The Weight of Words: Hearing Rachel Goldberg-Polin Speak

There are times when we are struck by the simplest things: the shape of a tree, even one we’ve seen hundreds of times, or the sound of a bird in the morning as we wake. The one that’s been chirping for months outside our bedroom window. And now, for some reason, on this particular day at this particular time, we detect something we hadn’t stopped to consider. Or water, the very idea of water, which had become so common it no longer deserved a moment of our attention. Or words. How many words have we spoken or heard, read and forgotten, used to defend ourselves or to cheat others or to seduce or to betray, until at some point the words themselves seemed bereft of their ability to convey meaning?

Yesterday evening, my wife and I had come to hear Rachel Goldberg-Polin use her words.

Those simple things formed from the interaction of teeth and tongue, palate and lips, a strand of flesh vibrating somewhere in the back of the throat like the string of a guitar. Today, having heard Rachel’s words, I have become once again astonished at their power, reawakened to their strangeness and to their potentially infinite value.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, to remind you, is the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the young man taken captive by Hamas terrorists after his left arm was blown off below the elbow while attempting to throw a live grenade out of a roadside shelter packed with young people. “It was as big a space as my bathroom,” Rachel said. He was held, tortured, starved and eventually murdered in cold blood along with five other captives in a tunnel beneath Gaza.

So you see, Rachel has not only words at her disposal, but a story to tell.

“My name is Rachel Goldberg,” she said at the outset. “How many Rachel Goldbergs do you know?”

The crowd assembled at Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles laughed immediately. Every American Jew knows at least five or six Rachel Goldbergs.

Rachel has been lauded, rightly, by many people, and I count myself among them. “She is our hero.” “A powerful force for good in a cruel world.” “A mother to us all.”

Yes. It does feel that way.

It feels, too, that she resembles the biblical Rachel who waits by the roadside near Bethlehem, “weeping for her children,” refusing to be consoled. But I want to suggest something else besides these things, truthful though they are.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin is a Jew.

Not uniquely so. Not some alien creature dropped among us. Rather, she embodies something recognizable to Jews themselves: a particular fusion of sorrow, intellect, humor, argument, tenderness, endurance, memory and sanctification. What appears extraordinary to the outside world often feels strangely familiar to our own people.

Perhaps that gives some answer to those who are not Jewish and who may occasionally wonder — sometimes with admiration, sometimes with resentment — how a mere 15 million Jews in a world of 8 billion could have exerted such disproportionate influence upon civilization, or how, after the horrors of the Shoah, after a third of the Jewish people had been annihilated in crematoria and ravines across Europe, the Jews could build again: families, schools, books, orchestras, laboratories and, finally, the State of Israel itself.

Rachel is not the answer to that question. She is an exemplar of it.

The unelected — except perhaps through God — bearer of an ancient disposition: the wrestler. The one who wrestles between the temporal and the eternal, between despair and meaning, between unbearable grief and an insistence upon the sanctity of life itself.

Rachel did not sing or dance. There were no special effects, no throbbing music to fill the spaces between sentences. She had words.

Words that, had I not been seated in public, might well have had me weeping aloud instead of quietly wiping tears with the back of my trembling hand. Words that spoke less of triumph than of brokenness. Words that told not only her story, but ours.

Words that alerted us once again to the wonder and fragility of life, to its beauty and to the mystery of its value.

A week or so ago, after reading a piece of mine about Rachel, Jon Polin wrote to tell me that years earlier he had attended several of my Chicago shows and had introduced Rachel to my music back then. Then he added something small, almost impossibly small in the face of everything their family has endured: had Hersh been born a girl, Raina — my daughter’s name, and the title of a song of mine Jon had heard in the early 1990s — was among the names they had considered.

Early on, Rachel described feeling as though she had left this world entirely after Hersh’s abduction and murder.

A friend was extremely helpful,” she said. “A Breslov Hasid — you know, long peyos, beard, the real deal — and also a psychiatrist with a medical degree from Brown …”

Yes. Those are indeed the sorts of people one encounters in Jerusalem.

He did not attempt to coax her back down into ordinary language or refute her feeling of existing elsewhere.

“He told me,” Rachel said, “that I wasn’t entirely in this world anymore. That part of me was now in Olam Haba.”

At that moment, I gasped.

Literally. And held back tears with all my strength.

Because tears do not come only from sadness. They also come from hearing something that feels perilously close to truth, something so true that language itself begins to fail before it. It is often at that edge of inexpressibility that tears arrive.

What is Olam Haba?

It refers to the “World to Come,” the world beyond the one we presently inhabit, beyond the rote and the overly familiar, beyond the normal shapes of trees, the ordinary sounds of birds, the commonness of water — or even of words themselves.

“Grief is a badge we wear,” Rachel said. She made the point that it shows we know love, that we have loved deeply, that another person’s existence had become inseparable from our own.

This is not a healing balm. It does not eliminate pain. But perhaps, especially if one believes there is an order beyond this visible world, it offers some orientation within suffering. A sense that existence is not random, that there remains some force — however one defines it — that places us where we need to be when we need to be there.

“I hate that Hersh is not here,” Rachel said. “I hate it.”

And yet, through all her words — exceptionally articulate, exceptionally emotive, at times hilarious and unmistakably Jewish — she somehow reminded us that our task remains here, in this world, in this week, this morning, this very moment.

In the afterword, Jon Polin is given the final words. He describes being stopped on the street by a stranger a year after Hersh’s murder. The man pulled out his phone and showed Jon a photograph of Hersh.

“Every morning the first thing I see is this picture of Hersh,” the stranger told him, “and I start each day by asking myself what I can do today to be better, to make the world better.”

“What a legacy!” Jon writes.

Then, addressing his son directly:

“Hersh: I continue to love you every second and always will. May your memory be a revolution … for good!”

My gratitude to Rachel, to her husband Jon Polin, whose quiet strength holds Rachel, lets her breathe, lets her speak, and to the Creator of the Universe for granting me, and you too, another day of life.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.