Start with a long Shofar blast.
We are called by the voice of the Shofar. This week the month of Ellul began and the Shofar will be blown every day around the Jewish world (except, traditionally, on Shabbat, but here we are!)
The Shofar blast is a call to action, an alarm bell, intended, according to Maimonides, to wake us up to our deeds, and inspire us to do better in the new year that is rapidly approaching. But this year in particular I am reminded of a midrashic idea[1] that the sound of the Shofar is the same as the cries of our matriarch Sarah as she learned of what Abraham nearly did to Isaac in sacrificing him. She screams six notes of the call we know as Tekiah, and then died from her grief and horror. This week many of us have been listening again to the cries of mothers, and fathers, and many more, as 6 of the Israeli hostages were murdered and their bodies captured to be returned to their grieving families.
If Sarah’s cries echo the call of the Shofar, the Shofar contains within it the wailing of a heartbroken mother… a sound we have heard too much of over the last year. Wailing mothers in Israel, and in Gaza. The high holydays draw us home and together unlike almost any other time, and if we allow them, they can connect us to the most visceral experiences, whether of joy or of pain. They allow us to connect to ourselves, and to those parts of ourselves we perhaps don’t always allow to rise to the surface; whether it is the sins we wish to forget, or the wailing grief we must put aside in order to function day to day.
This week, many of you will have heard or read the heartbreaking words of Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hersh who was one of the six whose body returned to his loved ones this week. Her words are beautiful and moving. And they are the crushed dreams of a mother. She spoke about the shifting of their hope that he would come home alive, into an unbearable grief. She then began to address Hersh directly in these words:
“I beg of you, please do what you can to have your light shine down on me, Dada, Leebie and Orly. Help shower us with healing and resilience. Help us to rise again. I know it will take a long time, but please may G-d bless us that one day, one fine day, Dada, Leebie, Orly and I will hear laughter, and we will turn around and see… that it’s us. And that we are ok. You will always be with us as a force of love and vitality, you will become our superpower.”
Rachel, even in the depths of her pain, knows there will be laughter again, even though now it is unimaginable.
She also addressed all the people around her who had held the family through the 329 days of Hersh’s captivity. She said:
‘I want to say now the sincerest and most heartfelt thank you to the countless people in our extended community who have held us, cared for us, prayed for us, cooked for us, and carried us when we could not stand up.’
What a beautiful description of community, and of the way we build ourselves back. As Tyler and his family know so well, the gifts we receive in doing good for others are immeasurable, and community provides a structure through which to do this. Ellul, the month that has just begun, is said by Rabbinic tradition to be an acronym for Ani Le Dodi Ve Dodi Li – I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine – it is a month when we reflect on our relationships, our connections, our loves and, inevitably, our losses. It has been a year like no other for many, but just as Rachel Goldberg-Polin knows there will be another sunrise, and laughter will one day return, we also share the hope of renewal and laughter. Hope in what it means to be in community, walking through the darkest of times together, and working for change in the world around us together.
We hear the cry of the Shofar. It is the weeping of so many mothers. But is also a call to action. A call to change ourselves. Hersh had in his bedroom a picture on the wall depicting his hometown of Jerusalem. It looks like he made it himself. And on this picture are the words, in English, Hebrew and Arabic, ‘Jerusalem is for everyone’. It feels painfully poignant that one so hopeful, so peace loving, has been brutally ripped away from the world. But perhaps this picture has been shared with the world to remind us that the weeping of so many mothers is not the world we wish to build, and in Hersh’s memory, and that of so many others, we must work to build a different world.
May Ellul empower each of us to find how we might most make a difference, and bring us closer to ending the wailing of humanity. Cain Yehi Ratzon
Venomar Amen
[1] Leviticus Rabbah 20:2 and Pirkei de Rebbe Eliezer 32
