Yesterday was the funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin in Jerusalem. 

 

My broken heart needed to hear the words of his deeply wise and courageous parents in order to properly bless his Neshama, to bless his soul’s aliyah/ascent. It was also what I needed to bless the body that once held his soul; the tender body that his mother and father had held in their arms, the body which will never hold its own child, as it was lowered into the dark earth. 

 

In order to listen in privacy and sanctuary, I went into my garden which I often do when I need to confront difficult truths and moments in our culture.  I have a whole area of blackberries I cleared when George Floyd was murdered, the huge compost pile I moved on the day that Roe v Wade was overturned, and yesterday, the entire garden was offered heavy buckets of that soil, as I listened to Hersch’s funeral and linked my soul to his soul and to his family. 

 

 My arms and back strained and became sore with the effort of bucket after heavy bucket as I listened to the speakers leading up to Hersch’s parents. Most of them spoke in Hebrew and the sound of the words invoked in me an ancient and present field.

 

Then I heard Rachel Golderberg-Polin’s voice, a voice that has  become very familiar in the past 11 months of her relentless activism on behalf of her precious son and all who were taken hostage on October 7th. I tried to keep spreading the rich life-giving compost of decayed leaves, straw and  food scraps onto the area where I planned to plant the Hersh Goldberg-Polin memorial strawberry garden , but as Rachel spoke, I felt her words in my body as if it was my own voice.  I stopped raking and stood still.

 

At this moment, my son Jonah, a beautiful gangly fourteen year old with dark brown eyes and thick dark curls, was just on the other side of the sliding glass door of our house. I could hear him laughing with a friend over the phone.  I felt his familiar laughter in my body and physical recollection of the thousands upon thousands of times I have transported his body with my body. The uncountable times I had physically moved him wherever he needed to go; to the bath, to bed, to the table, to the car, on a walk, not to mention actually having his body inside of my body,  the inseparable miracle of blood sharing, cells migrating, his nervous system forming within the field of my own.  

 

The body is a way we as mothers so profoundly experience our children.  

 

Our bodies create the food that our babies need to survive. Our nipples uptake our babies saliva which communicates to the breasts what the child is needing; antibodies, magnesium, proteins, so the breast can produce a milk exactly tailored to the child.  The mother’s body forms the child's body, tends to the child's body, feeds the child's body, comforts and regulates the child’s body.  It is in our every cell to protect our child’s body, to cherish it, to marvel at it, and the greatest grief is to imagine that we would not have one more moment with that body. 

 

Rachel Polin spoke,   “I will love and miss you every day of my life. Now I will have to learn how to love you from here in a different way”  

 

Her words caught me in the center of my heart and I leaned on my rake and sobbed. Tears fell to the earth where the strawberries would be planted, salting the wet dark soil with a visceral grief. 

 

Rachel is right.  She will (I have no doubt) find a new way to love Hersh and to be with him.

 

In our Jewish tradition there is a way that we love, connect to and relate to our “ancestors”, those who have shed the mortal coil of this earthly carbon based body,  And we can cultivate it.  

 

Most indigenous cultures have these practices, but in modernity, most of us are outof practice, don’t “believe in it”, and lack the curiosity and openness to learn this subtle form of communication with what we cannot physically see, or touch, or hold.   

 

Connecting with your deceased child as an ancestor is not what any mother wants. It’s what we have actively spent one hundred percent of our energy trying to avoid since they began to grow in our wombs.

 

Connecting with your deceased child as an ancestor is not the weighty delicious feeling of their body leaning on you while you sit in the green grass together.  It is not the soft feeling of his tiny fingers reaching over your shoulder to touch your hair as you hold him on your tired hip.  It is not the beauty of his smile, his preferences for this food or that, the car rides of conversations about philosophy or religion or laughing together about the ridiculousness of the media. It’s not any of that. 

 

I took a deep breath, wiped my face, and my heart began to break again as Hersh's father, Jon Polin, began to speak.  Standing still, I bore witness to the broken heart of this exhausted man. 

 

In the tender timbre of his voice more was communicated than his words could convey. And he wound his way through a weary recounting of all that he had learned from his only son, and then with great strength he offered this:

 

 “Hersh we failed you, we all failed you.  You would not have failed you, you would’ve pushed harder for justice, you would have worked to understand the other, to bridge differences, and you would have challenged more people to challenge their own thinking. What you would be pushing for now is to ensure that your death, and the deaths of all the soldiers and so many innocent civilians are not mashav, not in vain.”  

 

Then his voice broke and became tender again, words winding their way to a  simple statement spoken through tears; 

 

“He was a great guy” 

 

In Jon’s quivering voice I heard my own beloved husband's voice and felt the depth, the literally fathomless depth, of a father’s love for his boy.  

 

G-d how deeply we love our children. There is such a bond of love, it is the love of a thousand ancestors peering through their eyes to us and from our eyes back to them.  It is so much that can never be expressed.  My mom used to tell me that was the case, and she was right.

 

Oh Hersh,  I write these words for you and your five companions who died in a tunnel as an army attempted to use force to rescue you.

For you and for all of us, I dream of a better world. I am broken wide open by your life and now by your death. And these tears on the earth are my small offering. 

 

 I am grateful for these hot tears, as I feel lately my heart has been a bit numb.  Witnessing the brutality of humanity has pushed me to retreat deep within the inner fences of my heart.  I don’t want to live there, numb and walled away, but truly how much can a heart bear?

 

That’s a real question. How much brutality and death can we bear?

 

Imagine if every parent of the 38 children killed on October 7th and the 14,500 children killed in Gaza since, had a microphone and time to compose their words in tender remembrance of love and grief and wisdom. 

 

And imagine we were all forced to sit in a room, while we listened to the weeping and breaking of one heart after another, (would it take weeks, months?) hearing of the specific beauties that each child was, the ways that each small life was an entire universe, the depth of pain in the understanding that they would never touch the body of their child again. 

 

 Would we say then, no more war, not one more bomb, not one more bullet, not one more day of oppression, starvation, and dispossession?? 

 

Or would we still clamor for more violence, more death? Would we still believe that violence and the death and traumatization of children could lead to a “safer” world?

 

Hersh’s funeral wasn’t the only one held in Israel today.  The parents of Almog also laid their beloved child to rest and this was what his mother spoke on her microphone at the burial of her son.

 

“Almog, my dear son how much hope we had to see you again, to hug you, to enjoy your smile  But on Oct 7 you were forgotten and you have been neglected every day, every hour, for the last 331 days. You were sacrificed for “destroying Hamas” for “Rafah” for the “Philadelphi corridor", you and so many other beautiful souls.  Enough!! No more!! We paid the worst price, I pray we will be the last ones. From now on please, only a deal to get the hostages back!!”

 

These parents are only TWO.  Is anything worth more broken souls? 

 

All day tears come and go.  I thank these families for their courage and their words of love and the unbearable reality they endured that gives a lens into the web of interconnectedness of the fates of these two neighboring cousin- peoples.

 

*****************************

 

After a cup of coffee in the afternoon, I am planning to sit and write, to capture the day, to find some words from my womb to express something helpful, healing, if not for anyone else than at least as a balm for my own aching heart.   I’m just sitting down at my computer when My son comes bouncing out of his room and says with a gleam in his eye, "What're you doing right now? Are you busy?  Can you take me to Best Buy?”  

My son loves going to Best Buy, the only store with a “tech” emphasis within several hundred miles.  He loves it the way an artist loves going into an art supply store perusing boxes of colored pastels, the way I love wandering around a plant nursery fondling leaves and imagining colors and shapes in my garden.

Going to Best Buy usually involves wandering around the computer department for a good while, trying out many of the display models, reading their specs, talking out loud to me and to himself about different options and the pros and cons of each computer model.   

It is a direct throwback to when he was a 4 year old boy obsessed with Thomas the Train. He would stand in front of the display of the tiny train cars at our local toy store for a literalhour. He would stand mesmerized, the time slowly passing, as he assessed and discerned, asking for my opinion but quickly returning to his own deliberate process. Honestly, I had no real opinion about whether Percy or Hiro was a better purchase, but would make an effort to contribute to and participate in what was clearly an important decision for him. I tried to be as patient as I could and enjoy his curiosity and his process as he took time to consider, asking for my opinion again and again, until finally he’d make a choice.

Oh I love my boy.  I love his unique soul essence and the things that he enjoys that I totally relate to like wordplay jokes and metaphysics,and I love  the things that I don’t relate to at all like Thomas the Train or the quest for the Holy Grail of Laptop computer technology.  

I just love how intimate I’ve been blessed to be with his beautiful unfolding day by day.  I love how much I have learned about humanity, our tender beauty, our desire for justice, and about myself through mothering him.  I have learned how far I can expand, how much a heart can love, and how exhausted a human body can feel.  All this learning just from the gift of 14 years of being his mother. 

I said I wasn’t busy, put down my writing, and we went to Best Buy.  It’s a 20 minute drive and he always asks great questions in the car. Yesterday it was about food additives and why is it legal to put them into food?  Do I think they cause cancer and disease?  If so, why is it legal? And also,why do people eat them if we know they are bad for us?  And about 5 minutes into our drive he looked at me and said with a sweet smile, “I love our trips to Best Buy together”

I love them too, my boy.  Just because I love being with you. I will take not one minute for granted. I will press my face into your shaggy curls and hug you from behind as you thank me for the food I’m setting in front of you. I will inhale and never exhale. 

Believe me, all children are as beautiful and precious as he is, as Hersh is, as Bind is, as Almog is, as all the unnamed buried in the rubble of Gaza are, as your own child is. 

Every single one.   Are we listening?