Unambiguous Loss

Like many of you, I am sure, I spent last weekend reading the terrible news about the six hostages killed, and especially Hersh Goldberg-Polin: our own, a Bay Area boy, who became a kind of avatar for the indiscriminate horror of October 7th. I watched videos of Israelis surging into the streets, the shock and fury, the helplessness of individual parents and loved ones trying with all the might in their small bodies to array themselves against the disinterested, disembodied state. I watched Rachel, Hersh’s mother, courageously stand in front of the world as she has over and over for eleven months and put her pain into words. One section of her eulogy really caught my ear:

Hersh, for all of these months I have been in such torment worrying about you every millisecond of everyday. It was such a specific type of misery that I have never experienced before. I tried hard to suppress the missing you part. Because that, I was convinced, would break me. So I spent 330 terrified, scared, worrying, and frightened. It closed my throat and made my soul throb with 3rd degree burns.

I saw in Rabbi Ryan Bauer’s note over the weekend an outsider’s description of the same. After noting that in meeting her the group of rabbis he was with were instructed not to stand or hug her, but rather follow the rules of shiva, he writes:

Rachel's eyes reflected a pain and despair I had never encountered in my lifetime. The loss of a child is every parent’s worst nightmare; the weight and magnitude of the grief are overwhelming. Rachel's pain was not that pain. Hers was the despair of a mother in purgatory, one with no answer. She was a mother who had been living in hell for months, struggling to imagine the horrors facing her son in captivity. 

When I went to Israel last November to meet with educators on the wake of October 7th, I kept a running diary. At one point, we met in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv with a woman named Galit, a therapist who was helping to coordinate the mental health response for families of the hostages. Of our encounter, this is what I jotted down late that night:

She told us that Israel had never created a legal category of "missing persons," as we have in the U.S., and so there has been very little work done in that area clinically here in Israel. There's a deficit of understanding among the mental health professionals about how to support people dealing with "ambiguous loss," where the trauma isn't singular but ongoing, like water dripping on a rock. You don't ask them how they're feeling, she said, because how am I feeling? Then she drew a line in the air with her pointer finger, up down up down up down very quickly, like a seismogram. You don't tell them everything will be ok. 

On Monday, I went to a shiva for Hersh, one of many all over the Jewish world, at the home of his cousin, a member of the Kitchen community here in San Francisco. Jonathan, one of the hosts, in his weeping remarks, noted that time had stopped for Hersh’s parents on October 7th, and that now time had started again, but not the time he would’ve wished for them to start counting. 

An ambiguous loss made unambiguous, and in its wake new kinds of pain, a new time. 

In his post-October 7th poem, “Illusion,” one being taught around the world by the great Israeli educator Rachel Korazim, Michael Zats writes:  

Amazing

How everything looks 

Unchanged, 

Even 

When nothing 

Remained 

The same.

The discomfiting tense shift in this poem, from the present “looks” to the past “remained,” captures well the rupture of this time, a rupture renewed by the events of this weekend. As I said to our faculty and staff in starting out the year, against the profound dehumanization of terrorism and war, we must stay human. Even in the face of unambiguous loss, in the face of an uncaring world, even when nothing remains the same. Stay human.

Monday night in the shiva minyan, I was struck in the amidah by these words:

Creator of all, who remembers the piety of our ancestors, and who brings a redeemer to their children’s children, for the sake of your name, with love.

All of our children. May Hersh, Carmel, Eden, Alexander, Almog, and Ori be redeemed, may all those innocents who died in these eleven months of violence be redeemed, may their families be surrounded by love, and know peace.