'Who’s the fool who told you boys don’t cry?' Approaching Simchat Torah with sorrow

“Hurricane,” performed by the impassioned 20-year old Eden Golan, was Israel’s entry in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest.

First submitted as “October Rain,” the song was initially rejected by the European Broadcasting Union for giving voice to Israel’s pain over October 7, which it deemed to be in contravention of the event’s nonpolitical nature.

Shocked and offended that expressing our hurt along with our hopes had been equated with politics, Israel considered withdrawing from the event altogether. Overwhelming public sentiment, however, was that despite the insult added to the injury, it was important, in the wake of the unspeakable atrocities committed by Hamas, that we appear on stage – defiant, proud, and resilient.

The song was revised and resubmitted, and, with most of the original lyrics intact, catapulted to popularity in Israel, capturing as it did so much of the agony, aching, longing, grief, anger, anxiety and general sadness that has descended upon our small and vulnerable country.

Personally, my favorite line in the number is, “Who’s the fool who told you boys don’t cry?” And I know exactly why. It validates what I’ve done more in the past 12 months than in the best part of the past 70 years.

Crying in a year of war and tragedy

IN THE beginning, the tears were pretty much a daily response to the harrowing revelations of the barbarism, savagery, and brutality endured by so many, along with the heartrending and insufferably poignant stories of those who survived the carnage, butchery, and weaponization of sexual violence of which the terrorists were and continue to be guilty.

But not infrequently the tears would begin to flow in much more banal circumstances, surprising me every time and revealing just how fragile I, and our society as a whole, had become despite the flag of national resilience we so proudly wave.

Once it was at a performance of Peter Pan to which I had taken my grandchildren. When Peter’s Lost Boys began talking about how it might not be so bad to have a family to go home to after all, it was I who lost it, overwhelmed by angst over the fate of our children held hostage in Gaza and anguish over the suffering of our newly orphaned who had no Neverland to take refuge in – nor anyone to take them there if it even existed. It was at the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, a few hundred meters from where the families of the abducted have gathered daily since their tragedy began. I walked over to them after the show, lucky enough to have a nine-year-old granddaughter with me to hold my hand and offer some comfort.

Another time, it was at my local health clinic. While waiting for my appointment, a rambunctious toddler caught my eye wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Wild and free.” The contrast between his reality and the nightmare of those imprisoned in the hell of the Gazan tunnels – without air or sunlight, confined, cramped, abused, hungry, and terrified – released yet another involuntary wave of tears.

A third instance was in the supermarket. There I was casually perusing the shelves when a little girl in a stroller began crying. The mother hurriedly placed a dislodged pacifier back in her child’s mouth, calming her with a gentle caress. Again my eyes welled up. An act as simple as this that should be so normal and commonplace as to go unnoticed was no longer anything to be taken for granted. Not when so many have had their lives shattered, left with no one to comfort them, or no one to comfort. Another line from “Hurricane” came to mind. “Baby, promise me you’ll hold me again.” It hadn’t yet been composed at the time when so many were wrenched from loving arms, but has since become a refrain playing endlessly in our minds.

Certainly in the mind of Omer Ohana, whose reflections on his love for Maj. Sagi Golan also brought on tears. Sagi was a commander of a counterterrorist unit who fell in the battle for Kibbutz Be’eri in the first hours of the war, just a week before the two men were to be married. As a result of Omer’s efforts, the law governing assistance for bereaved spouses was amended to include common law same-sex partners, allowing Omer to walk at the head of this year’s Jerusalem March for Pride and Tolerance, recognized as much of a fiancé as any other whose wedding to his betrothed will never take place.

Then there were – and continue to be – the innumerable instances of unsummoned tears in response to the never-ending barrage of radio, television, social media, and newspaper stories to which we are relentlessly – but appropriately – exposed all day, every day since October 7.

Interviews with pregnant women whose husbands will never see their unborn children; with brides-to-be whose wedding plans were cruelly canceled; with grandchildren who lost their grandparents and with grandparents who lost their grandchildren; with the wounded – men and women, soldiers and civilians – who are adjusting (some better than others) to getting on with lives without limbs or sight; with the uprooted in Israel who have lost their homes, livelihoods, and communities, and sometimes their hopes as well; with the bereaved parents of soldiers, partygoers, and hostages who will never return; and with the tormented parents of soldiers, partygoers, and hostages whose fate remains unknown.

The last time I cried for those experiencing such agony was during Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s eulogy for her son, Hersh. Thanking all who had provided the family with so much support during their nearly 11-month ordeal, she continued, “I apologize deeply, but we will need continued help to get through this sickening new chapter, too. I am so sorry to ask,” she said, because “you have already given so profoundly and completely, [and] we have given you nothing.”

I cried because she was so very wrong, and I needed her to be right. For 332 days Rachel and her husband, Jon, had given us an abundance of hope when there was little reason to have any. They had become the face of the hostage families for so many and a continual source of inspiration, exuding a sense that somehow the horror would end and the hostages would return to their loved ones. Listening to them repeatedly at myriad venues on the world stage, it was inconceivable that Hersh wouldn’t come home. But now the inconceivable had come to pass, and in its wake, the flicker of optimism nurtured by his parents was flittering away.

So I cried for Hersh, who had only one arm with which to struggle against his captors in his final grasp for life. I cried for Alex, executed alongside Hersh, who would never see his five-month-old baby, born while he was in captivity, killed, perhaps, without even knowing he had been born. And I cried for his wife and the infant as well, and for so many other spouses and orphans who would somehow have to go on without their partners and parents. I cried for Ori and Eden and Carmel and Almog, four more of the Nova music festival celebrants who had been caged along with Hersh and Alex in the same suffocating tunnel in such hellish conditions for weeks if not months before being ruthlessly murdered.

This, then, was the year I learned to cry – along with hardened generals, toughened first responders, macho husbands, jaded newscasters, and the profoundly shaken of every imaginable stripe. This was the year an entire nation learned to cry – unashamedly and without restraint.

No wonder Eden Golan’s resounding performance at the Eurovision extravaganza touched us all so profoundly: “Every day, I’m losin’ my mind / Holdin’ on in this mysterious ride... / I’m still broken from this hurricane.”

I would like to think, though, that she sings of a broken heart, not of a broken spirit. Of anguish, not of defeat. Of agony, not of despair.

I recall tears, then, of another sort that I shed during this past year as well. Those that appeared unexpectedly while listening to Farhan Al-Qadi, the Bedouin hostage rescued in August, shot and taken captive by Hamas because he refused to reveal the whereabouts of his Jewish employer. They are the tears of hope that coexistence is still possible.

The tears I shed upon the birth of Maya, a granddaughter born in the harrowing months following October 7. They are the tears of rejuvenation, of dreams still being dreamed in the midst of this nightmare.

The tears I shed at the bat mitzvah of Avigail, and those I fully expect to shed at the bat mitzvah of Sophia, two more granddaughters. They are the tears of regeneration, of continuity assured.

SO WITH all these tears – and more apt to well up at any moment – how are we to approach this year’s Simchat Torah holiday, marking as it does the one-year anniversary of the most devastating and singularly most murderous day we have experienced since Israel came into being, and the onset of tragedy, turmoil and trauma from which we have not even begun to emerge?

With clumsiness at best.

But also with resolve that as tears of torment flow together with tears of restoration, we will – both individually and as a nation – be able to find and embrace the joy our enemies endeavored to extinguish. And, without forgetting for a moment those never to return, those yet to return, those battered and bruised, and those mourning, longing, or grieving for one or the other, that we shall again find ourselves dancing, whether it be embracing the Torah in synagogue or one another at a Nova dance fest.

“Nova,” by the way, is the astronomic term given to bright stars that appear suddenly in the sky and release powerful energy. The Torah, of course, releases a powerful energy of its own. May we find strength, comfort, and even happiness in one or the other – or perhaps even both. For as we have been proclaiming for a year now, only together shall we overcome.

The writer is currently engaged in establishing the Yitzhak Navon Center for a Shared Society. He previously served as deputy chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive and World Zionist Organization and was the founding director of the Herzl Museum and Educational Center in Jerusalem. An earlier version of this piece appears in 7 October 2023: Jewish Reflections from Around the Globe, Marla Brettschneider and Bonita Sussman, eds., Edwin Mellen Press. breakstonedavid@gmail.com