Weeping with Rachel: The plight of the Goldberg-Polin matriarch - opinion

Having responded to catastrophe the way they did – with poise, resolve, and grace –  they captured millions of hearts. 

Never mind us Jerusalemites who thronged to Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s funeral; we were anyhow there. Many came from afar, and those who didn’t come physically were there emotionally, having effectively hosted his noble parents Rachel and Jon in their living rooms week after week for 11 straight months. 

As Rachel and Jon humbly insist, they were but unwitting representatives of all hostages and their families. Still, they opened doors from the White House to the Vatican and addressed batteries of influencers, from American senators and governors to United Nations forums in Geneva and New York, using Jon’s instincts as a venture-capital entrepreneur, and Rachel’s as the effective speaker she doubtfully knew she was.  

“They range in age from 10 months to 85 years, and they are from nations all around the globe,” she told the UN. “They are Christian, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists,” she went on, thus universalizing the hostages’ plight while imploring the diplomats she faced: “Look at their photos, read their names, and then replace their names with the name of your own daughter, son, father, mother, brother, sister, spouse, grandparent.”

Rachel, an academic executive, thus became a major face of the October 7 tragedy, especially because despite having done all the right things, she ended up defeated by the evil that life demanded her to brave. 

Yet tragedy turned Rachel into much more than an envoy of her cause, as her struggle became an American inspiration, a Jewish parable, and an Israeli ray of light. 

FOLLOWING THE deafening calls of “Bring them home!” by the American multitude at the Democratic National Convention at Chicago’s United Center, Rachel electrified some 20,000 people, who rose to their feet as she told them that Hersh “was stolen from his life,” that she and Jon “live on another planet,” and that “anyone who is a parent or has had a parent can try to imagine the anguish and misery that Jon and I, and all the hostage families, are enduring.”

Watching Rachel burst into tears, the Democratic Party delegates, and millions of other Americans watching them, knew what they were seeing: barbarity’s assault on civilization, tyranny’s attack on liberty, and evil’s molestation of good. Rachel convinced them better than a hundred ambassadors that our current war is not between the competing justices of rival nations and faiths, but between an innocent Abel and a jealous Cain. 

Jews, however, saw in the same tears something additional. They saw, and heard, what Jeremiah saw and heard when he looked from Jerusalem northward, to Samaria’s deserted mountains: “Rachel weeping for her children.”

The Bible is full of people crying – Esau when he loses his birthright, Joseph when he meets his estranged brothers, and Job’s friends when they see him devastated, to mention but a few – but no crying in Jewish heritage is as powerful, lasting, or resounding as Rachel’s. 

WATCHING FROM the kingdom of Judah the destroyed kingdom of Israel, where Rachel’s descendants once prospered, the biblical matriarch’s voice came in Jeremiah’s ears, “wailing, bitter weeping,” a mourning mother’s bereavement of her son. 

Penned some 2,600 years ago, these lines became a parable of Jewish loss, displacement, and despair. So loud did Rachel’s sobbing seem that it rolled across the Samarian mountains, and so intense was her sorrow that “she refuses to be comforted for her children who are gone” (Jeremiah 31:15).

Not every Jew knows these lines, but every Jew knows Rachel’s cry. We hear it from afar, even if it is whispered, and that is what we heard when we watched Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s cry at the gates of Gaza, from the depth of her lungs, her only son’s name, so close to him and yet so far, clueless that it was his last day. 

That is what Jews heard. Israelis, however, could also hear beyond the agony, and see beyond the anguish an ember of unyielding hope. 

Rachel the matriarch

THE ORIGINAL Rachel’s agony was about the death of the nation she mothered as her spirit saw her offspring’s kingdom leveled and its deported people disappear. Yet her own death was no less heartbreaking, having arrived at midlife while she was bearing her second child, in the pre-dawn moment between the end of her previous life, in today’s Iraq, and the beginning of what would have been her new life, in this land. 

The biblical Rachel died in the Promised Land but did not live in it. That is not what happened to Rachel Goldberg-Polin. Born, raised, and schooled in the US, she also journeyed here at midlife, but unlike the biblical Rachel, she survived the journey to the Promised Land and thrived in it with her family. 

No, this is not the moment to tell her, or ourselves, “Restrain your voice from weeping, your eyes from shedding tears.” It’s much too early for that. However, it isn’t too early to tell her, “There is a reward for your labor.”

Yes, your cry to Hersh in his last hours – “survive!” – did not prevent his murder, but like the rest of the struggle that it punctuated, it did inspire us. You showed us there are big people in our midst, people who can make us come together when others try to tear us apart.

You inspired the thousands who followed Hersh’s coffin, and the millions who joined that multitude’s gentle singing, the singing of timeless Hebrew lines – “I believe” as the funeral emerged from your neighborhood, “Our hope is not lost” as it passed through ours, and “Our father, our king” after reaching Hersh’s grave – lines that traveled through Jerusalem’s crowded neighborhoods, rolled across its gentle hilltops, and echoed between its ancient alleys like Rachel’s sobbing above her children’s orphaned land. 

www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.