A Mother Mourns With Her Soul Intact

What's happening

Rachel Goldberg-Polin has published When We See You Again, a book about her son Hersh, who was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and killed on August 31, 2024, after 330 days in captivity. Hersh was 23. He had lost his arm in the attack. He had been reading the Dalai Lama, studying Buddhism, practicing the Jewish mystical discipline of hitbodedut. A fellow hostage later revealed that Hersh repeated Viktor Frankl's words to sustain the men held with him: "When you have a why, you can get through any how." Rachel writes about the Jewish mourning practices that have carried her: the morning blessing that thanks God for returning the soul, the structure of prescribed daily prayer, the traditions of shiva. She calls grief "a precious badge of love." She refuses to reduce her son's death to a political position.

What the Text says

Jacob, upon believing his son Joseph was dead, tore his garments and refused all comfort.

Genesis 37:34-3534Jacob tore his clothes, and put sackcloth on his waist, and mourned for his son many days.35All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. He said, "For I will go down to Sheol to my son mourning." His father wept for him.

The text does not correct Jacob. It does not tell him to move on or find meaning. It simply records that he mourned. The Hebrew Bible treats sustained grief as legitimate, not as failure. Jacob's refusal to be comforted is not stubbornness. It is fidelity to what he loved.

The psalmist writes from a similar depth.

Psalm 34:18Yahweh is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves those who have a crushed spirit.

This verse does not promise repair. It promises proximity. God draws near to the shattered, not to fix them, but to sit beside them. The Jewish mourning practices Rachel Goldberg-Polin describes operate on this same principle: structure without explanation, presence without resolution. Three daily prayers do not answer the question of why a 23-year-old dies in captivity. They answer the question of what to do with the next hour. The morning blessing thanks God for returning the soul.

The reflection

Hersh Goldberg-Polin spent his captivity giving other men a reason to survive. His mother spends her grief refusing to let it collapse into something smaller than love. She prays three times a day. She thanks God each morning for returning her soul, knowing part of it lives somewhere she cannot yet reach. Grief structured by ancient practice does not heal. It holds. And sometimes what holds us is closer to God than what heals us.