4 | SEPTEMBER 12 • 2024 J
N
opinion
Our Collective, Endless Grief Is an Expression
of Love — and Our Most Powerful Weapon
W
hen I was a little girl,
my teacher told us
about an ancient Jewish
tradition — a story of a miraculous
goblet that God keeps in the
heavens, a tear catcher. It is said to
be so delicate, yet so
powerful, that it can
hold the tears of our
entire Jewish people,
across time and space.
She told us that every
tear shed by our
ancestors, every cry of
pain and yearning for
redemption, is lovingly gathered by
God. And that one day, when the
goblet overflows with our collective
pain, the Messiah will finally come.
As I grew older, this story
resonated with me less and less.
It felt like a relic of a faith that
valorizes suffering without truly
confronting it. It didn’t fit with the
God I was yearning to know — a
God who could bear the weight of
my anger on behalf of my people, a
God who welcomes the raw edges of
our pain, the offerings of our broken
hearts.
But since Oct. 7, I find myself
returning to that image of the tear-
catching goblet. Every time my heart
aches with grief, every time the tears
come too easily, when the pain feels
unbearable, I yearn for that goblet.
I know that my tears are just
among the many that our Jewish
family around the world have
been shedding since that day. So
many of our brothers and sisters
in Israel are in the eye of the storm
— bleeding, losing loved ones,
mourning personal pain, going into
battle, enduring the worst cruelty
imaginable in captivity. The rest of
us — the collective Jewish people
around the world — still feel their
loss as if it were our own. This pain
isn’t distant; it’s ours.
And that’s why my heart keeps
conjuring up a celestial, bottomless
goblet capturing our tears. I keep
thinking about all the tears and
prayers, the desperate supplications,
the begging, the fervent psalms,
the praying so many have done
with their feet, their wallets, their
activism, with every fiber of their
being. Where do all our tears go?
Where does all that love go? We
are a tiny people, and yet we feel so
much. What happens to the tears
we shed for Carmel, for Hersh, for
Ori, for Alex, for Eden, for Almog
— the six hostages whose bodies
were recovered in the Gaza Strip?
For all those killed, taken hostage or
wounded? What becomes of all the
begging, all the bargains with God?
Is there some sort of cosmic goblet
that holds our collective Jewish
pain?
The news of the past few weeks
has brought so many of us back to
the pain of those weeks following
Oct. 7, when we were in the haze
of hurt. Remember those days
before the numbness set in? Before
we started focusing on every new
outrage in the news cycle, when
we were simply horrified? We’ve
endured countless losses of soldiers
and other hostages since that dark
Shabbat, and each one hurts deeply
— but something about this news
struck a nerve, intensifying the
accumulated grief of our people,
breaking through the fog.
I slept little the night we got the
bitter news, and in the morning, I
wondered what to tell my children.
I decided to share with them the
news about the hostages who were
murdered, even though my children
are young. I knew that if we lived
in Israel, I wouldn’t have been able
to shield them, and I felt that, as
a Jewish mother, this is one of the
talks that even as children they need
to hear.
My children, of course, knew
about the hostages. They had
prayed for them with me. They
wore hostage necklaces. They had
held up hostage posters at many of
the awareness walks we had done.
I didn’t tell them much about the
horror — the 330 days in captivity,
the callous murder, the desperate
knowledge that we were so close to
them and saving them, the way this
tragedy seemed poised to bring our
Israeli people back to the brink of
civil war. I just explained why I was
sad and said that it was a sad day for
all of us.
My 4-year-old daughter, seated on
my lap, listened carefully and looked
at me with those serious eyes. “Is
Hashem on their team?” she asked.
I asked her to explain. “Is Hashem
on the Jewish people’s team?” she
clarified.
My heart broke as I realized
that my daughter was asking her
own version of “why?” How could
this happen? How could a people
who loved each other so deeply be
experiencing this?
My daughter asked the same
question we are all crying out right
now — the question at the core
of our pain. How could Hersh
Goldberg-Polin’s parents, who
loved him so fiercely, who shook
the foundations of heaven and
earth to free him, not get to hold
their sweet boy again? How could
Ori Danino, who escaped the hell
of Nova but went back to save
others, not make it back himself?
Dr. Mijal
Bitton
JTA.ORG
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