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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