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Many of you will already know Rachel Goldberg-Polin. Her incredibly moving and beautiful book, When We See You Again, is out this week. It’s about her son, Hersh, who was stolen from a musical festival on October 7th, 2023, and who was executed after 328 days of being held hostage.

While I completely understand the instinct to turn away, I also really hope you will stay with us for this conversation, if you can. Rachel is incredible, and there are so many gifts to be found in her words. She told me stories today that made me laugh, that stunned me, that were utterly profound, and that will stay with me forever. If you have ever wondered why we’re here—or what your “why” is—I think you will also be changed by Rachel, too.

Her Book: When We See You Again

ELISE:

I know some version of grief and I also know you are magical and I’m excited to talk to you about those parts of the book as well. And first, it’s beautiful. It’s obviously very hard. My kids were circling me over the course of the weekend as I was reading your book and it released a dam in me as I think it probably does for so many people. And I want to talk to you about your experience of grief at the end of the book and letting it happen. But like most people, I think we all function by keeping it as far away from us as possible. And then when I go, I go down big. So thank you for that once in a decade catharsis. All right. So I want to talk about, you write at the beginning that your book is not from a healed place and that the wound is still open and will be probably forever.

But as you were working on this book and bringing it out into the world, do you feel like you’ve taken more steps towards that deeper understanding of even your why, which is sort of the thesis of this entire book? Was it therapeutic at all or do you feel like it was a re-traumatizing experience?

RACHEL:

Yes.

ELISE:

Both.

RACHEL:

Yes. It is both. I think it’s both. I know it’s both. I started to write because my soul was buckling from the weight of the pain, of the loss, and I couldn’t really shoulder it anymore. And I just tipped over and it spilled out all over the floor, these words.

They’re just packages of pain, I think. Someone asked, “What is this book about? “ And I said, “Oh, it’s about two things, love and pain.”

And they said, “That’s it.” I said, “Actually, it’s about four things, love and pain and pain and love in that arc.” It’s really a love story doused in pain or maybe it’s a pain story drenched in love. But I wanted to warn readers in the beginning, as you mentioned, I said, “I am underneath the truck as I’m writing this. I have one arm sticking out and I’m tapping with one finger trying to write this. I have no perspective. I have no distance from the impact of this gargantuan, Herculean, colossal journey. I’m still in it. “ And I wanted to be very clear about that upfront because I do think that sometimes people wait for that panoramic distance from an event so that they can comment on it in a way that is more measured. And I thought, I just want to give over my pain.

So as visceral and present and thorny and sticky and ugly as it is, actually that’s exactly how I want to give it over. And I don’t know if it was helpful. I don’t know if this process now, as the book comes out next week on the 21st, and I have no idea if it’s going to be horrific or fair or fine or dreadful or epiphanal. I really don’t know what to expect. I’m curious because I think when you don’t have a grand plan in terms of, I’m going to teach you how to make a million dollars, start from here, go here and here is your check. And really all I’m doing is I’m saying, “Please hold part of this. Please, please, please hold part of it. Just one molecule, take one molecule for me. “ And also, I think that the book for me, I’m hoping, is a little bit the answer to the most kind, innocuous question that I get asked constantly that is completely reasonable and comes from a heartfelt place. And I lose my mind. And it’s when people say, “How are you? “

And I lose it. And it’s not rational. And it really is me with the problem. When you’re in a relationship and you want to break up and you don’t want to hurt them, so you say it’s not you, it’s me. But it is actually them. I’m telling you, it’s me. It’s not you. It’s not them. It’s not anybody. I am broken. I am not normal. I even said it’s a disorder. And truly take apart the word disorder. I mean, this is the opposite of in the Latin an order. I am the opposite of order. Actually, my life is the opposite of order. I buried my son and that is out of order. Now, I’m also not unique. There are millions of people who have buried their childrens, millions and millions of people. There are many of your listeners who have buried children. I’m not unique, but I couldn’t carry all these words anymore.

And I think I was saying to someone that if someone’s born without sight, it’s very difficult to explain to them what blue is, but I have this desperate need to explain to you my blue. I have this desperate need to explain my pain. And I don’t know why. I don’t know why I have that need. What is that broadcast therapy that I’m so desperately thirsty for? What is it? I don’t know. But now it’s out and I really pray that it’s not going to cause me more pain.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, first, to affirm you, how are you, is a terrible question for anyone in grief. If you’re going to ask it as a reflex, add today or in this minute as a marker to provide a little bit of relief because that’s an impossible and terrible question with no correct answer. So I completely relate. I relate deeply as an introvert too and finding yourself as sort of the mascot of this crisis and having an exceptional experience where all of the attention is on you, I can only imagine how excruciating that is for something you would never choose. And so I feel for you. And I understand completely wanting to explain blue, but doing it through, I need you to feel without needing me to explain it every day to everyone how this feels. And I will say as an unpackaged, the instinct or the impulse to write without distance, I think is a real gift.

Because as much as I also can hold this idea that when you’re traumatized, you can traumatize other people when you don’t have an understanding of what you’ve experienced. I think too many of us, and you do it so beautifully. I also want to just say that, and we’ll talk more deeply about that, but that when there’s distance and packaging and story and explanation and context, I think yes, it helps us make meaning of our lives, but it’s also distancing from pain. And there’s so much distancing from pain and death in our culture. And it’s part of the reason I think that we are living in this moment and we need to have these visceral experiences and not distance desperately, as terrible as the medicine is. So thank you, because I think that it’s a tremendous gift that you didn’t want to give. And I also feel what was so profound about When We See You Again is that I expected, and maybe this was part of the process of doing this book, I expected to encounter anger and rage and maybe just a tiny thirst for revenge and it’s absent.

How?

RACHEL:

Well, I think that that wasn’t what was coming out. And I wanted really badly to tell the truth. And the truth was the love and the loss and the grief and the mourning and the suffering. There wasn’t those other ... If they were present, and I do think that there are moments of anger in the book or rage, but those weren’t ... I’ve always had an issue with that. Even as a little girl, I always knew I went to sad, I didn’t go to mad. And as I was saying, I mean, Hersh was so with me and I so desperately wanted to explain who he was. And so the ugly wasn’t really what I was going for. The ugly comes because the loss is so embedded and my DNA is different now. It’s like after Chernobyl, it changes your constitution when anyone has the loss of an extremely core person in their lives.

And I love what you said about that we fear pain so much. It makes me think that that’s what led to the opioid crisis, is that this need to avoid acute, severe pain, and yet pain also can promote healing. Without pain, parts of us die. And even I remember reading an article years ago about a child who was born without the nerve awareness. So he didn’t know when he was burning himself or he didn’t know ... And

You end up really hurting yourself if you don’t experience suffering, which sounds counterintuitive, but that’s where the greatest love and growth comes from those losses.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think we also labor under this belief, it’s global culture-wide here in the US, certainly that we only take action from anger, but in reality, we protect what we love and that is a far more powerful, durable, safe motivator. I want to talk about your faith, but before we get to that, that moment when you go and you see Or who has just been released and he tells you that Hersh heard you, to imagine that was a totally life-changing event.

RACHEL:

I said that to someone else, that that was one of for sure the most magnificent moments in my life that will stay with me for the rest of my life. He also gave me back part of my life because when I buried Hersh, I buried part of myself, obviously. And when he gave me all this information about Hersh when they were held together, and at the end, the most interesting ... I can’t even say it’s the most interesting because all of it was so interesting. It’s like, which of your eight children do you like the most of which of these, all these things or told me. But when he said, Hersh told me that he heard you on the news. And I said, “Oh, he heard that I was on the news? What?” I could not compute. And he said, “No, he heard your voice being interviewed on the news and he told me what he heard you saying on the news.” And all of a sudden I felt when you get weak in the knees, when you just have this jolt went through me and there was a flutter of something and part of me permitted itself to come back to life.

And in the Jewish faith, we believe that your name is intrinsically woven to what you will do in your life. And that’s why sometimes it’s actually said that there’s no longer divine inspiration in the world except when we name our children, the moment we name our children, meaning sometimes you’ll think, “I’m going to call him Adam.” And then the moment you have this child and you’re going to name them and you’re like, “Nope, it’s Solomon.” Where’d that come from? I don’t even like the name Solomon, but you have divine inspiration. And it’s clear to me that Orlevy, his parents had complete divine inspiration because the name Or in Hebrew means light and he gave me back light. We were absolutely living in darkness from day 330 when the angels of death came to our door to tell us that Hersh had been executed and we got him back in a bag with six bullet holes, his hair full of gunpowder, missing his dominant left forearm, skeletal, filthy.

And we were in complete darkness from day 3:30 when that happened until the evening of 496 when we met light, we met Or.

ELISE:

Yeah. I can only imagine obviously in some sense, Hersh had to have known that you were climbing every mountain and every wall on his behalf, but for him to know and also the comfort, I’m sure, of him hearing your voice. Yeah. What a gift in a terrible moment. And then also that he had managed to get a book and so amazing now, obviously that you’re writing a book, but that Hersh had managed to get a fantasy novel.

RACHEL:

I know. It’s crazy because what was explained to me is they were all losing their minds. They were all in pain. They were all in trauma. I mean, Hersh, before he was kidnapped, had witnessed the murder of 18 people. He was in a five foot by eight foot bomb shelter. So picture your bathroom with 28 people smashed into your bathroom and then grenades being thrown into your bathroom and then machine gunfire in the doorway of people shooting at point blank range. So 18 people were murdered in front of him, including his best friend Aner Shapira. His arm was blown off, Hersh’s arm was blown off and then he’s kidnapped. And they were obviously suffering in ways we can’t begin to even pretend to imagine. And when he walked into the tunnel on day 52 that Or Levy, Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Eliya Cohen were in, they all were in shock because Hersh walked in with his mat. They had each been given a mat to sleep on. He walks in with his mat and in his hand, it was under his arm, in his hand was a book. And they all said, “What is that? What are you doing with that book?” And he said that he had ... You end up with a rapport with your captors.

And he explained to them. Hersh was always a voracious reader. He read early in kindergarten and always had a book. We were always every week religiously at the library taking out, you could only take out 12 books. So he would always take out 12. And he had begged them and said, “You must get me a book. You must get any book.” And I’m an English reader, get me any book. And somewhere, one of the captors found this book that was a young adult fantasy genre book by Leigh Bardugo called Shadow and Bone, which that wasn’t Hersh’s genre, but beggars and hostages can’t be choosers or explained to us that Hersh had read the book over and over and over. He would just get to the end and start over and over and over and over. And when he ended up leaving that tunnel, Eliya Cohen told us that the captors came in on day 54 and said to Almog Sarusi, Or Danino and Hersh, “You guys get to go home.

You’re getting released today. Come on. “ And then they turned to Hersh and they said, “Be happy you’re seeing your mother today.”

And he turned and he gave them the book so that the other hostages would have something to do. That’s how sure he was that he was going home. And Or said that that book mentally saved them because it gave them something. First of all, they read it over and over and over again. And Eli Sharabi, they had taken his glasses. So he couldn’t read, even though he reads English, he couldn’t read anything. So they would read the book out loud. They had book club, basically Alon Ohel is also an English reader. He read the book, but they taught Eliya Cohen how to read English. He did not know how to read English with this book because they had nothing to do, but they had the book. So when I first met Eliya Cohen, he gave me a huge hug and he said, “And now I can speak and read English beautifully because of Hersh.”

ELISE:

Amazing.

Or has a tattoo, right? Because of Hersh, because he was telling everyone, reminding everyone about Victor Frankl and knowing your why.

RACHEL:

Yeah. He was saying to everyone the famous quote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “When you have a why, you can bear any how. When you have a why, you can bear any how.” And Or told us that Hersh kept saying this mantra over and over and over again, and he was telling them, “This is what got Victor Frankl through the Holocaust.” It was a riff on what Nietzsche originally said. And Hersh kept saying to each of the men in that tunnel, “Figure out what is your purpose? What is your meaning? And you will get out. “ All of us have to keep our eye on the prize in this world. And it really resonated with them. And they said that every day, even after Hersh and Or and Almog left their tunnel, they would all go through ... They would do a little circle every day and say, “What’s your why?” Because your why changes sometimes.

And sometimes it can change within the day. Your why for the morning isn’t your why for the afternoon. Or said to us, we met him, he was 50 kilo and he’s like maybe six feet tall. And he said to us, “When I’m feeling stronger, I’m going to get that tattooed right here.” And my daughter heard him interviewed after he got the tattoo, which he got in English, by the way, that when he went home and his son saw the tattoo, he said, “Daddy, what is that? “ And he said, “It’s you.”

ELISE:

So beautiful.

RACHEL:

Because Hersh kept saying, “Your why is your son. Your why is your son. You have to get home to your son.” And for people who don’t know, Or was at the Nova Music Festival with his wife, Einav, who was one of the 18 people who was killed in that bomb shelter. And it’s just a really powerful gift that we were given.

ELISE:

Yeah. God, and unbelievable, and aner presumably saved many lives in that bomb shelter too.

RACHEL:

Anyone who is alive today is alive because of one word, and that word is on Aner.

ELISE:

Yeah. Who is Hersh’s best friend and Hersh watched him die.

RACHEL:

I also just want to say he did also save Hersh and he gave us a gift. And I’ve said to his parents, Moshe and Shira, over and over, I have thanked them because those 330 days that were utter torment and torture and agony and misery were a gift because we got to try to save him.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah. You write so beautifully about that with your fierce little fist or something. I can’t remember exactly what you said, but the honor of getting to fight for Hersh and the other hostages for so long. I can imagine that is the most excruciating and the most loving action to be able to take, to do something. And you did a lot. So throughout the book, I love the sort of moments where you’re talking about your faith and teaching about Judaism and there are these little respites that are such beautiful and soft places to land. And you have this incredible faith, which I respect deeply, which is, I can’t remember exactly the words, but I guess when the other, after you receive Hersh’s body and bury him, after his murdered, you continue to fight with Jon for the release of the rest of the hostages and ultimately the ceasefire.

And people want you to be enraged when the final hostages come home that Hersh is not among them, that’s not fair. And you say essentially, “I know he’s not supposed to be here because he’s not here,” which is so profound. I mean, but can you talk a little bit about this faith and even your dreams?

RACHEL:

So the first thing that I’ll say about faith is that it’s incredibly challenging for any of us to describe how we feel about this universe and how it’s organized. And I always say, I believe in an idea of God because I think that everybody’s idea of God is so different that it’s loaded when people say, “Oh, I believe in God.”

Because what is yours is even if we grew up in the same household with the same parents, going to the same church or going to the same synagogue or mosque or temple or wherever. And we have different appreciations of how this whole place is organized. And I have been extremely grateful and thankful that I happen to be a believer and it’s not hard for me. And that’s been from when I was a young kid before I even really understood the world. And then as I wasn’t raised in a observantly Jewish home, and then I came to learn and discover and observe in a way that’s different from how I was raised. And I kind of feel like it’s cheating a little bit. I say, I just know. I know that there’s God where knowing is different than having faith because I know this is a phone.

I don’t know if faith this is a phone. I know it’s a phone. So it kind of makes it, it’s like a little bit cheating because having faith is hard because having faith means you don’t know, but you hope. So that’s a little bit. And so that was why when the last living hostages came home, thank God in October of 2025, so many people were saying what you were sharing from the book where they were saying, “It’s not fair and it should have been Hersh and how is this possible? And it’s not right.” And to me, it seems very clear that Hersh is not supposed to be here now because Hersh isn’t here now. And that’s how I know. It doesn’t mean I like it. You can hate it, but you can know it. And that’s definitely how I feel. And I’ll tell the story of Death and Tehran because I think I love that

ELISE:

Tale. I do too.

RACHEL:

Yeah. So I had never read Man’s Search for Meaning. And then of course, after meeting Or Levy and him telling us that Hersh was quoting from it, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get my hands on that book.” And it’s a slender book. It’s an easy read. I mean, it’s a terrible read, but it’s an easy, terrible read.

ELISE:

And it’s beautiful.

RACHEL:

Totally. Completely. And Victor Frankl talks about a tradition of folktale that’s in many cultures. There’s a ancient Mesopotamian version. There’s an Islamic version. There’s a ... I’m trying to remember. There were four different versions of this tale, but more or less the story is that there’s a king and his servant and they’re walking through a garden and they part ways for a moment to go around a bush. And when they come back together, the servant says, “Oh my gosh, your majesty, I just saw death. Quick, give me your finest horse and I’ll run away to Tehran so that death doesn’t get me. “ And the king says, “Sure, take my finest horse, off you go. “ And he goes galloping away. And then the king is by himself in the garden and he bumps into death. And he says to death, “Why did you frighten my servant?” And death said, “Oh, I didn’t mean to frighten him.

I was just surprised to find him here because I have a date with him later in Tehran.

And it’s like a mic drop moment of you cannot outrun your destiny. He ran straight into his destiny by trying to run away from it. And there’s also a version of that in the Talmud about King Solomon. And it’s the same idea. And the punchline at the end of the passage with King Solomon is your feet will always take you where you’re supposed to be.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah, I know. I mean, and it’s a terrible realization because we want to believe that we’re sort of this completely self-authored every decision and every decision does matter, et cetera. But this idea that there’s this overarching fate that’s ours.

RACHEL:

I love it.

ELISE:

Yeah. You love it? Yeah. Yeah. It’s comforting.

RACHEL:

I don’t even know if it’s comforting. There’s so much chaos and pain and confusion and discombobulation in the world, but if somewhere there’s this exquisite tapestry that’s actually there and we don’t see it because we’re too close, that is really interesting to me. My mom, I grew up in Chicago, so I have a bad accent, but I’m really friendly and she was desperate to make me cultured. So she would take me constantly to the Art Institute and her favorite painting, which became my favorite painting was the famous one by George Serrat.

ELISE:

Yes, “In the Park with George.” Yes, one of my favorite paintings too.

RACHEL:

And she would ... Now this was back in the day because I am old, they didn’t have the red velvet rope. You could actually go up to the painting. Now they have a whole situation because I think people like me were probably touching the painting, but she would put me very close to the painting and I would say, “Oh, I see our dots and it’s giving me a headache.” And then she would say, “Close your eyes and take 15 steps backwards and now open your eyes. And suddenly here you go, this magnificent order

And gorgeousness.” And I really believe that. I believe that there is a huge masterpiece. I’m a molecule in that. I am nothing. I’m smaller than dust. I am probably, I will never be privy to know why my dot was put here and not here, why it’s this color and not that color and why this had to happen and why that had to happen, but I really believe it. And then when these ... It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean I don’t have an obligation to make things better, to make things different, to change things, to identify injustice and make it just. It just means there’s something bigger than me and I’m not a big shot. I might think I am. And I also love, there’s a part, this is a complete tangent, but there’s a part in the Torah that talks about predicting that initially when we’re trying to be successful or do whatever it is in life that we pursue, when we become successful, we think it’s because of us and we lose the perspective that it’s a blessing that’s given to us.

We think, “I am so amazing. Look at this car and look at this house and look at these jewels. And I worked really hard and look at what I did.” And not having the ability to see this is a gift and it is a blessing and be grateful. And it doesn’t mean you don’t have to work hard. And it doesn’t mean you weren’t a partner in it. It just means you didn’t do it yourself.

ELISE:

I want to talk about that, this idea of the blessing and the why. Ultimately, I know that’s an ongoing question, but can we talk about how ... And I would imagine that this maybe provides some iota of comfort too, but that you found and somehow decided to keep a page of a journal of Hersh’s written in Hebrew. You couldn’t read it. And it sounds like he had terrible handwriting, but after your daughter translated it for you and he writes about being in a tunnel.

RACHEL:

Wow. Yeah. Big wow. What happened is during COVID, when the whole world was closed back in 2020, I said to the kids, “Everybody clean your rooms really well, tear them apart and clean them really well.” And I went around with a garbage bag and I went to each of their garbage cans and I was dumping what they had thrown out. And in Hersh’s garbage can, there were all these old spiral notebooks from high school. And I remember opening them and thinking, “This is so interesting,” because it would say on the cover, he would write science and there’d be two pages of notes from science and then it was all empty. History, two pages of notes and then it was all empty. So I thought, why is he throwing these away? So I tore out all the pages that were few and I left the notebooks empty in the place where most people, we all have a place where we do that reusing of last year’s notebooks.

And on the bottom was a journal, an actual journal, like a hardcover little book. And I know because my mother raised me not to be nosy that you’re not allowed to read someone’s journal, but I’ll say that he made it easy because number one, it was in Hebrew, which is really still hard for me to read, to understand. I can read it. But number two is his handwriting was atrocious. So even if I read Hebrew, I couldn’t read his Hebrew. But I thought here he had written three entries and then the rest of the journal was empty. And I thought, “I don’t know what he’s saying here, but I’m not throwing out his words.” So I tore out the entries, the three entries, folded them up, and I put them in an envelope in my closet that said in English, “Private.” And I put it in the back left corner of my closet.

And I thought one day when he’s older, when he’s traveled the world and come home and is introducing us to his partner or something, I’ll give him these words that he wrote many years ago. And in the spring of 2024, I came across the envelope. So it was now four years after the envelope had been living in my closet and Hersh was still being held hostage. And I thought, no, it’s not appropriate. I’m not opening this and reading it. It’s none of my business. And I didn’t, and I put it back. And then he was killed. And in December of 2024, I was sitting in the kitchen telling his little sister, Orly, about what had happened and that I have this envelope that’s been sitting almost five years in my closet. And she said, “I want to read it. “ And I thought, “You know what?

Now it’s okay. It’s okay.” And I went and I got it and I gave it to her and she’s sitting across from me in the kitchen table and her whole face drops.

I said, “What’s wrong?” And she looked up and she said, “It’s prophecy.” And I said, “What is it? “ And she reads this passage. Now, the most important thing is that he had dated them, and I assumed they were from 2020 because that’s when he threw it away, but it was from 2014. It was from nine years earlier from when we were reading it. It was from when he was a freshman in high school. He had just started October 26th of his freshman year of high school, ninth grade, and he talks about being trapped in a tunnel and he uses the word tunnel in this tiny little ... It’s like a page and a half. He uses the word tunnel 12 times in the piece that in our lives, we’re going to find ourselves sometimes trapped in a tunnel, how you digest that ... He’s using it as a metaphor, but how you handle your tunnel, how you can you push through so that some tunnels are very long, some tunnels are very short, but you have to keep going through your tunnel.

And he says at the end, “The one thing I know for sure is that I will get to the end of the tunnel.” And it was just this very eerie, otherworldly kind of moment for us and our family. And when we showed it to the rabbi who ran his high school, he used to go to a 900 boy high school, Orthodox high school here in Jerusalem.

The rabbi said, “This is his goodbye letter to you that he wrote in ninth grade.” And so in the book, we actually have the exact translation verbatim with the mistakes of the letter that he wrote, the entry that he wrote.

ELISE:

It’s so beautiful and very profound and also resonates. You write at various points that this hallway is a metaphor in Judaism for many, I don’t know if it was Akiva, I can’t remember exactly who, but that people talk about this as this life as this hallway to some much larger hall or place that’s on the other side. And do you believe that?

RACHEL:

I do. You’re talking about Rabbi Jacob.

The Mishnah talks about how, and then multiple Maimonides and Rashi and all these different commentators along the way have deconstructed this idea that this world in Hebrew, they say Olam Hazeh, this world is different than Olam HaBa, the world to come. And people get obsessed with this world, with the wealth and the toys and the gossip and the friends and the peel, not the fruit. And it says, “This is just the lobby. It’s just the hallway depending on who’s talking.” They said, “It’s the hallway. You want to get to the banquet hall.” And I wrote in the book, it’s sort of like this world’s the elevator. Nobody lives in an elevator. It’s a means to get somewhere else or in a lobby. Lobbies are places that people pass through to get somewhere else. And this world, according to Jewish tradition, is a place to really affect change and do good and be benevolent and go to where you’re really supposed to be.

And there’s something gorgeous that I learned recently by the Baal Shem Tov, who’s the mystical father of the mystical movement within Judaism from about 300 years ago. He said this unbelievable thing, which is someone asked him, “So why do souls come here? What is the point of coming to this world? Why is a soul dropped here?” And he said, “Every single soul comes to this world so that one day they can do one act of kindness once.” Meaning you have to do thousands of acts of kindness, right? But there’s some reason why you were put here and there is an act of kindness that you will do that will fulfill your why, and then you get to go. But it doesn’t always happen, meaning someone can do their act of kindness when they’re five years old, and then they’re still here till they’re 97 because maybe they have to be 97 for someone else to do their act of kindness to them.

ELISE:

Wow.

RACHEL:

And what really brought me comfort was knowing, and I know Hersh did his act of kindness. I don’t know if he did it when he was two years old to me, or if he did it when he was 23 years old in one of the tunnels. Maybe he did an act of kindness and then he was able to go, but I know he did it and that gives me tremendous comfort. And I am aware that I’m here because I’m not done yet. You’re here because you’re not done yet.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, and I think that sometimes people like Hersh, and I loved Jon’s epilogue in the book too, and sort of the things that have emerged in the wake of Hersh’s death and his name, but sometimes people go and I feel this way about my brother-in-law, my brother’s husband who died at 39 in his sleep, it completely changed the trajectory of my life in the most beautiful way. It gave me much deeper meaning, much greater understanding. I mean, it was the most profound impact on my life. I wouldn’t have given him up for that ever. But you also think about the way that Hersh and you and Jon and your whole family have sort of resonated with the world as a symbol of something, reminding us, I think, of something in the midst of horrible horror that I can only imagine as Hersh sort of looks back and sees that impact that there’s some ... I mean, it’s staggering, but that there’s some other whys that he’s just unlocking as this rock hitting the ocean.

And you wrestle with your why. I mean, and one of the whys obviously in some ways is we don’t have a name for grieving parents. It’s so odd. We don’t have names for people who have lost siblings. We don’t have names for grieving parents. We only have widow and widower and orphan,

Because it’s so unnatural out of order. As you said, it’s disorder, but in some ways it’s like, please hold all bereaved parents with tenderness and care. But do you have a sense of your why? It feels like it’s more than that, even though that’s so big.

RACHEL:

We’re trying very hard to hone in on what do we do with this humongous, gargantuan, enormous challenge that we’ve been given. How do we take this and create purpose? How do we take this and keep breathing in this world without air? And it can be done and it must be done and we are still reeling and the whole world. I mean, we are at an inflection point. It’s very clear and nobody really knows where to turn, what is something to hold onto, where is the meaning? And we are very much aware that this was not punishment, this was not a mistake.

This was supposed to happen this way and it is arduous and thorny and sticky and ugly and painful and wrapped in love and wrapped in meaning and potential. And we are duty bound to figure it out. And so to me, it’s very obvious that I think about my great-grandparents had to get married, so my grandparents would get married, so my parents would get married, so I would be born, so I would marry Jon, so I would have Hersh, so he would get killed, so I could do this. What is this? I’m not sure yet, but I will figure it out because it is our why. It’s just obvious to me. But Jon feels very strongly, and I agree that we have to make the world a little different. I think all of us feel very overwhelmed. And Rabbi Tarfon in Ethics of Our Father in the Mishnah talks about the idea of it’s not on you to clean up the whole mess, but you also can’t pretend you don’t see it and do nothing.

It’s okay. I get it. We’re all overwhelmed. There is unbearable pain and suffering. You don’t have to cure it. You need to help.

That’s what we’re all hopefully trying to do. I think what ends up happening sometimes is we try to distract ourselves and I don’t blame us for distracting ourselves with worrying about the things that we know are not important. We’re always saying that. That’s the disclaimer. I know this is ridiculous, but ... And then somehow, then it’s allowed. As soon as we say that, then we’re allowed to have the ridiculous thing be front and center. But I think that what happened to us is it’s almost like what happened in Chernobyl. It changed our DNA. It changed this disaster was so deep and embedded in us that I’m no longer myself who I was before. And then I actually realized maybe I am myself, but I’m now revealed because the ease is gone. I don’t have any more ease in my life and I miss it. I remember it.

I was really blessed. I went through 53 years of a really easy, beautiful life and the ease may have made it where I wasn’t digging as deep as I could have. And now, I mean, I wish I had ease, but I don’t.

That isn’t what the hand that I was dealt, and I’m going to play this hand as best I can.

ELISE:

I know we’re essentially at time. There’s a small moment, but I didn’t know this, even though I’m Jewish, but like you, I was not raised as an observant Jew and I feel like I missed ... So I’m still learning. I’m on the curve. But you talk, I think it is so profound. I was stunned by it. You talk about on the Sabbath how you bless ... There are many women that you can sort of bless your daughters in the name of, but that you bless your sons in the name of Joseph’s sons. Is that correct? And who break this incredibly long chain that marks our entire culture of brothers hating, killing each other, which is when you think about everything happening in the world, this is an interfamily, that is what we are doing, right? We are all from the same father. We’re all from Abraham.

Can you explain that to people? Because I didn’t know that.

RACHEL:

Right. So on Friday night, it’s traditional for Jewish parents to bless their children, to be like different respected people from the Torah. And girls are blessed to be like the matriarchs like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. And it’s interesting because our boys are blessed to be like Ephraim and Mannaseh. And you kind of think, really? Because if we’re playing Family Feud and I ask you to name the top five male characters in the Torah, I really don’t think Ephraim or Mannaseh are coming up there. You might have Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, Moses.

ELISE:

Moses.

RACHEL:

But what’s with these boys? And it is explained, and there are a couple different explanations, but one of them is that they were the first set of brothers to break the paradigm of hatred of sibling rivalry. And we see in the Torah, the damage that that poison of hatred even amidst brothers, what it can do. We have Cain and Abel, you have Isaac and Ishmael, you have Jacob and Asav, you have Joseph and his brothers, he’s one of 12 brothers and they hate him so much that they throw him into a pit and they end up selling him and he’s sold and taken away to Egypt, and he ends up getting out of prison in Egypt, marrying, having two children, and those two boys end up loving each other. They break this paradigm of hatred between brothers and they don’t resort to violence and nothing untoward happens between them.

They actually just loved each other. And it sounds so simple, but that is the point. It is the hardest thing in the world to love each other. And we know this. But once I will just end by saying something that I have learned through this experience of radical loss is that love is stronger than time and love is stronger than death. And I didn’t know that before. And love is like bamboo and it keeps growing because I am telling you, I love Hersh more today.

I love Hersh more right now than I did this morning. And it makes no sense. And I’m not being one of those people. I am just telling you the truth. And I said to a group of young people I was talking to recently, one of them said, it was a high school and they asked, “How do you explain grief? What is grief?” I said, “Think of anyone you absolutely love, really love.” I said, “It could be a parent, a sibling, a grandma, a best friend, but really love who’s integral to your life. Are they in this room?” And all the kids went like this. And I said, “Do you not love them anymore?”

He’s not here the way he was. The love is still here and it is still unfolding.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, it’s beautiful. Thank you for your gift. I think it is so also stunning that Hersh’s most treasured belonging at the end was a book and that words helped sustain the people that he left behind in the tunnel. And it is ... I wish you didn’t have to write it. I’m so sorry, Rachel. And as I know we all are, but it is a beautiful gift. So if there’s anything I can do to support you and your family, let me know. And thank you.

RACHEL:

Thank you so much for carving out the time, and I really appreciate it. And I pray for all of us to have strength and love and light.

ELISE:

She’s stunning. And the book, When We See You Again, is really beautiful. It is certainly hard. And yet I promise you it’s worth it to say with her and her pain. It’s a very beautiful and pure kind of pain. And the absence of anger, rage, desire for revenge is remarkable. It’s not a political book. It’s a humanitarian book, which I think in this particular moment is a great reminder. We didn’t really talk about this. We glanced over it, but she writes a fair amount about the suffering of that club that nobody wants to join, which is bereaved parents, parents who have lost children or whose children have died, just to be frank. And how it is like a homesickness. She calls it Hershsickness, where each day it only grows. There’s no abatement. Grief is pretty pernicious. And this is a certain kind of pain that if you don’t know what the color blue is, you don’t quite understand, but maybe you can touch.

And in the book, if you read between the lines, there are sort of guidelines. There’s recommendations for how to be with people who have experienced this. And after her died, many people rushed to tell her that she would never get over it. I don’t think she was worried that she would, but this is certainly true. My friend Nora gave a TED Talk that’s called, “You Never Get Over It. You Move Forward.” And Pauline Boss writes about this. I’ll include all the show notes. I’ve done many episodes with Francis O’Connor, who Rachel also writes about as well. And what happens when an attachment figure dies and how primate mothers carry their dead babies around for months and stop grooming there in grief. It is a visceral, wild experience. But this is why she and Jon ultimately wore the masking tape, marking the number of days that Hersh was in captivity because they just couldn’t bear to tell people and answer that question compulsively.

And so she writes, “I think this is really helpful. These kindred sufferers want, I know, to offer comfort as well as to receive it, but as someone who still feels open lesions all over my body, when people grab me or try to hug me, it has been painful. I think this is confusing for the person offering themselves in kindness to me. I know it is coming from an abundantly benevolent place. Years ago, a gifted teacher, Alana, taught me a piece by the famous Reb Shlomo Bobov about the Chesed (kindness). This most complicated of disciplines requires looking at the person in front of us and asking ourselves, what does this person need rather than what do I imagine I would need in this person’s situation? All right, friends, thank you for listening. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word.

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