‘We are now all walking around with an invisible tear in our clothes’

Last week, I sat in a circle of friends listening to Rabbi Dr Ariel Burger tell us a story by Rabbi Nachman of Breslev about two birds, the last two birds of their species, separated, lost from each other, wailing to each other every night from their nests across the skies.

Burger encouraged us to think of what this reminded us of, pop culture references included. I thought of Feivel and Tanya Mousekewitz in An American Tail,  singing for each other beneath the pale moonlight. And of course, my own family searching for each other after the Holocaust. Hope and grief. Grief and hope.

Days later, so many of us watched Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s mother Rachel, and other hostages’ family members, running to the gates at the Gaza border, howling their children's names through a megaphone across the lonely plains. “Hersh, Hersh, it’s mama!” cried Rachel, our biblical matriarch, our mother of mothers, our womb of wombs. Rachel, the Hebrew name of my own mother.

On Saturday, I ordered my morning take away coffee in Hersh’s name, inspired by a social media campaign to bring awareness to the hostages. It wasn’t the first time I had done this, but the urgency to do something was increasing. A minuscule gesture for the “I don’t know what to do” people like myself. To say his name into the ether. Say all their names. Every human who is lost to this war.

On Sunday afternoon, after our Father’s Day brunch of smetana (a Polish cheese dish), fresh bread and pots of tea, I scrolled my phone for news. When I saw that it was Hersh who was murdered among the six, something broke inside me and around me. I could hear and feel gravel moving. Earth cracking. The splinter of trees breaking. The sudden jolt of a shift in the earth’s axis. A wail from the abyss escaped from my insides. A cry that continues each day since.

By Sunday evening, as I was getting ready to go to a bar mitzvah of dear friends, I learned that one of the six, Eden Yerushalmi, was a friend's cousin. "It's her,” she wrote to me when I asked for her name. And there at the bar mitzvah, watching people dance the hora, the Hebrew words and familiar songs piercing my ears and heart, I could not dance. I could not breathe. I stood outside and wept.

When my daughters were younger, I tried to explain to them what it means to be Jewish. We didn’t belong to a synagogue, we weren’t part of a particular Jewish community, they didn’t attend a Jewish school, and their grasp of Hebrew, despite having an Israeli father, was minimal.

And yet, the answer to this question seemed so incredibly clear with a child’s perception in mind. “We are part of a bigger family,” I told them resolutely, nodding to them and to myself too. “Just think of being Jewish as being born into a very big family that you are connected to all over the world.”

We are now all walking around with an invisible tear in our clothes. There is an invisible candle burning in our homes on the mantelpiece. We are birds wailing to each other across oceans, deserts, forests and cities, longing for our family to be brought home.