Hi, it’s Noam. Before you get into this episode, I want to tell you, it’s a little different. What you’re about to hear is a bonus episode, recorded live two nights ago, April 27, 2026, a conversation with the incredible Rachel Goldberg Polin, mother of Hersh Goldberg Polin, who millions around the world came to know after he was captured by Hamas and brutally murdered after 328 days of unimaginable suffering.
Hersh was among the most visible of the 251 hostages. He was American and Israeli. The image of him, his arm blown off as he was kidnapped by Hamas, became seared into people’s minds. And alongside that image were his parents, Jon and Rachel, doing everything possible to bring him home. For millions across the world, his face became the symbol of the struggle to get the hostages home.
So, I want to prepare you for it, because it was… a lot. It was intense. I try to be dispassionate when teaching history (sometimes). But this was different. It was emotional, for me, for Rachel, and for the entire live audience of nearly 1,000 people at Temple Judea in Miami. I got pretty choked up, which I tried hard not to do.
As you’ll hear me say more than once in the conversation, Rachel is not just the mother of her own children, Hersh, Orly, and Libby. In many ways, she has become a kind of mother to the people of Israel, to Jewish people around the globe, and also to the broader world, for anyone who has endured suffering. And frankly, that is all of us. There’s something about the way she speaks, the way she holds pain and hope at the same time, that just stays with you.
I really encourage you to listen or watch all the way through. Sit with it. Let it land.
And after you do, go read her book. It will deepen what you’re about to hear in a really meaningful way.
This episode was sponsored by the only people I would want to sponsor this episode, my parents, Neil and Pam Weissman, Abba and Ema.
As always, I’d love to hear from you, what resonated, what challenged you, what you’re still thinking about. You know where to find me, noam@unpacked.media.
Noam: Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
Normally I say, ‘yalla, let’s do this’ after that because we’re about to unpack history. Tonight, the history is still happening, and the person, you, sitting across from me, lived it.
I want to thank you, Rachel, for being here. I want to thank you for writing the book, for going on this book tour, for writing about Hersh, for sharing him with us, with the readers.
I want to set the expectation for tonight. This is not just a book talk, not a traditional interview. This is a conversation. And I want to frame the core question. What happens to a person, a parent, when life is split between before and after.
And I want to acknowledge the public and private. Rachel, you and I just spent 45 minutes just schmoozing. You’ve been known globally over the last 2.5 years, but you’re a high functioning introvert. That’s really who you are. You had quiet life before. And tonight is not about the public figure. It’s about Rachel, the mother, the writer, the thinker. The private Rachel in a public setting.
For me, and it’s something I said to you on July 14th, 2024, day 282 for Hersh, I said that you became Eim Yisrael, you became the mother of the Jewish people. That’s how I viewed you and that’s how many, many other people view you, millions of people. I want to frame the book. Themes in the book include grief, love, faith. Hope, hope versus despair. Questions without clean answers. How do you keep going? What is hope? What endures?
So I want to start off with a quote from page 189 of your book. It says, we are born, we live, and then we leave. These are the bones of what happens.
There is more that fills the in-between. We love, learn, cry and laugh and cry. What is left behind can be a legacy, a lesson, or nothing. If we are honest, usually nothing at all except love. It didn’t get the memo.
I want you to interpret this briefly. I want to think about what it means. Tonight is about the in-between, not answers, how we live, how we struggle and make meaning. So I want to thank you so much for letting us into this space.
Let’s start with your origin story of writing this book. I want to take a step back. I immediately told my wife after reading this book, I told everyone I spoke with, this is the 25th book of Tanakh. That’s what this felt like to me. It felt spiritual. And I want to know from your perspective, writing it, did it feel like a spiritual experience writing it for you?
Rachel: So first I just want to thank every single person in this room for carving out the time to be here with us, with all of us, all of us together.
I would love to say that it felt really spiritual to write this book because I think that would sound extremely cool. But, really what this book was, was intense suffering that I couldn’t do very well anymore. And it was just taking out wrapping paper and putting packages of pain and wrapping them up and putting them to the side. The writing came fast and furious because there was so much surplus of agony and angst and misery and loss and grief and love.
And I didn’t know what to do with all of that. And thankfully, Jon said, you need to start to write. And when you have so much, I really felt, I felt it in my throat, like I was choking. I was drowning in pain, which I know I’m not unique. I know there are people in this room who have buried children. I know there are people in this room who have buried people who are core to their being. Partners, parents, grandparents, grandchildren, siblings, friends. I know that you know what I’m talking about. I didn’t know how to fake it anymore.
And so really this became a love letter that was doused in pain, or I say sometimes maybe it was a pain letter swaddled in love. But it was in many ways probably mostly selfish of I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t carry this. And so it was just getting it out. I do think that there were times where I did feel, I actually thought this the other night, that maybe I felt Hersh very close during all of the writing. And Jon would say, why don’t you write about this? Or why don’t you write about that?
Because when you’re overwhelmed, sometimes you don’t know how to start to clean your you need someone to say, whoa, the desk. So, you know, how about under your bed? So thank God for Jon who would say, what about the first day of eighth grade? Like that seemed kind of like an easy place to start. But I really think sometimes I was writing and it was almost like with a Ouija board with Hersh moving my hand. And you know, I’m left handed too. So I think he was saying, mama, let me help you.
Noam: That’s what it means to be a book of Tanakh, that there’s a spiritual experience, someone helping you guide and write the book itself. That may be, that’s a thought that’s going through my head when you say that. I want to talk about the different worlds.
Those of you who just got the book right now, if you haven’t had a chance to read it, it’s on audio to listen to it. But what Rachel does is she writes, you write a lot about the way this experience delineated your life. Part one is called the before. Part two, the after. It’s longer because it contains multiple elements. The after is the rest of your life after the 7th of October. But you also talk about how this experience has forced you to live in different worlds. And there’s a really beautiful and painful moment in there about your friend, whose son Yuval was friends with Hersh. As the Shiva, the traditional mourning period, came to an end, Oshrat held your hand, ushering you into the new world, into this part of After.
Excruciatingly, and this is what you’re talking about, that other people have experienced things. I think your experience is quite unique though. But a few months later, you do the same for her. When her son, Hersh’s friend Yuval, was killed while serving in Gaza, you write on page 93:
At the end of Yuval’s Shiva, it would be my hand put into Oshrat’s broken paw, pulling her up into the new world where we both now live.
And that theme of living in a new world, of living between worlds, shows up again and again. You write about the difference between this world and the world to come. To quote you on page 80:
This world is not our destination at all. It is the way through. We should use this place to prepare ourselves. What we do here will decide our portion of the world to come. It is the lobby, not even. It’s actually just a hallway, a vegetable. If this is where we get ready for the world to come, then Hersh, Carmel, Eden, Alex, Ori and Almog were in a hallway within a hallway within a hallway for a long and unimaginable time. When death came to get them, they went to the world to come not only with the purest of hearts, but also with pieces of their parents’ hearts along with them. So I am here and I am there, a foot and heart in both worlds for now. One day all of me there.
This entire theme is incredibly powerful, but I was most struck by your certainty that you will reunite with your beloved Hersh in the world to come. And of course, this book is literally titled, When We See You Again.
I’m curious about your experience of these two worlds. This world which for you changed irrevocably on October the 7th and again in August of 2024. And the world to come, where a piece of your heart accompanied Hersh. What can you tell us about these worlds and about the experience of having a foot in one and a heart in the other?
Rachel: So I had a rough time for a while describing how I feel now, and I would say, I feel like I’m on another planet. I feel like I’m in another galaxy. And finally, my dear friend Zev, who is so wise and has known me for many, years, said, you need to stop saying that. Your problem is that part of you is already in the world to come.
And it was this real moment of clarity for me. We say in the Jewish tradition that we have two worlds. We have olam hazeh, this world that we’re all in, and olam haba, the world to come. And it was finally permission to understand that what I’m feeling is this bifurcation of my soul and of myself.
And it’s not down the middle, because a lot of me is of course still in this world. have this magnificent partner, Jon, and I have these two vivacious, dynamic, glorious daughters, and I have family, and I have community, and I have friends, and I have a lot in Olam HaZeh in this world.
And yet, it was extremely obvious and visceral and touchable and very shattering and like cracking part of me off when we put Hersh in the ground. And I was very aware that I could hear part of myself being put in the ground with him. I could hear it. And I’m not the same, because I’m not running on… this is gonna be like an attempted car analogy. Four cylinders? I don’t know. Whatever cylinders, full horsepower? Something’s wrong. There’s an engine out, I’m not 100%. And so I really feel like a stranger in a strange world, rather than a stranger in a strange land.
And again, I think that this is a universal phenomenon. I don’t think that I’m unique, but I am trying desperately to put it into words because I think that it will relieve me of some of the weight that I’m having such trouble carrying.
Noam: Does it help you to think that you’re not unique because you are unique? The experience is remarkably unique. I don’t have to go through what makes your experience particularly unique. Yes, there are people that it’s horrific, have to bury their own children. There’s no word for that in Judaism. It doesn’t exist. But you also, like I said before, became Eim Yiraeal, you became the mother of the Jewish people. All of us started identifying with you and Jon in a way that I don’t think we can think of many other people that are like that, that you had your tragedy unfold in such a public way. And then you with your profound voice and you were for 12 years, were doing, working with a school and with students with different sort of backgrounds. You weren’t this public figure. That’s not what you were. And now you’re all of this major public figure. So does it help you to think that you’re like, I’m just, other people go through traumatic experiences or do you really feel like you are not that unique.
Rachel: I think that it does help me to know that other people have done this. I think what happened to us that’s unusual is that we had a weird 330 days preceding this unique but extremely painful scalding experience of bearing someone intrinsic to us. And what I’ve understood from speaking to many therapists about it is that losing a child is very different also within the rubric of losing people who are close to us.
And yes, those 330 days preceding Hersh’s murder were very complicated for obvious reasons and for not obvious reasons. The truth is that I actually realized that partially those 330 days in this very twisted macabre kind of way were a gift. Because, we were trying so desperately to get Hersh to be understood as a person, not as a number, get all of these hostages to be people and therefore tell their stories and talk about what they liked to do and what teams they liked and here’s what happened to him when he was in fourth grade and here’s a picture of him at the last music festival he was at and we know he’s alive and here’s the video of him getting on the truck without his dominant left forearm.
And that allowed us to let you grow to love him. And that phenomenon of, didn’t know that you, it sounds so obvious now, but you can love people that you’ve never met. And I think a lot of people grew to love Hersh because he became very much, first of all, I say, you know, I’m like the Jane Doe of Jewish women. My name before October 7th was Rachel Goldberg, and there are 18 of us who are my age, and we all look exactly like this. Like this is, I’m like the Jane Doe of Jewish women. And then, this happened and you know and Hersh very much, Hersh kind of looked like me, like he also looked like a very specific type of kid who was either your son, your nephew, your newspaper delivery man, your first counselor in camp, the first boy you kissed in eighth grade, you know, like everybody could kind of identify with him and that ends up being a tremendous bracha, a tremendous blessing because when he was killed, we had literally hundreds of thousands of people reaching out who were grieving because you can grieve, you only grieve people you love. You can feel bad when you hear that someone passed away, but not grieve them. We grieve for people we love and people were grieving and still continue with us grieving for Hersh and that is tremendous scaffolding for us. And that not everyone has.
And so I still say when I see Moshe and Shira Shapira, who are Aner Shapira’s parents, I always say to them, and I mean I love them, and I see them, you know, we live in the same area, I always say thank you. Because Aner also saved Hersh’s life and gave us the opportunity to fight and hope and scrape and pray and run to the ends of the earth to try to save him. And that was a tremendous gift. But it also made us very public. And therefore, it became confusing.
I don’t know that it’s bad or good. It’s just unusual. It’s unusual. And that’s why I think I’m so strange and disordered and not normal now because very kind, benevolent people ask the innocuous question of how are you? And I literally go, I flinch because to me it feels so obvious. Like I have this dagger sticking out of my chest. I don’t understand why you’re asking me how I am. It seems perverse, and yet people can’t see it. It’s not their fault. It’s like trying to, I’ve said it’s like trying to explain to someone who was born blind what is blue.
If someone is born blind, how do you explain blue? And the book ended up becoming this attempt to show you my blue, to show you my pain. And I think that at a certain point in writing, I realized, holy cow, this is the answer. So that when people kindly, sweetly, innocently say, how are you, now I can just hit them and say, here, that’s how I am. Which is also not normal.
But I really admit it, I know I have a problem. I remember when I was in high school and my mom said, you know, when people break up with people, you should always say, it’s not you, it’s me. Even though obviously it’s them, you don’t like them. But I’m telling you, because we are all best friends, it’s me. And I’m not being, I’m telling you the truth, it’s me. I know I have a problem. I’m sort of trying to work on it, but I don’t know how. I don’t know how to work on it. So this at least is a way of saying, here, I’m sprinkling you with bits of how I am. Maybe this will do something, but I’m not sure. Maybe it won’t.
Noam: I want to go to philosophical, theological.
Rachel: Sorry I threw that you, it was for dramatic effect.
Noam: I’m here for you. I want to be philosophical, Rachel, for a second, could we go to page 36? I’m going to ask you to read something in your own words, back to everyone here. This is, I want you to please read from the beginning of page 36 in Viktor Frankl and end in Tehran. I brought Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which many people know from listening to anything that’s been said about Hersh, that he guided so many people, of if you have your why, you could deal with any how, right? So let’s read a little bit from what you said. This section’s called Death in Tehran.
Rachel: Okay, it’s very interesting. just would like to say that I Jon and I both only read the book once in December because the editors said, people, you have to actually read the book. And we read it. And for us, obviously, it’s very difficult to read. And then a few weeks ago, I had to read it for the audio version, which was really difficult to read out loud. But I tried distancing myself from it. And last week, we were in Brooklyn and the rabbi at a shul in Brooklyn where we were doing an event for the book, she was reading an excerpt from the book and I was thinking, yeah, I totally agree with that. And then I was like, oh, I actually wrote that. So this will be interesting because I haven’t read this. I don’t have the book yet. Mitch.
Okay, this chapter is called Death in Tehran:
In Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which I only read later, there is a well-known tale that has bespoke incarnations in various traditions. It is a story called Death in Tehran. Depending on the version, the details vary, but it goes more or less as follows. A king and his loyal servant are strolling in the garden. They separate for a moment, and the servant comes running urgently back to the king. “Master, I have just seen death. Please lend me your finest horse so I can get away quickly to Tehran and avoid death.” The king immediately agrees and off the servant goes on the king’s favorite horse galloping toward Tehran. A few moments later the king himself runs into death in the garden. Irritated, the king asks death, why did you frighten my servant? And death replies, I didn’t mean to scare him. I was just surprised to see him here since I have an appointment with him tonight in Tehran.
Done. That story did it for me. For me it says you cannot outrun your destiny and if we try we will run full force right into it.
Noam: So this story emphasizes that we cannot outrun our own fate. There’s a parallel story in the Talmud, or a phrase, I think this is it, that the path that you want to go, ultimately your legs will take you there. That everything in this world is meant to happen, the amazing things, the awful things, we are where we are meant to be. It’s inescapable. It’s a philosophical point that you’re raising, a theological point.
So how does this idea, the inescapability of destiny, if that’s a word, how does it make you feel? Is it comforting? Does it draw you into despair? Because at the end, fate is inescapable. How do you avoid the conclusion that if fate is inescapable, nothing we do actually matters? How do you react to it? This is the type of question students would ask me time and time again in a high school setting. Does it matter then, ultimately?
Rachel: So it’s really two parts. The first is, how does it make me feel? I love it. And the second part is, you absolutely have to do every single thing right anyway. Meaning, I don’t think you go and lay down in the middle of the street because you say, okay, well, if I’m supposed to get hit by a car, then I will, and if I’m not, then they’ll swerve around me. I think we all have to do what we were put here to do, which I’ll talk about in a second. And we all have to try hard to be making the world more repaired, more refined, more holy, more godly. And yet, I really believe there is a master plan that we are not privy to. It doesn’t allow us to not do our part.
Like, Rabbi Tarfon would not be into that, right? It’s not upon us to do all of it. It’s too big to go fix the whole world, but we’re also not exempt and allowed to do nothing. But I got a tremendous amount of comfort recently. was reading some of the writings of the Rebbe on, he was talking about the Baal Shem Tov on a commentary of Tehillim Sadi, Psalm 90.
And the Baal Shem Tov was once asked, the sort of father of mystic Judaism from 300 or 400 years ago, he was asked, why does the soul come to this earth? Like, why are we here? It’s a big fat mess. What are we doing here? What’s the point? And he said this idea that has so resonated with me.
He said, every soul is put here because for one time, one day, that soul is gonna do one act of kindness for someone. Now that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do kindness all your life and that you don’t have to try to improve and you don’t have to try to live a life of meaning and aim and purpose and growth.
But it means that there really is an intricate plan for exactly for you to do one thing one day for one person. Now it might be that I did my thing when I was six. So why am I still here? And I realized because maybe someone has to do their nice thing to me when I’m 86. And so I have to stay here because we’re all part of this synergy of interwovenness. And I really think that that idea is so profound because what it tells me, especially about Hersh, is not only did he do his why, but he did that act of chesed. Now he may have done it when he was two and we were living in Berkeley, or when he was six and we were living in Richmond, Virginia, or when he was eight and we were in Jerusalem, or when he was 23 and he was in a tunnel under Rafa. I don’t know. But I know he did it. And that’s why he’s not here.
And so I think that this idea of destiny and fate, are very loaded terms.
I just look at it more as this interwoven masterpiece tapestry that we all are one stitch of. And I love that if we can live our lives waking up thinking, I don’t know if I did my act of chesed yet. I don’t know if I did my kindness yet. Maybe it’s today. And then every opportunity today that you have to maybe do your kindness, to even think back when you’re going to sleep, I did this, maybe that was it, maybe it was this, maybe it was this. It makes you try to search for those opportunities to do goodness because we don’t know what that one thing is. And again, it doesn’t mean you do it and then, you’re going to get hit by a bus because now you’re done. Because again, it could be that you need to be around for another 50 years so that someone else can once smile at you when you’re feeling sad. And that is their act of chesed. And that is the whole entire purpose that that soul was sent to this world.
Noam: I want to ask you a question, different identities of Rachel. I want you to go to page 203 again and to please read out loud. I just had a chance to meet your father right before we started.
Rachel: Dad, are you awake? It’s very past Joe Goldberg’s bedtime, people.
Noam: He’s a special man. I told him he looks a lot like Hersh, who looks like you. You have a whole theory of Jewish genetics for another time. But I want you to read this section on page 203, which relates to your description of when people ask you how you’re doing.
Rachel: Yeah.
My father and I have a bit that we do on the phone. He calls and says, how are you, honey? Lie to me. And I lie to him. I say, dandy, how are you? Lie to me. And he says, I’m just dandy too. We get that baloney out of the way and talk for a few minutes, but only a few. More than a handful of minutes is still too hard to pretend to be dandy.
Noam: So this section really struck me because there so many layers there. For the past three years, I said that you’ve been this mama bear. You’re the name Rachel who cries for her children in the Bible and Tanakh. That you’ve been endlessly sacrificing, endlessly selfless.
But there’s a different Rachel. There’s the Rachel, not the mother, but the Rachel, the daughter. And I started thinking as somebody who has three daughters, not of Rachel, the mother, but of your father and how your father has had to deal with the tragedy since the end of 2023. Not Rachel, the mother, but Rachel, the daughter.
Can you tell us a little bit about that dynamic, Rachel, the daughter, and how you’ve seen what that’s like to be in that situation when you have a father who’s thinking about his little girl?
Rachel: I mean, obviously it’s been horrible for our whole family. And I think my dad and I used to talk every day. That was our thing. And after October 7th, first I couldn’t, first I had to lie. And I talk about that in the book, like having to talk to my parents right after October 7th to try to keep them calm, calm enough like in those first few days, even though we were losing our minds, but having to lie enough to say like, it’s okay, and we’re hoping, and we’re gonna find him, and you know, and just trying very hard to not tell the truth. And finally, when things, when it became obvious that Hersh was kidnapped, his arm was gone, we didn’t know if he had bled out during the abduction. There was a very long time from when Anderson Cooper shared the video that many of you probably saw until we had from the intelligence sources word that they thought they had a sign of life from Hersh, which was always, I talk about that in the book, it’s never, they would come and they would tell us and they would say, it was from two weeks ago and we can’t tell you what we mean by that and we don’t wanna harm the source. And so it was like this ball of complete confusion and lack of clarity. And that whole entire time, I just said to both my parents, parents, I cannot talk to you. It was just too painful. And my mom and I started really writing emails because that was, I could deal with. And my dad and I, know, like once a week, I would very much sort of like bolster myself to call him and to pretend that I was okay because I knew that torment I was feeling knowing Hersh was being tortured. So I knew my dad knew the torment I was feeling because I was being tortured.
And so I was trying to pretend, and I say it was the beginning of my acting career. And a lot of what I was doing during those 330 days was lying, faking, acting, and pretending with different people for different reasons, with the goal and objective being to get back Hersh.
Noam: One thing I’ll say about your dad, and sorry for spoiling this for some of you who haven’t read the book yet, he sent you on an airplane at age four by yourself. That was remarkable.
Rachel: My mom was involved with that too. They were married then. It was both of them.
Noam: I was mesmerized by that.
Rachel: It was only to Detroit. Okay, Chicago to Detroit.
Noam: I mean, was… Fair enough. It was like 35 minutes or something. When I asked him about that, he said, have you met my daughter? She can handle it.
I want to go from Rachel, the mother, to Rachel, the daughter, to Rachel, the wife. And something I was struck by in this book over and over is the relationship between Jon and Hersh.
Maybe because I’m a father and my son’s here, and my firstborn is a son, those stories really got to me. And there are two specific pieces I want to ask you about, and they both relate to Hersh and Jon in Shul in synagogue. You wrote about the moment that Hersh told you that the way your family practices religiously wasn’t calling to him. He decided he wanted to practice his Judaism differently, and yet he continued to wake up early on Shabbat morning and go with your family to shul, to synagogue. And when you asked him why, he said, I don’t want Dada to sit alone.
You attend as I attend a shul in which men and women sit separately. And then you wrote, now Jon does sit alone at synagogue every time. He moved his usual seat from where he and Hersh sat together, where everyone commented on how sweet it was that Hersh would rest his head on Jon’s shoulder. In the after, Jon prefers to seat all the way against the wall. Maybe it lessens the phantom pain of not having that piece of himself on his shoulder.
Then at the end of the book, we actually get to hear directly from Jon himself. Here’s what Jon had to say about going to synagogue without Hersh writing directly to him. It’s on pages 261 and 262.
While I miss you every moment of every minute of every day, I feel it most acutely during Birkat Kohanim, the priestly blessing, which is recited twice every Shabbat morning in synagogue. The custom is for men to cover themselves and their sons under a prayer shawl during this blessing. So in your 23 years, you and I shared over a thousand moments cloaked in privacy. When you barely reached my waist, we’d stand silently together with our eyes closed, soaking in the prayer and the moment together. More recently, you would be half asleep and rest your weary head on my shoulder. Whenever you were home for Shabbat, whether as a seven-year-old or as a 23-year-old, I knew I could count on those moments. Now I look around, not at the kohanim at the front of the room, but at the scene around me, fathers embracing their sons for an intimate moment under their prayer shawl. I stand alone with tears in my eyes.
Those moments are so specific, they’re intimate, they’re so ordinary, which somehow makes them even more painful and powerful. As a father and as a son, these words really stayed with me. I’m wondering if you could take us into that space a little. What it’s like now for Jon to be in synagogue without Hersh. What it’s like for you to watch that, to live alongside that kind of absence for you as Rachel, the wife.
Rachel: So much of the suffering is watching the people who I love who are here who continue to suffer and will continue to suffer. I think what was confusing in the time when we were fighting so hard for Hersh was watching Jon in pain, and watching him be tortured and knowing he was watching me be tortured. And you know, we’ve aged so much in two and a half years. We’ve had these experiences where communities will ask us to come and can we send a picture and we send a picture literally from last year and we’re not recognizable. I mean, we don’t look like that anymore because we’ve aged so much because we’ve lost so much and I do feel, you know, there’s something really unique about a father-son relationship.
I do think Jon still has that relationship, but it’s a much harder dynamic to foster when you can’t use your five senses, which is how we normally experience people that we love and people in the world. And now it’s this ever intense searching and seeking in hidden places and obvious places for Hersh. it’s something Jon recently was saying, we can hold all of that longing and yearning and missing and still laugh and be happy and dance and be joyful. And he’s trying very hard to figure out, how do you juggle all of those very real things that you want to incorporate into your life in the after. Because I think the denying of it is not healthy. And that, again, it goes back to why have the words there.
And I recently was studying this incredible passage by Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Who was amazing, iconoclastic stuff, and he talks about when supreme tragedy strikes, if you don’t give word to it, you can end up with incurable muteness. Incurable muteness, which he talks about in the context of his parents who were both Holocaust survivors who were never able to discuss it because it was so painful, and then it cornered him into this place of silence and real damage. And so we’re trying very hard not to do that. And so we’re constantly talking about this and constantly talking too harsh, which I think is might make people feel uncomfortable because it seems like a strange practice. But I actually think it’s really helpful and real because it feels very much that he is still here, and I am still thankful that that soul exists. I just have to figure out how do I relate to it in a way so that I’m not starving.
Noam: I want to talk a little bit more about theology with you and continue on with the conversation you had with Jon. One of the most poignant passages that we have in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, is the story of Akedat Yitzchak, of the binding of Isaac. It’s a story that has pierced through the thinking of thousands, countless of philosophers and theologians and scholars and teachers. I spent 10 years teaching Akhedat Yitzhak in a high school setting, The Binding of Isaac. I think it’s the most remarkable text of all time.
But you talk about The Binding of Isaac and don’t sanitize the story, you sit with how unsettling it really is. And then you share this question someone asked you. A pretty bold question. Bold, bold, bold. Which is almost impossible for those of us in the audience to hear, and it’s on page 191.
Would you have been able to do it? If you wholeheartedly and completely believed as God asking you for your gorgeous boy, would you have been able to do it?
That question is so raw because it forces a confrontation between faith, love, loss in the most direct and painful way. And you say on page 192, you say this, again, this is Rachel the wife:
I love so much about Jon. But I love, love, love Jon’s response when I asked him that question from the eight page letter. What if God came to you a few years ago and asked you to kill Hersh? If you really and truly knew it was God talking to you, what would you do? And without a moment of hesitation, he replied, I would have negotiated.
It’s a striking answer and it’s emotionally devastating, but I struggle to understand why it hit me so profoundly. So could you tell me more about why Jon’s answer was so powerful and so meaningful for you? Why you describe it as something you love, love, love?
Rachel: So what happened, the background to that, is that I received an eight page letter. Now, we actually receive, it’s very kind, thousands of letters. Actually handwritten, remember handwritten with envelopes and there’s a stamp on them. It’s like really interesting. And I don’t read them because they would destroy me. And for some reason, one letter came.
And it was months after Hersh had been killed, months. And I don’t know what possessed me, but I opened the letter and it was eight pages in the neatest block print handwriting. But eight pages. And I thought, I’m not gonna read this, but I’ll read the first page. It was riveting. It was such a well-written letter and so interesting and profound.
And one of the questions, this woman actually, thought, gutsy that this woman said the quote, that’s from her letter. She said, would you have been able to do this? Would you have been able to kill your gorgeous boy if you knew, if you really felt that it was God asking you to do it? And I thought, holy cow, I don’t know who this woman is, but this is like someone with a lot of moxie, you know? I’m surprised you immediately react like that because you’re also like, when someone asks you the question that you don’t like, you’re kind of like, if I didn’t like it, but I it was a great question. got you thinking. I thought it was really impressive to have the guts to say that to the mother of a murdered child and I really, and I read the whole letter, I thought she was so interesting. And then I asked, but to me, I thought the reason I love Jon’s answer is because I didn’t even know you were sort of allowed, like that that could be the relationship with God. Like I thought, if I’m putting myself in that place, and I really believe God, God is coming and saying to me, I need you to go kill Hersh, would I have been able to do it? I didn’t understand that there was, I just thought it was a yes or a no. And so I love that the way that Jon relates to this idea of God is that it does not have to be yes or no. And you can negotiate. And then I remember even thinking, Abraham negotiated!
You know, this isn’t, it’s not the first time in biblical Jewish canon that someone says, well, wait a second there, big guy. I’m not so sure this is a good idea. And I just thought it was a brilliant answer that he would have said, let’s figure it out.
Noam: I want to transition from theology and Rachel, the mother and Rachel, the wife and Rachel, the daughter to Rachel, the leader.
And two different aspects of this book. There was a part, I want to talk about failure. There were points in the book where I was reading it and my emotional reaction was very strong, crying, like intensely. And then there was another point when I was reading the book where I wasn’t crying but I was angry. Like really, really angry. And I didn’t know who I was angry at, but I was angry. I was angry at myself. I was angry at everyone here. I was angry. I was just angry.
And I remember, like I tried to do a few things. I told you this on day 282. I don’t expect you to remember it. But I told you that I named myself Hersh at Starbucks so that every single Starbucks person would know the name Hersh. that virtue signaling? Is that symbolic? To me, it didn’t matter. Like I felt that grief. And I wanted people to know the name, to expose more people to the name.
But then there’s also this aspect of me that was like, wait, we failed. We failed. And we didn’t bring your son back. And you talk about failure a lot in the beginning of the book.
So what does failure mean to you from the inside? And would you say my articulation of my anger of like, why were we not, and you know, my producer told me, this is a little bit of navel gazing, so my apologies, but like, why were we not every single Sunday, you know, every single Sunday ensuring that this is what we were doing, bring Hersh home? Like how is that not failure? How do you deal with that question? Did you have that anger?
Rachel: Well, I think what Jon and I said a lot is that we failed to elicit the sense of urgency that was needed to get these people home because not only Hersh, and we call, Hersh was killed the beautiful six, Ori, Almog, Alex, Eden, and Carmel, and Hersh. But there were 45 hostages who were taken alive, who managed to stay alive for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of days, and then were killed. Because people with power and influence were not convinced of the urgency of the situation. And we often sat in rooms, and Jon was very meticulous about drilling into anyone we spoke to saying, because they often would say, just, we’re working on it, just give us another week, two weeks. We’re gonna wait until after Ramadan, we’re gonna wait until after Easter, we’re gonna wait until after, and he kept saying, what are you saying? These are people who are being held in an active war zone known terrorist organization. We need them out now. If we don’t get them out now, the terrorists are going to get spooked one day and they’re just going to line them up and they’re going to shoot them in the head. And he said that nine times. We had meetings nine times where he said that.
And they kept saying, no, that’s not how they operate, and they’re worth more to them alive than dead, and that’s not gonna happen. So we do feel that we failed to elicit the urgency in people who held power. But again, that’s not really how I address this whole situation.
But what I will say about your question of why weren’t we all out there Sunday, you know, I had someone who was a powerful person say to me, I will pretend that he is my son. I will work as if he is my son. Now I know he did not work as if it was his son because had he done that, Hersh would be home alive. And so I think what happens, and I think this is sort of, we don’t like to admit this to ourselves, I felt, and I think a lot of people felt, that Hersh was one boy in the whole wide world. And I thought of Hersh as the whole wide world in one boy.
And I think that if we all thought that about each other, if we really valued life, right, and that’s why in Judaism we say, koladam olam. Every person is a world unto himself or herself. is how do we actually inculcate that into us and behave that way? Well, we don’t. It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge we should be pushing ourselves to do because it shouldn’t have to be that someone says, will pretend it is my son. It should be that we value life and therefore we value when life is at risk.
And so we really, we learn that in the most deep and profound way. And we are very careful, and I like your choice of words, because sometimes people will say, we got them all home. And we always say, Hersh never came home. Hersh never came into my home again. We got Hersh’s body back, and we buried it six miles from my home. But Hersh never came home. 45 of those hostages who were taken alive did not come home, they came back to where they live and they were put into the ground.
Noam: I want to stay on this theme for another question. You don’t name, this is something that I noticed in the book, and I would imagine it’s not merely a stylistic choice. You don’t name any big names in the book.
instead you wrote that you met with, in caps, Influential Person or Important Man. Even your therapist who you call Smart Man.
I wanted to ask you about that decision because I really suspect it wasn’t merely stylistic. Why did you choose not to include names?
Rachel: I really felt that this was a love letter and I wanted every name that was in the book to be someone holy and who I loved, even if I didn’t know them.
And so a lot of hostages are named and a lot of people in our lives are named. Just first names, like wasn’t necessary. And the editor in the beginning said like, who’s this, who’s that? And I said, just keep reading. And then they said, okay, we get it. Because it doesn’t matter. And also I felt that it would have been almost profane because it was this homage to love, that I didn’t want anyone’s name in there that would sort of distract from this adoration that I was trying to articulate.
Noam: I want to talk about this last dialectic and then I have a closing question for you. One of my favorite chapters of your book is called Hersh’s Words. You write about finding one of Hersh’s old journals and waiting years and years to open it. Can you briefly tell us the story?
Rachel: So briefly, I found in his garbage can in 2020 a journal that only had three entries written in Hebrew. So I tore them out, put them in an envelope, and wrote Private and put it in my closet. And then I took the rest of the journal and I put it back where our empty notebooks go. Because I just thought, I don’t know what he wrote in that journal. My mother always taught me not to be nosy. And honestly, even if I wanted to be nosy, his handwriting was so bad and it was in Hebrew. So it was a full stop. But I thought one day I’ll say to him, you know, I found this in your garbage can once five years ago.
So I didn’t even realize at the time because it was during covid in 2020. I assumed he had written it recently. It turns out after he was killed, I was talking to my daughter in the kitchen in December of 2024 and I told her in my closet I this envelope it says private and it’s something Hersh wrote and I thought it was from 2020 and she said I want to read it. She opened it and it was dated October 26 2015. So it was nine years before he was killed. He was a freshman in high school. I didn’t know. I thought he was you know 20 years old. He was a freshman in high school and he wrote a passage that Orly started to read at our table and her face dropped and I said, she’s reading it to herself and I said, what’s wrong? And she looked up and she said, it’s prophecy. So this is the prophecy that I’m gonna read. I wanna read one specific passage from Hershey’s journal entry, which felt like you said, ominously prophetic. Is it page 125?
To every person there is a tunnel that belongs to them. Some have small tunnels and some have long tunnels. What is certain is there is an end. How much time it will take to get to the end of the tunnel depends on the person. If it is with despair, it will take a longer time. Or if you enter with all of your might, it will pass quicker.
Noam: I haven’t stopped thinking about that quote. It’s obviously heartbreakingly apt considering what happened to Hersh. But of course, this tunnel is one everyone goes through, especially everyone suffering. And I think that a theme throughout the book is there’s suffering, there’s pain, there’s hope. I did a quick review of the book in terms of the number of times that these words appear, hope, pain, and suffer. Did I a control find?
Hope appears 67 times, pain 79 times, suffer 49 times. To be, again, a little existential about this, there’s this concept is, I think therefore I am, but it’s also, and maybe this is a little bit existential, but I suffer therefore I am is also, I think, part of the human condition.
I was reviewing the interview we did in July of 2024 on day 282, and you were telling me about this book called A Fine Line. Do remember that? You told me this. There’s a beautiful book about India called A Fine Balance, and it’s an incredible book, and the fine balance is the fine balance between hope and despair. And we have really tried very hard, very intentionally when we wake up to be hopeful. This is what you said.
And we say hope is mandatory, that we’re in an unimaginable place. All of the hostage families are in such an indescribably unimaginable place that we have to make decisions. And sometimes it might even seem robotic, but we’re in such pain that you have to push yourself to keep going forward. In real life, we are constantly vacillating or feeling all of these things simultaneously. What does it actually look like to live inside that tunnel with despair and hope coexisting at the same time in the same place side by side? How do you navigate the moments where despair feels overwhelming, and how can hope exist side by side with despair.
Rachel: So I think of that book all the time because I do think, and it was written by the Indian writer, Mistry. And he does talk about that sort of, I look at it as almost a tightrope that we’re walking on. And we do have to be very careful in life in general that despair is always an option. There’s a lot of really crummy, complicated, difficult, entwined, messy things in this world. And if we fall into despair, I really think it’s quicksand of molasses and we are just, it’s almost impossible to get out. And so the best idea for me is don’t get in. so to constantly be on this tightrope is very much looking at both options of hope and despair. I still very much believe in.
We sing every morning. Wow, here I am, I’m back. My soul was given back to me, that first line that we say when we open our eyes in the morning when many Jewish people say, you know, thank you so much God for giving me back my soul. You have such tremendous faith in me, which I love that idea because it’s so crazy to think God has faith in me. But that is why all of us are here, because millions of people did not wake up today. Their souls were not given back to them this morning because they were done and were not done. And that in itself is hopeful. Even when you feel miserable and you wake up in the morning and you’re in a place of darkness, for whatever reason, we all have our reasons. And then to say, but I’m here. Someone has faith that I’m gonna get something done today. And so my soul is back, let’s go.
And I do really feel that. I can hold both. I think there, it doesn’t have to be an either or. It can be peanut butter and jelly, because I’m American. And by the way, that’s something that my therapist did say to me because he’s European. And I was talking to him once and I was saying how the editors for this book, to me, they felt like peanut butter and chocolate because they really, they were so good, such a good combo. And he said, you are so American.
Noam: We’re almost out of time, so I wanted to end by asking you about takeaways. I loved that your book gave us a window into Hersh, the person as you knew him, the boy who was obsessed with keeping books in perfect condition, who loved traveling and meeting new people, who sometimes carried a certain odor when he traveled. The real person, the person who was looking forward to having pizza that night. Not this mythical boy, this icon, this symbol who was abducted and killed. What do you most want people to understand and remember about Hersh?
Rachel: I like that. I think I want people to know that Hersh was normal and magnificent and average and beautiful and flawed and godly and and smelly and delicious and delightful, and a total complete blessing within his imperfection.
Noam: Rachel, thank you again for your strength, for being here, for speaking publicly thousands of times about the most horrific moments of your life, for writing this book, for sitting down to have this conversation. I want to end with a quote you shared from Viktor Frankl. The meaning of life is to give life meaning. The answer is for meaning. I also brought The Art of Happiness.
Hersh was just a kid, a young man when he was stolen from you, from the rest of the world. He had so many years ahead of him to live his why, to imbue his life in the lives of those around him with meaning, and it’s unfair and tragic that he wasn’t able to. There’s no comfort that I can offer you. But since this tragedy, you and Jon, and your girls, Libby and Orly, have taken up this job instead. You’ve given Hersh life, you’ve given Hersh’s life so much meaning and significance. You’ve captured his essence and given it to us, for us to make meaning with it, for us to make meaning of it.
So thank you. Thank you for giving us Hersh, for sharing him with us, not just as a symbol or an icon, but as a person. Thank you for sharing his story, which is also your story, which is also the story of so many grieving parents. Thank you for giving us and everyone both the language to talk about the enormity of grief and for showing us the strength it takes to bear the unbearable. On behalf of everyone here, I wanna thank you so much, Rachel. Thank you.