The Most Important Jewish Idea I've Heard Since October 7th

This is, at its root, the most Jewish intuition I know, and our tradition hid it inside one of its strangest and most beautiful images.

Author Rabbi Steven Abraham with Rachel Goldberg-Polin at an event this week (photo courtesy: author)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Steven Abraham, the rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

When Moses came down from Sinai the second time, the Torah tells us that the skin of his face had become radiant (ki karan or panav) and the detail that has always undone me is the clause that comes right after it.

Moshe lo yada — Moses did not know. He did not feel the light. He walked down the mountain carrying a brightness that everyone could see except the one who was carrying it, and he had to be told.

Holiness, I have come to believe, is the one thing a person cannot perform. You can rehearse piety. You can stage conviction. You can learn to sound deep. But kedushah, real holiness, you can only carry, and almost always you carry it without knowing, while it shines off your face to everyone but you.

I have been thinking about that verse since I sat across from Rachel Goldberg-Polin this week, because I have rarely been that close to a face that was shining and did not know it. You know the shape of her story, and I will not reduce it to biography, because biography is what we do to people once we have quietly decided to keep them at a safe distance.

Her son was named Hersh. He was 23 years old. On the morning of October 7th he was at a music festival out in the desert, the kind of place you let your child go precisely because it is supposed to be safe, supposed to be nothing but joy, and a grenade tore away part of his arm, and he was dragged down into the tunnels of Gaza, and he was held there in the dark for 328 days, and then, days before a deal that might have carried him home, he was murdered.

Read that number again, slowly, the way a mother is forced to count it. Three-hundred and twenty-eight mornings of not knowing whether he was alive. Three-hundred and twenty-eight nights of lying awake imagining the dark he was lying in. I do not want to write about what was done to her son. I want to write about what she has done with it, and what it asks of the rest of us, who are trying, in a far gentler season, simply to learn how to live.

We live inside a strange theology in much of the West, and it has seeped into our synagogues too, so it is worth saying plainly. Call it the gospel of relentless positivity. It teaches that pain is a problem to be solved, that grief should come with a deadline, that the healthy soul is the one that has moved on, and that the right thing to say to a suffering person is that everything happens for a reason. It is the spirituality of the refrigerator magnet, and it mistakes a good mood for faith.

Rachel has a name for it, and she earned the right to give it one. She calls it “toxic positivity.” And against it she sets a phrase she went hunting for one sleepless night, when she sat down and typed into a search engine the question of what the opposite of “toxic positivity” might be. The answer that came back to her was two words: tragic optimism.

She has said it felt like something pressed into her hands. It named exactly what she had become.

The phrase belongs to Holocaust survivor and famed psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who set it down in 1984 in the postscript to his bestselling book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He is a man who built his entire understanding of the human soul in the worst classroom that has ever existed.

Frankl defined tragic optimism with terrible precision: It is the choice to remain optimistic in spite of what he called the tragic triad, the three facts that no amount of cheerfulness will ever dissolve — pain, guilt, and death. The whole question of his life, the question the Nazi concentration camps put to him and that he refused to stop answering, was whether a human being can still say yes to life in spite of everything.

Notice what he is not saying. He is not promising that things turn out well. He is not telling the prisoner that the barbed wire has a silver lining. He is saying something far harder and far more dignified, that meaning remains possible inside the catastrophe, that suffering can be turned into something, that even the shortness of a life can become a reason to act rather than a reason to give up.

And he insists, gently and immovably, that you cannot command optimism. You cannot order a grieving mother to hope any more than you can order her to laugh. Hope has to be given a reason. That is why the gospel of good vibes is not merely shallow but cruel. It demands the feeling while refusing to supply the reason, and then it blames the brokenhearted for failing to smile.

There is one more sentence of Frankl, and it sits at the very center of this story: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Frankl took it from Nietzsche and set it down in the middle of his account of the camps, and Hersh carried it into the tunnels of Gaza the way other prisoners once carried it into Auschwitz. He said it aloud to the men held with him. He pressed it into them. It became, as one of them would later put it, the mantra of everyone in that tunnel, the thing they repeated to one another in the dark to stay alive one more day.

One of those men was Or Levy. He was with Hersh only a few days, three days underground, and yet those three days seem to have marked him for the rest of his life. Or had lost his wife on the seventh of October, though he would not learn it until he was freed, and in captivity he kept himself whole by reaching for a why of his own, the small son waiting for him at home, and by repeating the line Hersh had handed him.

On the worst days, the days he was sure he was going to die, he would touch a particular place on his arm and say the words to himself in the dark. When he was finally released, he had that very sentence tattooed onto that very spot, so that he could never again lose it.

And when Or went to Rachel and her husband Jon, weeping, to tell them what their son’s words had done for him, it was they who had to tell him where the words had come from in the first place: from Nietzsche, by way of Frankl, by way of Hersh.

Or carried something else up out of the dark and laid it gently in Rachel’s hands. He told her that Hersh, underground, had once heard her voice on a broadcast, had caught the sound of his mother on the news still fighting for him, and so had known, even there, even then, that he had not been abandoned.

Sit with that for a moment.

Somewhere beneath the earth, in the worst place on this earth, a young man with a ruined arm heard, for a few seconds, the voice of the woman who had sung to him when he was an infant, still calling out for him, still refusing to let him go.

I do not have a better word for any of it than holiness, moving along a circuitry we are not permitted to see. And I cannot stop thinking that Frankl, who wrote that line out of his own abyss, somehow knew (or at the very least dared to imagine) exactly what a human being is able to carry when he has been handed a why to carry it for. He never met Hersh. He died decades before Hersh was born. And still he set down, in advance, the words that would keep Hersh’s friends breathing in the dark.

What she has done with all of it, and what I felt in that room the way you feel the air change before a storm, is to insist that a whole life was never meant to be a painless one. The fullness includes the catastrophe. This is, at its root, the most Jewish intuition I know, and our tradition hid it inside one of its strangest and most beautiful images.

When Moses came down and saw the people dancing around the calf and shattered the first set of tablets against the rocks, the Talmud tells us that we did not sweep up the broken pieces and throw them away. Luchot v’shivrei luchot munachim ba’aron — the whole tablets and the shattered tablets were laid into the Ark together, side by side, the broken stone every bit as holy as the unbroken.

The most sacred object in the life of our people was a box that held wholeness and brokenness at the same time and refused to choose between them. We did not pretend the shattering had never happened. We did not pretend it was secretly fine. We carried the pieces, every jagged one of them, into the Holy of Holies, and we called them sacred.

That is the exact opposite of toxic positivity, and it is the exact shape of tragic optimism. Rachel says it more plainly than any of our commentaries ever managed to. Grief, she says, is the price we pay for love, and she is willing to pay it, because the only way she could have avoided the grief would have been never to have had him at all, and that was never a bargain worth making. This is not surrender. It is defiance. It is the refusal to stop loving in order to stop hurting, the refusal to cut out the love so that the wound will finally close.

And yet there is something hidden inside that willingness, something it took an old story to show me. No one is ever asked in advance.

There is a story they tell among rabbis. A woman has buried a son, a young one, and the rabbi sitting with her in the rawest hours asks her, very gently, a terrible question. If you had known, he says, on the very day that he was born, that you would have him for only a little while and then you would have to give him back, would you still have chosen to have him at all?

And the woman sits with it, and turns it over, and turns it over again, and finds that she cannot answer. She cannot say yes, and she cannot say no. And the rabbi, very quietly, tells her: That is why God does not ask.

That single sentence holds the whole mystery of being alive. The love is handed to us first, long before the price is ever named. The cost is only revealed afterward, and by the time we learn what it is, we are already so far inside the love that we could not hand it back even if we wanted to, because we can no longer find the seam where the love ends and we begin.

No one could sign that contract with their eyes open. No mother, holding a warm newborn against her chest, could agree in advance to the grave. So we are spared the signing. The yes that Rachel gives, her willingness to pay the price, is the only kind of yes a human being is ever actually able to give — the consent that comes later, in full daylight, with everything already spent, when a mother who has lost the center of her world looks back at the years she was given and says, through her tears, that she would not give back a single day of him.

God does not ask, because to ask would be unbearable, and because the asking would miss the entire point. He gives us the love first. He lets us find out only afterward, too late to refuse it and too deep ever to regret it, what it costs to love something all the way to the end.

If you want the difference between these two faiths in a single line, here it is. The gospel of good vibes is forever trying to get out ahead of the bill, to love only on terms that promise no loss. But there are no such terms, and there never were. Every love worth the name is signed in the dark.

Rachel signed hers, and when the cost came due she did not look away, and she did not pretend, and she goes on paying it now in daylight, every single morning — and still she says yes.

---