Hi, loves. 🌿

1.

I dreamed of Rachel Goldberg-Polin last night. I know I am not alone in this; when I mentioned it to friends, too many simply said, “me too.” In the way of dreams — where things don’t exactly line up but still somehow make sense — we were in the dining hall in Cambridge, but rather than being served food, we were making it ourselves. Rachel was in the kitchen, at work, even though her son, after months in captivity, had just been murdered. I turned to face her, looked her right in the eye and said only, “Rachel.” In my dream, I opened my arms as wide as they would go and held her tightly against my body. Just like that.

2.

This family, Hersh’s family, has somehow taken hold of so many of us, we feel that they are part of us, even if we have no actual connection to them. And Rachel, the symbol of the mother, the Jewish mother, who will go to the very ends of the earth to save her child. A mother who will suffer, daily, in public, who will keep on, in public, for the hope of his return. Who will fight in every way she can imagine and yet more impossible ways. As the months wore on, it felt — somehow, again, as in the way of dreams — that this could so easily have been any one of us; we asked ourselves if we’d be able to do what she did, every day, to get her son back from the depths of hell. How many of us asked ourselves: what is worse — your child held in captivity, probably in a tunnel deep under the earth by terrorists, or your child dead? Every time I asked myself this question, I had no answers, only a feeling of shimmering terror.

3.

She believed that he would be returned. Her hopefulness carried so many of us for close to a year, she carried us on her small back. This tiny woman with the force of a pack of lions. We wanted everything for her. We wanted her world back, for her, and for us.

4.

Wanting her to get her world back does not, for one iota of a second, mean I did not — I do not, still, always — want every other mother to get her world back as well. I want every mother to be able to hold her children in her arms for as long as she is alive. I do not believe Rachel’s pain is any worse than any other mother’s pain across any border on this great planet: in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Russia, in Sudan. It is only that I am looking at her now, in the depths of her fresh grief. I do not know why I feel the need to write these words at all, but I do. As Rachel herself said, “in a competition of pain, there is no winner.”

5.

I cannot stop replaying the image of her at the border of Gaza, screaming Hersh’s name, voice fraying, a screech, loud enough, however, brutalized enough, that he could maybe, possibly, please God, hear her from inside the tunnels we now know he and at least five other men and women were trapped in. The agony of waking up each morning to a day in which you don’t know where your child is being held, if your child is alive, if they’ve seen sunlight or been fed or starved or deprived of sleep, of medical care. If they know that people are fighting for them, believing they are still alive. It is beyond words. And yet they found them every day, shared them with the rest of us.

6.

My own child, my 11 year old, knows nothing of these recent developments. Tonight, on a quiet walk around the neighborhood, I suggested she send some tips to her God-brother, who is starting Kindergarten this week. What can I tell him, though? she asked. Maybe tell him, I said stupidly, to be friendly and to share. Was this all I could think of? And then I added: And to remember that even if he’s having a really hard time, or he’s feeling sad, that his mom or dad will pick him up at the end of the day.

Like any kid who has never once doubted her own parents’ imminent return, she said, Right, I’ll tell him that: You always get to go home.

7.

Isn’t this every mother’s wish? That her child knows this, believes this to the very depths of his being. That her child be granted this, a safe return home, forever and ever, amen.

Sending love,

Abs xo