Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin: How Torah Gives Us Faith and Hope

Transcript

Transcripts are produced by Sofer.ai and lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

David Bashevkin: Hi friends, and welcome to the 18Forty podcast where each month we explore a different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host David Bashevkin and today we have a special Simchas Torah episode. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big, juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18Forty.org, that’s 18forty.org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.Simchas Torah from its very-inception was an extremely and is a very unusual holiday. It is celebrated at the tail end of the high holidays, going through after Rosh Hashanah, after Yom Kippur, after Sukkos, after Hoshanah Rabbah, after Shmini Atzeres, that final day, especially in the diaspora where we celebrate two days, Simchas Torah is that final day, and it is a celebration of the completion of the yearly Torah cycle where every single Shabbos, the Torah is read in shul, a portion of the Torah known as the weekly parsha, and we finally finish the entirety of the Torah each year.

It’s scheduled to work out that we finish it at that final day of Sukkos. So we begin in the shabbos after Simchas Torah, we begin again and read Shabbos Bereishis. Now, the evolution of this holiday is incredibly, incredibly strange. My dear friend, Professor Chaim Saiman, the author of the book Halacha, a fantastic work, and of course, a former guest on 18Forty, wrote a brilliant article available on Lehrhaus entitled “The Inverted Halacha of Simchas Torah.” And the entire article really centers and highlights how strange of a holiday Simchas Torah in fact is. It is not mentioned in the Torah, it is not mentioned in the Talmud.

While people do find allusions for it in the Medrash, it is not explicit in the Medrash either. Really, so much of the holiday and the way that we give aliyos, call people up to the Torah, the additions that we make in davening, a lot of it does not have a very strong basis in halacha, less so than any other holiday that we celebrate. And it is not even the only holiday that celebrates the joy of Torah. Normally, we associate that with Shevuos, which is celebrated many months prior, and it celebrates the giving of the Torah.

The entirety of Simchas Torah seems to be based on customs, on folk practice, on minhagim that developed over centuries to kind of give us the Simchas Torah experience that we have today.After presenting kind of the evolution of the celebrations of Simchas Torah, Professor Saiman ends with a reflection of why this strange holiday is so central and kind of culminates the entire high holidays experience, beginning in the preparations of Elul, getting ready for Rosh Hashanah and then Yom Kippur, Sukkos, Hoshanah Rabbah, Shmini Atzeres. The final celebration that kind of takes us into the winter, to the darkness of winter, is Simchas Torah. And he writes as follows: In addition to offering a release from the intensity of the high holidays, Simchas Torah reaffirms the community’s dominant values. The celebrations, whatever their excesses, literally and figuratively revolve around the Torah.

The day has obtained its character through a millennium of iterative dialogue between popular custom and halachic sensibilities. Further, some of the most halachically problematic practices have not survived, while others were transformed as they were absorbed into quasi-official halacha. Moreover, the lightheartedness of Simchas Torah is impossible absent its proximity to the awe of Yom Kippur. The symbolic function of the kittel or Yom Kippur nusach can only be meaningfully inverted within a community that assigns them deep normative significance.

The day’s halachic abnormalities stand out specifically against the backdrop of rigorous halachic compliance. Finally, Simchas Torah recalls that religious life becomes possible when the unfathomable Ein Sof, the infinitude of God’s transcendence, is manifest in human action and society. The season that began Slichos night, centered on the image of Vayeired Hashem b’anan, God appearing obscured in mists of clouds, descending on the mountain’s peak to speak with Moshe, while the people stand far below, concludes with a day that owes its its character to popular imagination. The push and pull of popular instinct, rabbinic meditation, and communal acceptance constructs a holiday exemplifying that minhug avoseinu biyadeinu.

Our ancestors’ customs are in our hands. It is we, the Jewish people, ultimately, who so to speak, invent and give material presence to that amorphous anan of godliness that descends beginning on Slichos night, and it becomes more and more real and more and more tangible until the eventual culmination of Simchas Torah, a holiday that is almost entirely a reflection of invented practices of the Jewish people, of customs that end up becoming part and parcel of the divine halacha. It is a very moving exploration of the day, of how this day is actually the kiss that shows the divinity that inherently courses through the veins of the Jewish people, of how Knesses Yisroel, the collective body of the Jewish people, are the ultimate expression of divinity. And through our very practice, even without command, without any clear textual basis, but the customs that have accrued over the years are the ultimate expression of the Torah, not only that we were given, but the Torah that’s uniquely expressed through our lives.

And that’s what Simchas Torah is all about. If Shavuos celebrates the Torah that we were given, Simchas Torah celebrates the Torah that we create through our lives, through our experiencing, wedding the very fabric of our lives to divinity, that the story of our lives is part of the story of the Torah, and that our customs and interpretations and translations and the way that we bring Torah into our lives and then speak through our lives is the ultimate expression and the ultimate revelation of the divine, beginning with those misty clouds of God saying, Vayeired Hashem ba’anan, that God comes, obscured in those clouds. We give them tangible expression through our customs, our interpretations, the Torah that emerges only through human experience and human interpretation and human perspective. And when I think of the strangeness of Simchas Torah, it is nearly impossible to divorce that dichotomy, that halachic dichotomy that we see in Simchas Torah from the experiential element of how a holiday that we call Simchas Torah, the joy of Torah, is now eternally intertwined with one of the most horrific and tragic days in Jewish history, October 7th, when Chamas massacred Jews in the state of Israel and unleashed the antisemitism and the brokenness and the ugliness that we still see, unfortunately, throughout the world, a level of hatred and antisemitism that I don’t think could have previously been imagined by people of our generation.

And I think, how could a day hold such polar opposites? How can we have a day literally called Simchas Torah, the joy of Torah, that is now stained with Jewish martyrs and Jewish blood, with tragedy, with exile, with pain? And I think if there’s any day that can hold that dichotomy, it is the day of Simchas Torah. Because Simchas Torah is a day that is a uniquely human invention that reflects the uniquely human contribution to the celebration of Torah, to the development of Torah, to the expression of Torah in this world. And there is nothing more human than holding wholeness and brokenness together. There is nothing more human than being able to stand with sadness and joy intertwined, past and present, different feelings intermixed that form the complexity of the human experience.

And if there’s a holiday that celebrates our interpretation of Torah, our confrontation with Torah, our revelation of Torah, then there is some quiet beauty to the fact that this is also the day that is forced to hold both pain, suffering, and joy. Because it is only in that perspective, in that world of human brokenness, that we’re given the task of unifying and finding divinity even when it seems absent and distant, and finding redemption and joy even when we seemingly are surrounded by sorrow. It reminds me of the ending to a prayer that we say on Yom Kippur that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. It’s sung now at weddings in Israel, a prayer that is at once mournful and hopeful.

It is called Titein achris l’amecha, give hope, give a future to your nation. And it is typically inserted in the Yom Kippur davening right after we finish the description of the avodah of the service of the Kohen Gadol on Yom Kippur. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful prayer that is famously put to the tune of Nachamu.

That prayer ends with a very beautiful plea where it says, tidrosh geula l’galuseinu. Tidrosh geula l’galuseinu. The word tidrosh means to seek. But it comes, you can hear from the word, like the word drash, like to create, to interpret. Interpret geula l’galuseinu.

Find redemption within our exile. That is different than asking for the exile to end, which surely we do. This is a prayer that I think is even deeper. It’s saying even before it ends, even when we have the suffering and the pain together, tidrosh through interpretation, geula l’galuseinu.

Construct, find meaning, find redemption within our exile. And it’s that drasha, it’s that capacity of drash, that I believe our modern day Simchas Torah reflects. It’s the sentiment that was once expressed by the Frierdiker Rebbe. The Frierdiker Rebbe was the sixth Rebbe of Lubavitch, of Chabad.

It was the father-in-law of the global face of Chabad, who’s typically known as the Rebbe, Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson. His father-in-law was the sixth Rebbe of Chabad, the Rayatz. And he famously said, quoting really from the first Rebbe of Chabad, Rav Shneur Zalman, the Baal HaTanya, who said once that you have to live with the times. And everybody was like very confused.

What does it mean you have to live with the times? That’s not something you would hear from a chasidisha Rebbe. What are you talking about you have to live with the times? I have to dress cool now, I have to use the contemporary slang? What was the Rebbe trying to impart to the Chasidim by telling them you always have to live with the times? And the Frierdiker Rebbe quoted someone, an interpretation that says when he said, when he implored you have to live with the times, it means that every day you have to live with and experience one’s own life, the weekly Torah portion of the week and the specific section of the weekly Torah portion that’s connected to that day. That literally to look through the Torah as a lens of interpretation to build meaning and understand your own life. And to look at your life, so to speak, as a window and a lens to understand the Torah.

This I believe is what we are celebrating on Simchas Torah: the capacity to live with the times, the capacity to interpret our lives through Torah, and the capacity to interpret Torah through our lives. To feel that each moment and each step we take, we’re taking the same steps as our forefathers, as Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov. The struggles of the imahos, of Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah. The personalities of the Torah come alive when they’re not just figures of the past, but they’re windows to understand our own lives and the own steps that we’re taking.

And then we take our own lives and we use them to understand and build the glory of Torah and the interpretations of Torah. This is the ultimate fusion, the ultimate drasha, so to speak, is finding that fusion between our lived experience and our daily lives and the timeless and eternal words of the Torah. And it’s in that fusion that Simchas Torah emerges, a day that has the unique capacity to hold both pain and suffering. And it’s with that perspective that it is really my incredible privilege to introduce today’s episode, which was recorded closer to those times of Slichos that God was appearing, so to speak, in the cloud.

We had the opportunity to partner with the Rabbi Sacks Legacy that has just published Rabbi Sacks’s incredible interpretation of the entirety of the Torah, published by Koren publishers, another one of our partners, as well as the Simchas Torah Challenge, an absolutely wonderful initiative that you could learn more about if you go to Simchat Torah challenge.org. Simchat spelled with a T at the end. Simchat Torah challenge.org that is really trying to bring out and encourage the weekly study of the Torah.

And we came together to celebrate the publication of the Rabbi Sacks chumash, and were joined in conversation by two incredible people who really need no introduction, Rachel Goldberg Polin and her incredible husband Jon Polin, who lost their incredible son Hersh after being kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza on October 7th and then murdered after being held hostage for far too long. I thought it was uniquely appropriate to have a celebration of Rabbi Sacks’s new chumash, one that just bristles with wisdom and insight that you can take on every single page as you begin and we all begin our parsha journey, living with the times and reading the weekly parsha each and every week. I look at the legacy of Rabbi Sacks as the person who gave us the language of learning how to fuse our own life experience and perspective of living in the modern day world and wed it to the timeless and eternal ideas of the Jewish people in the Torah. Rabbi Sacks was the translator par excellence, not because he knew how to take a word from Hebrew and render it into English, but he knew how to translate the ideas, the wisdom, the perspectives and values of Torah into the parlance and language of contemporary society.

And it’s for that reason that Rabbi Sacks’s legacy continues so strongly today. He gave us a new language. It’s why Rabbi Sacks’s works are now more popular than ever in Israel, because he gave us the gift of language. He gave us the gift of translation, of learning how to take the Torah and infuse it and integrate it and weave it into the fabric of our own experience and lives.

And that is why, at least on a very personal level, Rachel Goldberg Polin and Jon Polin, in many ways have served a similar role, I believe, for the Jewish people. They endured a tragedy and a crisis that would seemingly be so unfathomable and so remote that it would never be able to be translated into the experience that would galvanize the entire world. But I look at both of them and the way that they shared their experience, the way they shared their hope, the way they continued to share their hope and their prayers, the way they look at the Jewish people, I believe, gave us a window of interpretation. They gave us language for how to process the horrors of what we have all collectively experienced as the Jewish people, but a family who experienced it so acutely and retained the capacity to speak, to translate, to share, to uplift, to inspire, is a family that I think embodies what it means to live with the times, to use the words of Torah and tfila to process our lives and experiences and to use our life and experiences to open up and to make the words of Torah and tfila shine even brighter and even wider, which is why it is my great privilege to introduce our conversation for the launch of the Rabbi Sacks chumash, published by Koren Press, our conversation with Rachel Goldberg Polin and Jon Polin.

It is a tremendous privilege to be sitting today with Jon and Rachel for the launch of the Sacks chumash. And on a very personal note, the way that you both have kind of translated your experience for the wider Jewish people to hold on to, to make sense of this moment. It really is an incredible privilege. So thank you once again for joining us tonight.

I wanted to open up with a question that I very often share at my Shabbos table. I have recently discovered that people do not like being asked to share a d’var Torah at the Shabbos table. I haven’t made so many friends that way. So instead, I kind of open up the palate and I say, look, I don’t need a d’var Torah, but I very often ask, do you have a favorite story or parsha in the Torah? We’re here to talk about Rabbi Sacks’s masterful translation and I wanted to begin by understanding your relationship to the chumash, and with a very simple question: do you have a favorite parsha story in the Torah?

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: So first, I just want to thank the Fifth Avenue Synagogue for inviting us to this tremendous occasion and to the wider Sacks family and to you, Rabbi, for having us for this conversation.

That’s me putting off answering your question. First of all, I like the manipulative way of if your people won’t answer by giving you a d’var Torah. It’s a very smart way to just say, all right, let’s make a left. Jon and I were talking about this.

There’s a reason that Ben Bag-Bag says turn it and turn it. Everything’s in it. You can’t really ask a people to continue reading something over and over and over again unless every time there’s something else magical hiding in there. But what I was thinking about when you were asking your question, instead of my favorite story, I was thinking of my favorite theme because it’s something that I find really fascinating is the theme that we find sort of starting in Shmot and that goes through Bamidbar, this theme of complaining.

Because really what is happening there? And I think what’s really happening is that Bnei Yisrael, the children of Israel, who have just been released from bondage and slavery and not having any agency are really coming into themselves and trying to figure out what does it mean to be free and what does it mean to be a nation? And I find it fascinating the amount of complaining that goes on and the lack of digesting the miraculous that is constantly happening. This rejection of the reality that they have this built-in awning that’s moving with them. And at night, there’s a bonfire in the sky every night, so everybody’s warm and everybody can read if they want to, whatever they’ve brought with them, all those reading materials. I think about the fact that they’ve just witnessed the most unbelievable miracles in front of them that the Nile turns to blood, that there are frogs everywhere, that all of the firstborn in the entire nation of Egypt die, including all of the firstborn of all of the cattle and all of the farm animals.

I think about remember the manna? It was Starbucks dropping three times a day from the sky. And yet people were like, we want to go back and be slaves. We don’t like it out here. There’s something very fascinating to me about the constant lack of recognition of godliness that they were encountering.

And I think that it’s something that we are all always feeling that we’re striving to attain today. Kal vachomer, they were not able to do it when it was happening in such a vibrant, obvious way. So there’s something about that that to me has always been very fetching. 

David Bashevkin: I absolutely love that response. No complaints from that response. That was really, really masterful. Jon, do you have?

Jon Polin: I do have an idea and because you have taken the liberty of expanding how you ask the question at your Shabbat table, I’m going to take the liberty in how I answer it as well, which is Rabbi Sacks was talking at the beginning of the night about prophets. And although we’re here to mark the launch of his Chumash, I actually want to go to Nevi’im in my answer.

And I’ll say proudly that part of what inspires me to turn to Nevi’im is our daughter Orly just studied for a year in Midrasha. And at the beginning of the year, she made a new friend, Ayelet, and they decided that they would spend the year and they would get through the entire Tanach, all of the Bible together as a chavruta, and they did. And her going in depth into Nevi’im made me realize it’s been a long time since I’ve done that. And so I’ve gotten a little bit more into Navi and I also, of course, am always looking for lessons, inspiration for our time.

And so I’m going to turn to a crazy story which is Yechezkel and Bikat Ha’atzamot, the valley of the dry bones, which the whole story is 12, 14 psukim, but as a reminder for those who may not know, it’s this crazy story of God having this conversation with Yechezkel and Yechezkel having this vision of the valley of dry bones. And this is in a time when the Jewish people have been battered and bruised. It’s actually in the story of Yechezkel that we see the words Avda Tikvateinu, we have lost hope, that we now know is in our Hatikvah anthem. And as many people know the basics of the story, Yechezkel is instructed to prophesy and to breathe ruach into this valley of bones, and in front of his eyes, the valley of bones is restored.

Life is restored and they stand up and the people of Israel who had avda tikvateinu, lost hope, stands up. And I think that’s relevant for us today. But I actually want to go on and say that a few psukim, a few sentences after the story, there’s another crazy story in Yechezkel where God instructs Yechezkel to take a stick and to write on this stick something, and you’ll correct me if I make mistakes here, but instructs Yechezkel to write something like about Shevet Yehuda on the stick and then instructs Yechezkel to take another stick and to write something about Shevet Yosef on that stick. This is at a time where the Jewish people were living separately, multiple tribes with multiple leaderships and Yechezkel is instructed to take these two sticks and they blend together into one stick.

And Hashem says, God says to Yechezkel something like v’asiti otam l’goy echad. took the two tribes, the separate tribes of the Jewish people and blended them into one. And I thought, that’s also amazing, right? Here we are sitting in New York and we’ve talked a lot about the support that we and all the hostage families have received and continue to receive from diaspora jewelry. And I’ve been building this thesis about how if I just go back in Jewish history recently to May 14th, 1948 till today, I feel like for a long period of time there was this notion of diaspora Jews support those poor Israeli Jews across the ocean.

And in more recent times, there’s been this concept of, well, Israel’s flourishing and high-tech and we could support diaspora Jews. And what we’re seeing now is we are more intertwined than we have ever been before. This notion that what happens in Israel, my friends in America who have hardly been engaged with Israel, now feel it viscerally, for good or for bad. And we read Tanach and there are lessons for us today as we sit here at Fifth Avenue Synagogue.

David Bashevkin: That really is remarkable and incredible. As you going forward to not ask me to correct you on any Nach p’sukim. You put me in a really tough spot right there. A common refrain that I’ve said many times on 18Forty is the purpose of Judaism is not to fight antisemitism, but we fight antisemitism in order to focus on the purpose of Judaism.

Rabbi Sacks articulated it in a similar way: The only sane response to antisemitism is to monitor it, fight it, but never let it affect our idea of who we are. Pride is always a healthier response than shame. And I’m curious, we’ve been in this period, in this era for 703 days. What brings you Jewish pride where you feel like you are tapping into the purpose of Judaism and perhaps more complex but in an honest way, what over this period has brought you Jewish shame, where you feel, we’re not locked in, we’re not aligned.

Jon Polin: So I actually I’m gonna maybe turn the question in the reverse and start with shame so that we could end on a higher note. There are things that I look around among our people and I and I’m ashamed. There are some decisions that we’ve seen our leaders in Israel make that distress me. There are what I hope is still a fringe of those in Israel who are taking it upon themselves to do what they think is right for justice and they’re wandering into Palestinian villages and burning fields and lighting cars on fire and doing things that I’m ashamed that they’re doing.

You know, there’s a quote from Viktor Frankl that has become in the last few hundred days to be a little bit associated with Hersh because he’s used it as a mantra and he taught others the mantra. Viktor Frankl says something else that’s much less quoted, and that is, ‘Nobody has the right to do wrong to others, even when wrong has been done to them.’ And I feel like we need to listen to those words and heed those words. But I want to speak about the pride part. And we are just bereaved parents.

We don’t work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel. We get asked to speak about antisemitism and we say we’re just parents who live in Israel. We don’t know. But I also am always quick to point out that I’m not going to go through the litany of those things we should be proud of.

But I do like to talk particularly to young people who I think are reeling on college campuses and so on and remind them, we come from a long line of proud accomplishments, people who have put a ton of good into the world. I mean, we Jews, I mean we diaspora Jews, I mean we Israeli Jews. The top accomplishments in academia and law and medicine and technology and there is a lot that we should be proud of. We have punched way above our weight in terms of contributions of goodness to the world, and we still do.

And so, for any of us who feel like there are others who are pushing us into a corner, trying to make us feel something other than pride in who we are. I recently said to a group of college kids in Washington D.C., just put your shoulders back, put your head up. If you wear a yarmulke, keep wearing it. If you wear a Star of David, keep wearing it.

Put a mezuzah on your dorm room door. And I know it’s easy for me to say, I’m not the one sitting there and doing it and dealing with the consequences, but just be proud. And I think there’s lots of reasons to do it.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: I think also on a personal level, each of us, especially at this time of year during the month of Elul.

I’m very proud of coming from a tradition and heritage that acknowledges that we always should be striving internally to push ourselves to be better, that introspection and soul searching, which if we do it in the right way, is actually supposed to be hard. It’s not supposed to be kumbaya. It’s actually, if we have anhonest moment, each of us can go over this past year individually, quietly, and we know where we missed the mark. We know what we should be.

I don’t know that we have to use the word shame, but disappointed, we can all do better. And I think all the more so in this valuable time that we have before Yom HaDin, before Rosh Hashanah, before Yom Harat Olam. Now is the time to turn and ask ourselves, what are we as individuals, not even as our larger community where we have so much to be proud of. And we do have improvement areas, and I think acknowledging that, not having the chauvinism of saying, we’re amazing, we’re always right, we do everything, and that it is not a binary situation.

It’s much more nuanced, and that we should use that energy right now to push ourselves to do better. 

David Bashevkin: Really, really incredible and moving. Rabbi Sacks once wrote that crises happen when we attempt to meet the challenges of today with the concepts of yesterday. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about for sure quite a bit since October 7th, of what are the new skills the Jewish people need to learn in order to not just survive this moment, but to thrive in the wake of all of the pain that we’ve been carrying as a people. What do you feel are the strategies of right now that the Jewish people need to learn? And is there anything that you feel like we need to unlearn in this moment?

Jon Polin: I’m going to answer this question through the lens of a thought on the Jewish people and a quick thought on the Israeli people. When it comes to the Jewish people, I will say that on Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day this year, we were at an event at President Herzog’s house. Home was filled with ambassadors from all over the world and religious leaders from all over the world, and a representative of the Israeli government gets up to speak and goes on for five minutes to effectively say, woe is us, we are victims, the world doesn’t like us, the world is against us, this is our fate, it’s terrible. And I wanted to jump out of my seat.

It’s true, we have a history of victimhood. Rachel and I know very well victimhood. That cannot be the speaking point, the talking point for our people to the world. Woe is us, we are victims.

Yes, that’s true, but we are an independent people. We have a sovereign nation today. We have agency. And while we have a history of being victims, while we have a recent history of being victims, that cannot define us.

We must move beyond victimhood and get way more into my prior answer of what we’ve done and what we continue to do for which we should be proud. So that’s one thing that I would like to change. I want to say something about Israel, and this might be controversial, but that’s okay. For 77 years, we have known war, sometimes more, sometimes less.

And we’ve tried periodically other paths and found reason to say it doesn’t work. I don’t want us to continue on this path of, this is our fate, we will be at war, we’re in a tough region, this is what we got to deal with. We have a narrative, we have a history, we have a Bible that we use as our guide. There’s a group on the other side who has a narrative and a history and a Bible that they use, and we could shout for 77 more years that our narrative and our history and our Bible justifies something, and they could shout it for 77 more years, and I don’t want that.

And I know I’m sounding simplistic and idealistic, but I want to pick a date. It could be September 10th, 2025, it could be January 1st, 2026, where we all get together and we agree we are going to stop out-shouting each other about our pasts, and we are going to move forward to our future. And it might take 10 years or 20 or 50 years to come up with a solution, but we must start actively working towards that solution. I want it for my kids and I want it for my kids’ kids, and we need it, and it’s not easy, but that’s not a reason to not start on that path.

And that’s my wish for the Israeli people.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: See why I like him? Okay. I would just like to point out that we are sitting in front of the ark. Makes me feel very important.

I’ve never been this close. I want to point out especially because this is something I learned from something Rabbi Sacks wrote, which I thought was really moving, which is the Hebrew word for crisis is mashber, which the modern Hebrew word is mashber. The root is shever, yeah, shattered. There’s a shatteredness when we’re in a crisis.

We are in a crisis right now, if anyone was doubting. We are in a crisis, all of us. What What Rabbi Sacks points out is that biblically in the Chumash in the Torah, mashber actually means birth pangs, labor pains. It’s the same word, because when many people in this room can tell me that I’m right, when you’re in the moment of true physical labor pains, it is a crisis to your body.

It is a crisis that can feel that you’re at the end, that something’s going to tear you apart. And actually, it’s an opportunity for birth and light and something better. And so, when I read that Rabbi Sacks said that, it implanted itself in me. And I think that my ardent prayer for all of us is that we are in this moment of mashber and broken shatteredness and crisis that is going to birth something really alive and filled with light.

Jon Polin: Once I’ve spoken and then I’ve handed it off to Rachel, I feel like I need to stop. But I want to say one more thing, and I’ve been quoting this particular quote of Rabbi Sacks for a long time, but it’s about crisis. And I think it’s encapsulates everything I’ve taken a long time to say so far. And that is that Rabbi Sacks wrote, also about crisis, the test of a society in crisis is whether it emerges cynical and disillusioned or strengthened in its rededication to high ideals.

And I think that is what it’s all about. It’s so easy to be cynical and to be disillusioned, but the response, as we get through that cynicism and that disillusionment is how do we do good in the world? If we could all take that lesson out of crisis, it goes a long way.

David Bashevkin: Well, that’s exactly a beautiful segue to my next question, which this is a quote from Rabbi Sacks that I found very prescient for the moment that we’re in now, where he wrote that the real test of a nation is not if it can survive a crisis, but if it can survive the lack of a crisis. And my question is, there are people in this room who remembers other periods of tragedy and difficulty for the Jewish people that have shaped us and allowed us to move forward.

When you think back, and God willing that day will come where the Jewish people and the world will be able to live in peace. What do you hope is the enduring lesson of October 7th for the Jewish people that we should be taking with us and reflect with us, God willing, in times of peace with or the lack of a crisis?

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Something that we’ve very much been witness to. It is not at all a cliche. It is absolute unity and solidarity that we have felt across all of the different textures and styles and brands of Judaism.

All the labels have fallen off the jars. We have seen the most beautiful coming together. And the scaffolding coming from the most unusual places. We had already in November of 2023, Haredi communities reaching out to us in Israel asking for me to come and speak, for John to come.

We went to certain communities where the Admor of a certain community never has a woman even enter the building and he had me come with John. He said, we’re all in so much pain. I need for you to explain to me what’s happening. He didn’t read the news, but he knew bad things were happening.

So we were explaining to him what was happening. We’ve had tremendous love and respect showered on us by communities that I don’t think normally would do that to us in the diaspora, all over the world. And the other hostage families have really talked with us about how embraced they have felt. These are people who are Israelis who have never really left the bubble of being secular Israelis.

And they really don’t know what an observant Jewish community, especially outside of Israel, feels like, what it feels like to be part of a community, not just part of a nation, not just part of a country, but part of a heimishe community. And that is something that I’m praying, obviously I’m praying every single day that in the blink of an eye, ke’heref ayin, that these hostages come home and that all of this deep, immense suffering that we are all experiencing on different levels in different ways, that it ends, but that that endures, that somehow that unity where people have been willing and open and hungry to just say, really v’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha, really, I love my brother as myself. And I am praying that we don’t lose that when this horrible chapter, this dark chapter, finally ends.

Jon Polin: My answer is the same, but I’ll still take a stab for a minute at it, which is, you know, I talked earlier about the interwoven connection now among the Jewish people and Israel and the diaspora, and Rachel alluded to some of the specific things that we’ve experienced.

And I think it’s really true, and I think it’s for a few reasons. You know, I remember in 1979, I was nine years old and my family went on a trip to Israel, and it was the biggest deal in the world. Like for months before, there was this excitement about getting on a plane and going to far away Israel. And at Hillel Torah North Suburban Day school in Skokie, Illinois, the principal, Rabbi Breckenstein, requested that I bring back a bag of dirt from Eretz Yisrael, because it was so special.

It wasn’t like today where people go back and forth like it’s nothing. Technology enables a lot of this. We could sit here right now and flip on the Kotel cam and see what’s happening at the Kotel. And, and I’m avoiding using this “October 8th Jew” term, but I have friends, many of them, who on October 6th, 2023, they were supportive of Israel in some passive, small way.

And now, for good or for bad, they’re intertwined. These are lawyers and doctors who have their peers asking them questions about Israel and decisions that the Israeli government is making and things that are happening in Israel. Like it or not, we are interwoven right now. And as Rachel said, I just think the challenge is, when we come through this, how do we maintain that and how do we maintain it as a source of strength and pride rather than anything negative? I’m chuckling in my head because we have a friend who recently, we were talking to and she said, I’m so sick of achdut.

By which she meant the word, not the concept, right? There’s so many people talking about achdut, unity. What do we do with it? And I kind of agree with her. Like, let’s cut back a little bit on the word and just do it, and just make it happen, and just perpetuate it.

David Bashevkin: So I want to ask a question exactly building on those last two points, which is Rabbi Sacks very often, it’s a recurring theme and it predates Rabbi Sacks, but Rabbi Sacks would always implore people to look at their very own lives as a text, that our life can be seen as a chapter and the generations is all coming together and looking at our lives not as as, you know, an opportunity for to earn a dollar, but to look at every moment as another letter in the scroll, so to speak.

And I was thinking of that analogy when we study Chumash, when we study the Torah, very often you come across a text or a story that’s very difficult, that’s hard to understand. And before I get to my question about those specific texts in the Torah, I wanted to know very practically, exactly that point about the difficulty of achdut or maybe the ease of achdut in the abstract. You over the last 703 days have had interactions with a spectrum of the Jewish people that most people do not have in a lifetime. And undoubtedly, every Jew has the Jew who triggers them, who they don’t want to be like them, they want to move away from them.

I’m curious, when you come to a text of a Jewish soul, you meet a Jew, it triggers you. It’s not the way I want to raise my family. It’s not the kind of Jewish life that I like, and we could attach a bunch of labels and everybody has their own label for the other Jew. I’m curious for you, when you interact with Jews who trigger you, who bother you, how do you find meaning in that text? How do you find meaning in that verse? What do you do to extract that joy and connectivity from Jews when everyone, I think, has Jews either for ideological reasons or social reasons or personality reasons that they don’t like? So how do you so to speak learn and find meaning in the text of individual Jews who at first glance do not really make sense to you?

Jon Polin: Rachel, which Jews do you like the least?

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: We have definitely had this interesting journey filled with despair and misery and pain that’s very difficult to describe in these past 703 days.

And we also have had this tremendous opportunity, as you said, to encounter all of these different people. And what’s so unfortunately fortunate is that our pain is so touchable that I’ve only felt connection with people all across from one one end of sort of what it means or what brand or flavor of Jewishness to another extreme. And I haven’t had so much difficulty. The interesting thing is that even when people have very different worldviews, when Hersh was still alive and we were meeting with leaders quietly, we always did it quietly because we both felt that that was a way that would open doors more, and it definitely did, and it continues to do that for us.

And I remember sitting with people who sometimes would say things that felt so counter to how I see the world, how Jon sees the world, how Hirsch saw the world. And yet we would sit in rooms with them and they cried with us because they could see themselves in us. They could see what it meant to be a parent in our situation, and it brought a universality to the situation. And so I haven’t had trouble like that in these times.

And to be honest, I think maybe because of the trauma, it’s hard for me to remember what I did before, but I probably wasn’t as patient as I should have been, as open as I could be, and as loving as I have the potential to, because I wasn’t in the situation that I’m in now, where now I greet people and I know that they also have pain. Maybe I have a different brand of pain, and I’ve been through an unusual type of pain. But what I’ve really grown to learn is that everyone is carrying their sack of pain with them. And so I haven’t had that sort of challenge of how do I handle this person who’s in front of me?

Jon Polin: I’m going to, I’ll give two examples of where I have been challenged and how I thought about it in my interaction.

The first example I’ll give is the charedi community in Israel. I think they need to serve the country. I think they need to serve in the military when able, and if not, we need to find other national service for them. That being said, that being said, the system today is such that they generally don’t do those things.

And that’s what’s been set up, that’s what they’ve inherited, and that’s what they live in. And within that, as Rachel talked about, we have been recipients of that community doing what it is that they know how to do and that they believe that they can do to best contribute to Israel today. And that’s learning and prayer. And it’s not a show.

I’ve gone into rooms of charedim where I think, come on, you need to be serving the country. Yet, I get swept up when I see an elderly rabbi leading Tehillim with tears in his eyes, a room full of his students joining in with tears in their eyes because a hostage family is sitting in the room with them and getting their brachot, their blessings. And there’s something really beautiful in that and they’re doing it in the way that they think best contributes. And similarly, I can share that within the family of the broad group of hostage families, there are differences of opinion.

There have been from the beginning and there still are about what needs to be done to bring home the hostages. We have been in a camp that is the military is set to create conditions to be able to do a deal from a position of strength. I think that they’ve done that. I think that we have as a country and as a government missed some opportunities.

There are families who from the beginning and still today think no deals, only military force is what’s needed to bring home the hostages. I totally disagree with that, but I know these families, and I know that while we disagree completely, our objective is the same. And I try to step back and say, who says I’m right? And it’s hard, but I just in all of these scenarios remind myself that there are different conditions set for each of us that make us think and act differently, but we do often times have shared goals that don’t get talked about enough beneath all of the noise.

David Bashevkin: Thank you.

Thank you for that. I’m curious coming back to the text of the Torah, are there specific verses from our tradition that you almost instinctively move towards, maybe whisper, maybe mumble, when you are looking for strength, when you are looking for hope, in your darkest moments? Where in the Torah do you turn? What are the verses and experience from our canon that you turn towards in order to find strength?

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Truly, there are so many. I considered bringing tonight my siddur that I use, my prayer book that I use every morning. I’ve been a davener for many years, which I’ve been so grateful that I have that foundation, because I feel like when what happened on October 7th happened, I didn’t feel like I was approaching a stranger when I was calling out to God for help.

You know how sometimes you’re not nice to your neighbor who’s the dentist, and then suddenly on a Shabbos afternoon, you think, oh my gosh, I feel like I need a root canal, and how can I knock on his door? I’m not friends with him. But I completely felt that I had access to the master of the universe the second that this unwound. And I have said with such kavanah so much of my tefillah, but the siddur I use is the siddur that was translated and annotated and commentated on by Rabbi Sacks. And it is his gorgeous translation.

And as we know, every translation is an interpretation. Every translation is an interpretation. And I really felt that when Jon and I a couple weeks ago, we went to a friend’s house and I had forgotten my siddur. And when I went to daven, when I went to pray in the afternoon, they had a Birnbaum siddur on the shelf.

Remember those? And I was like, sure, I’ll use that. And I’ll glance at the English, and I felt like I was reading something completely from another religion almost. I mean, it just didn’t, the English for me, it’s my mameh lashon. So even though I daven in Hebrew, I love to read the English.

And when I read what Rabbi Sacks says, he reads into words and he translates things in such a meaningful way for now. When I say Ashrei, when you’re saying, you know, are there lines? I mean, I literally could tell you 50 lines, but people know every day when I say Ashrei and I get to Karov Hashem l’chol korav, l’chol asher yikrauhu v’emet, I do this. I’m doing this. Karov Hashem l’chol korav, l’chol asher yikrauhu v’emet.

And I’m on the number, and I stop and I say, Hashem, I’m close to you. Be close to me. Be close to me. I’m calling you out in truth.

Help us. Help us. Not just us. Us.

And I’m saying it with such kavanah and I know that it’s there. I know it’s going up. I know it is there. And I had this magnificent teacher in Richmond, Virginia named Leah Scaste, who taught us a class about tefillah.

And she talked about how tefillah is like humidity that goes up into the air and then at a certain point enough accumulates in a cloud and then it rains down. And the thing is, sometimes those those tefillot go up in the air and they accumulate, and sometimes they move and then they rain down somewhere else. And I know that the tefillot that I said for Hersh were accepted and they are up there and they are raining down. I know that some of the hostages who came home in January came home because of the tefillah that we have all been doing.

People say to me, you prayed and God didn’t answer you. And I say, I prayed and God did answer me. He just didn’t answer me the answer that I I think that I wanted. But he answered.

And I think that there are so many pieces of the tefillah and of the Humash that speak to me on this point. But I’ll give Jon a turn.

Jon Polin: So we were asked a question similar to this hundreds of days ago, not as eloquently, Rabbi. But we were asked a question similar to this, and I’m going to give my same answer.

In Shacharit, in our morning service, towards the end of the service, we say, now, this is written by the Psalmist thousands of years ago, and it’s sort of a comparison of the Jewish people to our enemies historically. And it ends with Eileh v’rechev v’eileh v’susim. They embrace horses and chariots as a tool of war is the connotation. V’anachnu b’shem Hashem Elokeinu nazkir.

And we mention and work in the path of God. Hemah kar’u v’nafalu. They’ve historically all keeled over and fallen. V’anachnu kamnu v’nitodad.

And we have stood up and been strengthened. And again, we are living in a really challenging time. And I talked about some of the things that I’m ashamed about. And I know there are things that we’re doing because we need to do them, but I remind myself and I try to hope this for all of us that we use the tools of war as a defensive mechanism to accomplish something, not as the end in itself.

And we keep on the path that we have been on as a people for thousands of years. It is what has kept us going as a people, and let’s make sure that we keep that course and not fall over and become like those that we’ve vanquished historically.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: You know, you touched on tefillah, so I’m going to go wild. I just want to say one more thing because it’s another line that I think everyone is familiar with, so it might speak to people.

Many times we have gone into what I think the before me would have been very scared. Part of what’s tragic or maybe it’s empowering about having what happened to us happen is that it scared the fear out of me. It scared the fear out of me. And there was one time when John and I had to divide and conquer when Hersh was still alive.

So Jon had to go to one country and I had to go to a different country, and I had to meet with someone scary. And I remember that morning davening, and they had said, come alone without a phone. And it was to save Hersh, so I was fine with it. But before I left the place where I was staying, I took a small piece of paper and I wrote a pasuk on it.

I wrote a verse on it. I wrote, Adoshem li v’lo eira, ma ya’aseh li adam. And I put it in my bra. Cause I knew they were going to check me.

And there’s something about standing in front of an adam who’s scary and just knowing, Adoshem li v’lo eira. This man can do nothing to me. And it was really helpful.

David Bashevkin: So we have time for one concluding question, and I wanted to end with a quote that for me, touched me in a very deep place from Rabbi Sacks where he is commenting on the struggle between Yaakov and Esav and the angel of Esav.

And they’re struggling and right before kind of let’s go, Yaakov turns to him and asks for a blessing. And Rabbi Sacks formulated it in such a moving way, it stays with me forever, and I want to read it to you. Rabbi Sacks wrote, “Sometimes all the pain and tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, I will not let you go until you bless me.” We’ve been seized by some really dark and difficult times. And I wanted to know, what do you hope when you look at these times? What is the blessing? What is the hope that you would like the Jewish people to walk away from from this moment?

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: A really prominent part of that piece, part of that story of first of all, who is Yaakov struggling with? Who is that wrestling with? Is it an angel of God? Is it him struggling with himself? Which both Maimonides, Rambam, and the Kabbalah say, it’s him struggling with him.

We all have that. We all know who we’re struggling with, but for me, the most beautiful moment comes right after he says, I won’t let you go until you bless me. And then the sun rises. The sun rises.

There’s light. And the name change of Yaakov that had been curvy, you know that’s the shoresh of the word, and it changes to Yisrael, Yashar El, straight to God. And what’s beautiful about that is if you know, if people are familiar with that story, is he permanently is limping. The rest of Yaakov or Yisrael’s life, he’s broken, but he goes on.

And we can all limp ahead, and we will, and the sun will rise.

Jon Polin: I sometimes know when it’s best to just say nothing.

David Bashevkin: Really on behalf of everyone here on a very personal level, I had a friend who coined a phrase that we often talk about love at first sight, but there are some moments and some people who give you hope at first sight. And for what you have done for the Jewish people, davening with you, praying with you, learning with you, and serving as a translator of the most horrifying experience but in a way that can marshal and give strength to the Jewish People.

You have given me, and I have no doubt everyone here, hope at first sight and we are so grateful. A round of applause for Jon and Rachel Polin. 

I don’t think I’ve recently had an experience that I can remember where I was so mesmerized by someone else’s capacity to take the most terrifying, the most impossible of circumstances, and still be able to translate it into hope. And there was a point at the very end of the interview, and you can go on YouTube and literally watch this moment, where in that very last question, I quote something from Rabbi Sacks, and you can see Rachel Goldberg-Polin mouth and continue the translation.

She knew it by heart already. And it was the words of Rabbi Sacks when he was reflecting on the death of his father, where he repurposes in just one sentence the fabric of the story in the fight between Yaakov and Esav, where the angel of Esav is fighting with Yaakov, and Yaakov won’t let go, and he looks at the angel and says, “I will not let go of you until you bless me.” And Rabbi Sacks writes as follows, and as I began this quote, this is when I saw Rachel, she knew the words already. She lives with this. Rabbi Sacks writes, “You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you could lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity, and that is why sometimes all the pain and tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, I will not let you go until you bless me.”

And it’s that capacity to take the bad times with two hands, take all of the suffering, take all of the pain, take all of the alienation, and everything that we carry as human beings, and insist that I will not let you go until you bless me. That’s what it means to live with the times. That’s what it means to live every day of your life and say, I am not going to let go of this moment until I find some meaning, until I find some purpose, until I find some motivation to bring more blessing into the world. And I believe that that’s everything that Rachel and Jon have done through their experience, mourning the tragic loss of their incredible son, Hersh, and that they continue to do in interpreting their experience and giving us language, and us inspiration, to look through that very same window and find meaning.

Tidrosh geulah l’galuseinu, find some sliver of redemption, some sliver of hope within those moments of exile, within those moments of pain, and within those moments of suffering. And that is the joy of Simchat Torah. That’s what the day, I believe, symbolizes more than anything. It is the joy, it is the simcha that Torah allows us to take even the darkest points in our life and be doresh and interpret and find meaning.

That no moment of our life is ever completely black, no moment of our life is never completely ours to interpret and find a sliver of hope. And that is why as we begin our journey, post-Simchat Torah to begin living with the times, I invite each of you to begin such a journey of interpreting our lives through Torah and interpreting Torah through the lens of our lives. And in that weaving together of that live Torah, the Torah of life, and the Torah of revelation, the static, timeless Torah that God gave us at Sinai, it gives us that anchor in our day-to-day lives. And there’s no joy, there’s nothing that gives more confidence like you are walking on stable ground.

And that is the joy that Torah gives us. That is the joy that the Jewish people and being a part of the Jewish people can give us. And that is the joy of the journey, the ultimate challenge, which is taking the capacity of Simchat Torah and living the rest of our lives with that vision and that fusion. So I invite all of you to join and to study each week the weekly parsha.

There are so many resources available and we of course will try to send out as many as possible. But the most important resource is you, the reader, the interpreter, the doresh, the person who’s carrying what we all carry and taking all of that, taking all of our experience and saying, I will not let you go until you bless me. So thank you so much for listening. And of course, thank you to our partners in making this happen, Koren Publishers, Sacks Legacy, the Simchat Torah Foundation.

We are so grateful to all of your partnership and support. And thank you of course to Rachel Goldberg-Polin and to Jon Polin. This episode, like so many of our episodes, was edited by our incredible friend Denah Emerson. Thank you so much, Denah.

If you enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, please subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends about it. You can also donate at 18forty.org/donate. It really helps us reach new listeners and continue putting out great content. We rely on our listening community.

If we have helped enrich your life, help us continue doing our work. Donate financially, subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on podcast channels. All of this helps us grow, and we are so appreciative for our community. And of course, you can also leave us a voicemail with feedback or questions that we may play in a future episode.

That number is 212-588-1840. Once again, that number is 212-588-1840. If you’d like to learn more about this topic or some of the other great ones we’ve covered in the past, be sure to check out 18forty.org. That’s the number 18 followed by the word forty, F O R T Y .org.