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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin, z”l Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show creating better conversations about the essential questions facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024.

On Sunday night, we took our eldest son Noah to the airport for his group flight to Israel, where he will be spending the year studying in Yeshiva. The whole day went mostly as expected, even though we did go to Manhattan early in the morning to join the weekly hostage rally, just to be around other people like us, feeling overwhelmed by the news of the killing of the six hostages that had arrived on our feeds the night before.

But then the rest of the day was a bunch of errands, a lot of rushed anxiety to get everything packed. We turned the house upside down looking for a missing but important item, which no one had realized was missing until an hour before we left the house. And then we milled about with a lot of downtime once everything was done, which didn’t prevent us from asking ourselves endless questions about the things that we had already finished.

All of us in our family played our respective parts to perfection. I compensated for some of my sadness about Noah leaving by assembling for him two massive perfect sandwiches, one corned beef, one pastrami, mustard, Russian dressing, pickles, and then sneaking more food into his backpack which he didn’t ask for. You know, just in case. Once at the airport, he smiled just perfectly at the gate agent when she saw that his bag was overweight. A smile I remember from baby Noah in his stroller, a smile that has helped him escape 18 years of mischief. She smiled back at him and said, okay, but just this time.

We stayed in line with him heading towards security for a little too long, lingering nearby as the line inched to that point of no return for non-passengers. I couldn’t hold it together as I hugged him, following in the tradition of blubbering in moments like this like my father still does, and like my grandfather did before him. But he, blessedly, didn’t make fun of me this time, either because he saw it coming, or because he noticed the other dads in line with his friends who were all doing the same thing. And then, after we said goodbye, he continued down the line with his friends and he never looked back at us. I was kind of in awe.

As parents experiencing the slow but inevitable process of our first child leaving the nest, Stephanie and I talked a lot about the gap we felt between our anxieties for him and his future and his relative lack of any of it. The news tells us a lot about teenage anxiety these days, and I don’t doubt that there’s research backing that claim up, that it’s been brought about by Instagram and the iPhone, or too much helicopter parenting, or too much omnipresent news. And some kids do come across their fears of the world honestly, as victims of traumatic experiences. We too have had some serious challenges with our kids.

But I see a lot of teenagers, including my own, walking through the world with a kind of fearlessness. I really saw it at the airport, and I found it striking and kind of amazing. Now part of it is just the wiring. Teenage brains are not fully developed, especially as relates to their capacity to make reasoned choices. This explains the absurd truth of why we send teenagers into war. Their fearlessness, or rather their limited capacities to understand the costs, makes them courageous soldiers. Our societies freely trade on their futures in exchange for their youthful bravado.

Meanwhile, those of us adults who have been around the block a few times know some of the traps and pitfalls and scary things that could happen to them, maybe partly because we’ve experienced some of those things ourselves, and maybe also because we know by now all of the things we ourselves haven’t experienced, but we know someone else who did, maybe second or third hand, and thus, our fears for our children are not just the sum total of our direct memories, but really the sum total of everything we’ve ever heard of what could be scary for them.

But our children, they have no pasts, only a future. And all the possible fears we hold for them can’t compete with all their possible futures that are in their sights. I think most people who haven’t had Noah’s background or who don’t live in a community like ours, where it’s normal to travel to Israel all the time, and where it’s a clear rite of passage to spend a year there before or during college, lot of those folks might puzzle about this decision to let our kids go there now to a war zone during an active war. That’s a perfectly rational reading of the situation. By the way, my years in Israel between high school and college were full of terrible trauma and tragedy and both Stephanie and I found ourselves within close range of catastrophe and we both know people who didn’t fare as well as we did. The fears are real, especially now.

The same people wondering about our decision as parents might also wonder not just about our decision to send him, but about his eagerness to go. He hasn’t been sheltered from this war. He knows what he’s going to. But then again, maybe you’ve also heard me say on this show that Stephanie and I have a rule when it comes to traveling to Israel, which is that we don’t not go. And Noah has heard that spiel before too. He knows it’s our family’s commitment, and he now shares it. I don’t think that any of what should have scared him about really going to Israel registered or even entered into a calculus that would make him change his mind.

And still, for what it’s worth, given the legitimacy of all those fears that others may hold, until Saturday night, I didn’t even give a second thought about the question of whether Noah would go spend next year in Israel. I think I spent more time excited for him to maybe get to have what I had, the year that was the most transformative for me in my young adult life. I almost wished I could go again too.

But starting Saturday night, I did have a tinge of fear. And when I hugged Noah a little too tight at the airport, that little bit of fear was there. And I thought about it all the way to the airport. And then I thought about it all the way back from the airport in my empty car. And the fear had a name. And that name was Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

I didn’t know Hersh Goldberg-Polin personally, though by the time I learned of his death, I’d felt like I did. His face is seared in my memory from his ubiquitous smile and posters and graffiti and signs and t-shirts, but I felt closer than that. Jon and Rachel, his parents, came on this podcast and told me great stories about him. I heard them speak this year countless times, and I’ll share some of the stories later on in this episode that stayed with me.

I sat behind Jon in shul a bunch of times this year and got to exchange a few words with him and we have close mutual friends. But mostly I got to know Hersh because of the heroic tireless work of my colleague Elliot Goldstein, Hersh’s cousin, who was one of the behind-the-scenes superheroes supporting the family and making the world aware of the urgency of the cause of bringing him home.

I’m sorry I’ll never get to meet Hersh. I love the way his father just called him a super guy at the end of his eulogy. What a great way to talk about your kid. The simplicity of that description, I felt, eviscerated so much of the political turmoil swirling around the story of the hostages and replaced it with the moral horror of this basically good kid. A super guy. Not perfect, as his mother Rachel said at her eulogy, but a good kid who got swept up from the normal life of trying to be a kid and instead was tortured for nearly a year while his family desperately sought his return from less than 60 miles away. I tried to calculate the exact distance, actually. I put it into Google Maps. Directions from Baka, Jerusalem, to Rafah, Gaza. It couldn’t do it. The screen read “couldn’t calculate away there.” Exactly right, it turns out.

As I reflect on knowing and not knowing Hersh, I’ve been thinking about our attachments and the way that people like Hersh, strangers who are not strangers, penetrate their ways into our hearts. The easy way to understand this experience is through the ethics of proximity, the ways that we feel more responsible, more connected to those with whom we have a connection. So many of us are one degree away from Hersh and his family and we feel like we’ve gotten to know Jon and Rachel throughout the year. This acts powerfully as a guide on our moral imagination and forges for us a sense of attachment.

But maybe this phenomenon is better described by what you might call an ethics of familiarity. For many of us American Jews, we may not have known Hersh, but we kind of feel like we do because the stories told about him resonate with our sense of our own kids. I couldn’t articulate this out loud until I heard of Hirsch’s Hersh, and I still feel squeamish saying it, but there was so much of what was being said about Hersh that reminds me of Noah. Now I don’t know if they’re actually similar enough people to make this comparison. I don’t know if it’s fair. But all of us have our categories of identity and our experience of others which are forged by the people we are closest to.

Those people, our kin, shape our very field of vision, and how we make sense of strangers and what patterns we look for that make us feel close or distant to them. This feels very normal and human to look for approximations and connections to what we already see and know and understand, thus using our people as frames of reference for understanding others and the world. In this case, the ethics of proximity and the ethics of familiarity serve us well in enabling us to feel the pain of others. They can become engines of empathy.

Some philosophers worry about this. Isn’t this approach wrong and maybe dangerous? If our empathy can be shaped in this way by proximity and familiarity, does the reverse become true that those we are not actually connected to, those we don’t recognize, struggle to earn our empathy? Are we not establishing implicit hierarchies rooted in our biases that narrow our moral vision for the world rather than expanding it? This is like an even more pernicious version of implicit bias. Our encoded assumptions based on lived experience might not just interfere with who we hire for jobs, but who we determine to have moral worth and who not.

As an expression of this concern, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote back in 2002 that our societies should be designed to cultivate the kind of empathy for the other such that we would treat all means of classifying identity, race, gender, nationality, religion, socioeconomic class, all of these categories of identity should be treated as morally irrelevant, in her words, “that we should make the equal worth of all human beings a regulative constraint on our political actions and aspirations.”

Early in the war, someone leveled exactly this critique against me when I expressed support for the war. I thought I had done so sensitively. I’ve never believed that Israel has a carte blanche to the decisions it’s undertaking. And my support for the war was rooted in understanding the ethics of war, which require of us to delineate between morally legitimate and morally illegitimate wars. This is a common standard rooted in the tragedy of how human civilization operates. But this person commented to me that my support for the war showed that I care more about Jewish lives than about Palestinian lives. The accusation stung, but I actually spent a long time thinking about it and trying to sort out which parts of it might be right and which were wrong.

You see, the counterargument to those who would argue for the kind of flat morality that Nussbaum suggested, that we should treat human difference as morally irrelevant. The counterargument to that is that only really extremist ethics would argue that we have no hierarchy of responsibility whatsoever, as though we’re equally indebted by the needs of a total stranger as we are to our children. No, most philosophers and most normal people know that we operate as humans with spheres of loyalty that radiate out. They start with those who are close to us and they extend eventually to strangers and maybe even enemies.

We don’t need to insist that our loyalties are the same to friend and foe, but we do need to acknowledge that our resources of empathy cannot be limited to and exhausted by just our friends and families. Nussbaum herself actually got to this place later in her writings. She became a strong advocate for what she calls patriotic love, what we Jews sometimes call Ahavat Yisrael, that our attachments to our group, our nation, can and should be emotional, even as we’re never meant to limit the full scope of our love and compassion for others and just reserve it for our people. Maybe the easiest way to say it is that I can love different humans differently while striving to never make any of them expendable.

I think this is my answer to that critique that was directed at me. Of course I deeply care about the lives of Israelis. I’m entitled, by virtue of my identity and my attachments, to be absolutely wrecked by the news of their killings, even those I don’t know, including the five other hostages killed this week with Hersh, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and a particular Carmel Gat, who I know even less than Hersh, but whose name I know better because I’m friends with one of her cousins.

And if this right to be wrecked includes those we don’t know at all, I feel we’re especially allowed to mourn those we know a little bit, or even who we recognize a little bit in our own children. We are entitled to feel a different emotional weight and register from those losses than we might feel about the deaths of strangers, even if those strangers too are of the innocent, even as their deaths are undeserved. We’re just never allowed to conclude that their deaths are less significant. We’re never allowed to lose a sense of compassion for them in their deaths, as remote as they may have been from us in their lives.

I didn’t know Hersh, but I just as well could have. We could have lived together at some point in one of the Jewish communities in America where the Goldberg-Polins lived before they made Aliyah. We could have become friends over a Shabbat meal. During many of the Shabbatot I spent in their synagogue community in Jerusalem. We could have met through the many mutual friends we have. And Hersh and Noah definitely could have become friends, and I wish that they had. And I’m now mourning Hersh’s death as if any of those things had happened.

What happens now? There remain somewhere in the neighborhood of 97 to 101 hostages in Gaza, including 33 who are presumed dead. What happens next? The choices involved are awful, and the public discourse now at this phase of the war is becoming dangerously contentious. I’ve struggled throughout this year watching these debates about the prudency and morality of the host hostage negotiations.

There are some who have insisted throughout the war, back from right when it started, that the first priority for the government of Israel was securing the release of hostages even at the cost of fighting the war itself. I suspect some of those advocating for this position oppose the war, even independent of the hostage issue, but never mind, it’s a totally coherent and valid moral position to oppose the war if you believe Israel can ensure the return of its hostages and if you believe that that’s the most important priority for Israel.

Not all the early opponents of the war did so with this kind of moral seriousness. A lot of the public criticism of the war came from quarters who either tacitly supported the Hamas attacks or who do not take seriously Israel’s legitimate security needs or who either maliciously or maliciously naively kept yelling about the war without ever mentioning the hostages.

But those that have kept the hostages front and center in their advocacy against the war represent a commitment that our hostages take priority, whether because they’re reading Jewish tradition and the premium that it places on the mitzvah of redeeming captives, or whether they’re making a Zionist argument, a classic Zionist argument, that we do not leave our people behind in the battlefield or in captivity, whether because they’re acting out of a basic humane prerequisite to care for a society’s citizens, or realistically, because they assumed they would have to make the same basic deal eventually, so we might as well do it now.

All of this represents a serious moral argument, and it has been all along. On the other hand, I’ve also had sympathy for those Israelis who are themselves sympathetic and outraged about the plight of the hostages, but who express reservations, often quietly, about the cost of bringing them home, a cost that is said to include both ending the war effort and accepting some security concerns that might involve leaving Hamas in power, as well as PR victories for Hamas and Iran by being able to declare victory.

And it might also entail, almost surely would, the release of over a thousand Palestinian prisoners, at least some of whom constitute a clear and present danger to the lives of Israelis. Surely not all of them do, but surely not none of them. The excruciating evidence supporting this fear was a discoverer of many bodies among the slain Hamas fighters who invaded Israel on October 7th as part of their murderous rampage and who had been among the prisoners released by Israel as part of the Gilad Shalit trade back in 2011. That, at the time, was the largest prisoner released by Israel as part of one of these horrific exchanges and it was the highest price Israel has ever paid for the return of a single soldier.

These fears, represent a serious moral argument. They reflect the complexity of the Jewish sources themselves as they relate to that very mitzvah of redeeming captives. Our tradition was very sensitive to the price that might be put by our enemies on our captives if those enemies know what we would be willing to pay. The decision by a state to try to decide between what it perceives as a collective security need. And on the other hand, the responsibility it owes to the family of individual soldiers and civilians whose loved ones have been taken captive. I really don’t envy the public officials who need to make such a calculus.

For much of the war, the hostage families did not speak in one clear voice about the question of the price that would need to be paid in the deal, even as they screamed and begged that the cause of their loved ones be front and center, prioritized by the government and by the international community.

It also goes without saying that at various times in the past year, it became clear that Israel does not hold all the keys to a deal. We periodically got windows into Hamas’s intransigence in this process and the moments that the negotiations constituted a massive and deceptive bait and switch. I can’t say with any confidence that I know what took place or even can guess at the moving target, which is the negotiation table, much less the dark alleys and smoke-filled rooms where all sorts of unofficial, plausibly deniable negotiations have also been taking place.

One time I heard Rachel Goldberg speak this year, she alluded to these encounters born of relentless desperation, the need to set up a telegram account, the willingness to travel to places they didn’t know, shrouded in secrecy, to meet people none of us would ever want to meet looking for leverage or anything else that might bring Hersh home. The whole story is unfathomable. Many times this year, I found myself wondering whether I would have had the fortitude to do a fraction of what they did. There were many times I watched Rachel, quite visibly a private person, speaking with a clarity of message like a biblical prophet channeling the wisdom of the divine, and I thought to myself, I speak publicly for a living, and I can’t hold a candle to what this woman is doing all by herself, with no ghost writers, just the pulsing of a soul, longing to hug her son one more time.

Now, I’ve been struggling all year with the choices that Israeli leaders have faced, lacking the clarity that activists on all sides have had throughout the process of the right thing to do. The one thing that has tilted the scale for me is that it has become tragically clear that Israeli leaders, but especially Prime Minister Netanyahu, has largely forfeited the entitlement that we might give him that would make us assume he’s making these difficult decisions amidst impossible choices based on integrity and a sense of responsibility.

For too long throughout this war, Prime Minister Netanyahu has failed to cultivate trust among Israelis in his leadership in his refusal to acknowledge the failures of intelligence and military decision-making under his watch that led to October 7th, in his refusal to face the hostage families if they don’t align with him politically, in his refusal to speak to the Israeli people throughout this impossibly tragic war that demands of them sacrifices to a strategy that he fails to disclose, and in his constant capitulation to the radical right-wing forces in his coalition, which make plain that his primary calculus is his own political survival.

Worst of all, though, is that all serious people understand that there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And all serious people know that the Palestinian people are not the same as Hamas. For decades Netanyahu has had no strategy to resolve the conflict, only strategies that perpetuate it. And he cloaks those strategies under the myth that he alone can protect Israel from the threats it faces. October 7th shattered that myth and serious leadership would understand that even as Israel fights a legitimate war against Hamas, especially as it fights that war, it must engage in a parallel strategy of diplomacy leading towards reconciliation with the Palestinian people. These processes should be happening at the same time, but they are not.

And all of this is the stuff of failed leadership. And that gets in the way, to say the least, of the benefit of the doubt we might otherwise accord to him about the complexity of the decisions he faces about the hostage negotiations and about the integrity of his choices amidst impossible options.

I’m not sure that the vast majority of Israelis are certain about what they want to have happen with the future of the war. My sense is though they just wish the country was being led by a different leader who they might be able to trust more with their lives as they hang in the balance. Maybe it would be nice to have the certainty of those who know exactly what decisions the state of Israel should make in prosecuting this war or negotiating a ceasefire or ending the war entirely.

I tend to have a little envy of the joy of moral clarity that those who have it seem to possess, even as I also remain suspicious of it, and all that seems to me that remains uninterrogated, or that at least requires some obscuring of the complexity that comes when you grant any measure of legitimacy to that alternative you are so eager to reject.

This reminds me of Blu Greenberg’s great line at the end of her book, Women in Judaism, she says, “How else can one respond to and be part of that turbulent encounter,” that is, between the truths of Jewish tradition and the truths of feminism, “but with a stammer, one step forward and half a step backward?” She writes, “I envy those who can say, ‘This is [Jewish law], that’s it!’ Or, ‘These are the absolute new truths and nothing less will do!’ I envy,” she says, “but I also suspect their unexamined complacency. I suspect that their fear is even greater than mine, therefore they must keep the lid on even tighter and show no ambivalence, no caution, and no confusion.”

I admit to having ambivalence, I admit to feeling cautious, and I certainly admit to feeling confused. Meanwhile, I’ve never felt that either position about the deal had the right to claim a monopoly on screaming in pain about the plight of the hostages. I think we are all entitled to emit primal screams about our suffering and even to insist that others center our suffering without needing to encode it as entailing a clear political demand in one direction or another.

I learned this exact point from Rachel Goldberg at a talk she gave at Hartman to a group of rabbis back in July when she spoke about her impending trip to the States for the Netanyahu visit to Congress. I’ve never been able to shake one thing she said, which was that she knew all the agendas and strategies that were being deployed out there in service of trying to bring Hersh home, that these included organizations who were using the cause of bringing him home for all sorts of competing purposes. Some protesting against the government, others supporting the government and urging them to prioritize the hostages from inside.

She didn’t show her own hand. She didn’t demand of all of us to advocate for exactly this strategy or that. She did not insist that the only way this works is that we march under the exact same organizational flag with the same political demands and the same talking points. Instead, she smiled, a tired smile, and she said she welcomes whatever any of us would do to try to bring him home. She refused to judge.

I am sure that there were things said at various vigils and rallies and protests this year that departed from her politics, which she, throughout the eternity of this year, kept close to her chest. I learned from her a lot about what it means to be so focused on a just outcome that you can genuinely embrace a pluralism of strategies. It reminded me of Maimonides’ dictum, “Accept truth from wherever it comes,” but now applied to actual humans and desperate needs. Maybe we can all learn to live lives of conviction without the seduction of certainty.

Hersh is not coming home, but a lot of young people are coming home in Israel from the devastation of their service to their country. At the same time, that many of us here in the diaspora are sending our kids out to live out their destinies in the same broken world, just a lot more enthusiastic to encounter it and a lot less burdened, for now.

I think it was Effie Shoham, who I hosted here on the podcast just a week or two after the war broke out who has been a key leader of the Jerusalem home front efforts all the while he had three sons fighting all year in Gaza. I think he was the first to use the phrase with me that this generation of kids fighting the war were “a generation of giants.” I felt that even more acutely when watching a musical and memorial retrospective of the year since October 7th that was written and led by my colleague Rani Jaeger at the Institute this summer in Jerusalem. He was on stage with his daughter, who had thrown out her plans as the war started to relocate to the place where one of the kibbutzim had moved, an entire community dislocated and trying to walk a straight line amidst their collective experience of vertigo. She had spent the year taking care of all the little children. So many people rag on young people, but this is a generation of giants on whom the survival of the state of Israel, or at least, the responsibility of fighting this war has overwhelmingly fallen.

On Monday night, last night after Hersh’s funeral, we hosted a group of these giants in our backyard for a barbecue. It was a group of 15 or so Israeli 20-somethings who had come to the States right after their army service, some of them almost directly from the battlefields in Gaza, to spend the summer at an American Jewish summer camp. We had spent Shabbat with them back at camp in August when we went to visit, and some of these kids were known as co-counselors at the camp. Now they were traveling around America or the New York area and we invited them over.

As we were preparing dinner, I alluded to one of them that I had watched the funeral and he said with a smile, a sad smile, again, that he can’t log on to watch the funerals anymore. He had attended too many funerals of close friends in the past year. We didn’t talk about the news over dinner. I just fed them and fed them more and sat silently looking at them and thinking about Hersh, who is their age, and about Noah, who has all of them to look up to.

There was one other thing I did at the airport before I said goodbye to Noah, which was to give him a bracha, the same blessing we give our children every Friday night. The blessing is that they be inspired to live the pious lives of their ancestors, which we then follow with the priestly blessing from the Bible asking for God’s protection. I realized something right after I gave him this bracha, which helped me understand that blessing differently than I ever have.

For the first 18 years, I had always seen it as an act of parental love. We cover our children with our hands as a way of showing that we will care for them and protect them. In giving him this bracha before sending him away, I realized it’s the exact opposite. The blessing is a witness to our ultimate powerlessness. We alone cannot protect our children, and that’s why we ask for God’s help.

The truth is, I don’t love the phrase that people sometimes say in moments like this when they hear terrible news, like the killing of Hersh, that phrase, hug your children, as if we’re not already doing that all the time, as though we don’t shake with a little bit of fear, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, every time we hug them for fear of what might happen when we let go. I also worry a little bit that when you say hug your children, you’re unintentionally, and nobody means this, but you’re unintentionally saying to the victims, to the parents who can’t hug their children, that we somehow have a leg up on them. We have a chance to do something they can’t. It would frighten me to hug my sons in the presence of Jon and Rachel.

Among the many things I heard Rachel say this year, the one that haunts me the most is that the last thing that Hersh said to his parents in his last communication right before he was abducted into Gaza was “I’m sorry.” This makes me dizzy every time I hear it. Hersh, of course, had nothing to apologize for. He’s permitted the right of the young to walk fearlessly into his future, in his case, to dance freely in the wilderness free of fear. It is too much for any of us to ask for our kids that they walk through the world holding our fears for them. It’s not the life we want them to lead. The ultimate blessing of redemption is the transformation of the world from the current reality that we no longer burden our children with the traumatic memories of their ancestors, which become obstacles to their dreams for themselves, which impede their sense of adventure. A redeemed world would be a world with a future that is not held back by memory.

The message today is not “hug your children.” The message today, as our people prepares to start a new year, as our kids start a new school year, as they walk further and further away from us, is that they continue to have the courage not to look back. It’s what Hersh deserved. It’s what all our children deserve.

Louis: Thanks for listening to our show. This episode of Identity/Crisis was produced by me, M. Louis Gordon, with assistance from Sarina Shohet. It was edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC and our music is provided by Socalled. Our executive producer is Maital Friedman.

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