Depravity and hope

Working on the stories in this week’s paper made clear how stupidly destructive war is.

That is not at all to say that some wars are not necessary, and the people who choose to fight in them to protect the rest of us are not heroes. They are, and they are.

But oh, the stupid stupid waste.

To talk to Rachel Goldberg about her husband, Rabbi Avi Goldberg, an IDF chaplain who died in Lebanon, fighting for Israel, is to feel devastated by loss — her loss, and the world’s loss. Rabbi Goldberg clearly was remarkable.

And so were the soldiers killed next to him, and the ones killed the day before, and the ones killed the day after he died. Each was extraordinary in a different way, and we will never know everyone’s story, but we do know that everyone has a story.

That’s true for the Palestinians who are dying in the war too. Every single one of us has a story. We cannot care about those stories in the same way as we care about the Israelis, and everyone who fights on Israel’s side, because we are normal human beings, and that’s how it works, but everyone has a story.

It reminds me of the time after September 11, when the New York Times ran the series it called “Portraits of Grief,” little vignettes of most of the people who died on that nightmarish day. Writers would sit with the families, try to stifle their sobs as they typed, and attempt to bring those victims not quite to life, but at least to the reader’s awareness. (No, that’s not fractionally as good as being alive.)

Still, with all that true, it is an inescapable truth that Rabbi Goldberg was a man of profound goodness, energy, kindness, and deep caring for others. His relationship with his wife, visible even in the blurry photographs Ms. Goldberg sent, is the kind of partnership only the luckiest of us manage to attain; that’s true, too, of his relationship with his eight children. The world could have benefitted greatly had he been able to be in it longer.

That is so clear that I found myself like those Portraits in Grief writers, trying not to get saltwater tears on my keyboard.

And then there is the Bibas family, with the grotesque evil of the murdered children — how depraved does someone have to be to be able to kill a child? — only amplified by the grand guignol of the games Hamas played with their mother’s body. How divorced from any basic human instinct does someone have to be to do that?

But we do come back to hope. We have to come back to hope. That’s why Rachel Goldberg and Rachel Sharansky Danziger will be in Teaneck. That’s why they’re working to build a community where pain is acknowledged and hope still is allowed to bloom. We hope that they succeed in their plans to build. The world can use more communities like theirs.

—JP

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