We called him Hersh.
Even those of us who’d never met him.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the Israeli American with family ties to Chicago, was like a member of our family. He was our son, our grandson, our brother.
It’s hard to distill the horror of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks into something — someone — relatable. But for us, especially in the Chicago Jewish community, Hersh was it. He represented every one of the 1,200 innocent people murdered that day, every one of those 251 hostages stolen from the prime of their lives — and from their loved ones.
For those of us who had never met Hersh, we grew to know and love him while he languished in captivity. We learned who he was through his fierce and beautiful mother, Rachel, who came to symbolize the agony and resolve of the parents of the hostages.
Hersh was kind, courteous and vibrant. He loved soccer. He had wanderlust, having backpacked across Europe not long before Oct. 7. He had made the seemingly innocuous decision to celebrate his 23rd birthday with peace-loving friends at a music festival in southern Israel last fall.
Hersh had so much joy left to experience, so much impact left to stamp on the world, and so many more people to love and be loved by.
Over 11 months, we held our breaths — praying that one day we’d be scrolling mindlessly through our phones and stumble across the news that “Hersh was alive.”
We prayed that Hersh, miraculously, had escaped evil, that he had fled the darkness, literally and figuratively. That he’d been handed over to the Red Cross and would soon be admitted to a local Israeli hospital just for the sake of observation and protocol, but that he was in good health, despite what he’d endured for 11 months.
We prayed that Hersh — like so many of us are doing this week — would one day get to escort his kids to their first day of school.
We prayed that Rachel’s dream for her son’s future would come true: that Hersh would live a happy life with his new bionic arm and that one day he’d become a grandfather.
We prayed that she and the other hostage families would cease needing to mark each passing day of their waking nightmare — the number of days their loved ones remained in captivity — on a piece of tape affixed to their chest.
Because Hersh — and every one of the hostages — would be home.
Mitzvot for our lost souls
But our prayers have been shattered. Instead, we grieve for Hersh, and we grieve for Alexander, Almog, Carmel, Eden and Ori, the five other innocent people whose bodies the Israeli military recovered over the weekend.
We grieve for the thousands of others who have lost their lives in the horrors of this war.
We grieve for all of them; any of them could have been our sibling, our grandchild, our child.
At Hersh’s funeral, his father, Jon Polin, said this to his only son: “The 23 years of life we had with you were a blessing. We will now work to make your legacy a blessing.”
I challenge you to make the legacy of Hersh and every other beautiful soul stolen on Oct. 7 and beyond a blessing by doing what we Jews call a mitzvah— a “kind deed”— for someone else this week.
Only then can we shed light on this abyss of darkness.
As we say in the Jewish tradition, may each of their memories be a blessing.