Rachel Goldberg Polin was a regular woman living a regular life in Jerusalem, American-born, Israeli by choice, mother of five. She was anonymous. Ordinary. Blessed. Then, on October 7, 2023, her eldest child and only son, Hersh, was ripped from a music festival in the Negev desert alongside 251 others taken hostage, on a day when Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 people in Israel. Hersh was held in the tunnels of Gaza, starved and tortured, for 328 days before he was killed. Since then, she has written a memoir, When We See You Again. I have not been able to put it down. And last night I came to the chapter on Shabbat. She calls it the source of all blessing in her life. And she means it.
How does a mother who lost her son to the worst kind of darkness look at the weekly day of rest and say that?
Every Friday, no matter the season, there is chaos, the rush to get everyone showered, food on the table, candles lit before sundown. And then it stops. For Rachel, the walk to synagogue on Friday night with her family was the most sacred time of her entire week. No phones. No distractions. Just her people, moving through the streets of Jerusalem as the week finally released its grip. She could feel the weight of everything begin to lift. The family was together, actually together, in a way the other six days never quite allowed.
This is what the beloved Friday night poem Lecha Dodi, written by the Kabbalist Rabbi Shlomo HaLevi Alkabetz, is reaching for when it addresses Shabbat as mekor habracha, the source of blessing. Not a source among many. The source. Goldberg Polin put it this way to her children when they were younger:
“If you find yourself happy on a Wednesday morning, if something good lands in the middle of an ordinary week, it is a ripple from Shabbat.”
The goodness doesn’t originate in the Wednesday. It was stored somewhere earlier, in the candles, in the walk, in the gathering of people you love around a table. Shabbat holds the foundation.”
She also writes about the custom of blessing children before the Friday night meal, parents laying hands on their children’s heads, calling blessing down over each one. Each child, she says, brings extra light into the world. Each candle lit on Shabbat eve is an act of that same truth. The light multiplies. It is not incidental that this happens on Shabbat, it happens here because this is where the blessing lives, and this is where it gets passed on.
After Hersh was murdered, Rachel writes that she has struggled terribly on Shabbat. The day that had been her most sacred became the hardest to bear. And yet, she also writes about the last Shabbat before October 7th. Because it was Shabbat, her whole family was together. No one had gone anywhere yet. The day of rest had kept them in the same place, in the same rooms, present to each other. Whatever goodbye she had with Hersh in those last ordinary hours was possible because Shabbat had gathered her family. She calls it a gift that only Shabbat could have given her. The source of all blessings, even the the most horrifying of times, will always come from Shabbat.
God did not stumble into rest. He worked, six full days of creation, each one intentional, each one building toward something. And on the seventh day He did not simply stop. He built the rest. He wove the blessing, the goodness, deliberately into the fabric of time itself, so that it would show up week after week, whether we deserve it or not. And let me tell you a secret. No matter what, we are always deserving of Shabbat. Shabbat is not an accident. It is a gift that was constructed for all eternity.
We are invited to meet the Shabbat in the same way, not passively, but actively. The prophet Isaiah said:
Rabbi Alkabetz knew this line, and wrote it into Lecha Dodi, in a later stanza. When we sing it every week at the start of Shabbat we are acknowledging that entering this day is the holist and most deliberate of choices we can make. You shake off the week. You rise toward what God already prepared. The blessing is there, it has been there since the beginning of time, but you have to walk toward it.
The commandment to keep Shabbat has always been more than just acknowledging it. And more than just stopping work. To actively build something, to light the candles when the week has emptied you, to gather your people and be present to them before another seven days pulls you apart again. The goodness does not renew itself. You renew it, week after week, by rising toward it.
Rachel Goldberg Polin has every reason to let Shabbat go. Instead, she is working, her word, to find again why it is the source of blessing for her. That is not passive grief. That is hitnari me’afar kumi. That is a woman shaking off the heaviest dust imaginable and choosing to rise.
Whatever this week has cost you, rise. Shabbat is waiting, and the blessing is still there. But you have to walk toward it.
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