There is a young Israeli woman named Hadas Lowenstern. Her husband Elisha was killed fighting in Gaza in the early days of the war that followed October 7th. She was left a widow with six children. She has since remarried, rebuilt, and continued living with intention and with courage. In a video clip that has been making its way around the internet, Hadas says something that stopped me in my tracks: “The Hadas before is dead. A new Hadas has been born.” She doesn’t say this with bitterness. She says it with a clear-eyed steadiness that is almost more striking than grief itself. She is not eulogizing who she was. She is announcing who she is now, changed at the core, but fully, undeniably alive.
What struck me about her words wasn’t just the loss behind them. It was the precision of them. She didn’t say she had grown, or healed, or moved on. She said the old Hadas is gone. A new one took her place. Everything she had lived and loved wasn’t erased. It was the material the new Hadas was built from. But make no mistake: she is someone different now. And she knows it.
So here is the question I want to sit with: Does Scripture actually give us a framework for this kind of identity rupture, not as something to recover from, but as something to inhabit?
Indeed, it does. Completely and without apology. And the clearest example in all of Torah is a man named Yaakov.
Yaakov — Jacob — spends the first half of his life as someone whose very name describes his character. Yaakov comes from the root ekev, meaning heel. He grabbed his brother Esau’s heel coming out of the womb, and he spent decades living up to the name, maneuvering, strategizing, always working an angle. He tricks his blind father Yitzchak into giving him the blessing meant for his brother. He flees. He works. He builds a family. He survives. He is, in every sense of the word, a yaakov, a heel-grabber, a man who gets what he needs by being clever rather than direct.
And then comes the night that ends him.
Yaakov is alone on the bank of the Jabbok River, and a man, or an angel, or something else entirely, wrestles with him until the break of dawn. This is not a polite encounter. Yaakov‘s hip socket is wrenched out of place. He walks away limping. But here is what the text tells us happened before the sun rose:
“Vayomer lo mah sh’mecha? Vayomer Yaakov. Vayomer lo Yisrael yikareh shimcha ki sarita im Elohim v’im anashim vatuchal.” “He said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ And he said, ‘Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and you have prevailed.'” (Genesis 32:29)
Read that carefully. God, or His messenger, does not ask Yaakov his name because He doesn’t know it. He asks because Yaakov needs to say it out loud one final time. He needs to claim the old self before it is taken from him. Yaakov. Heel-grabber. That’s who I’ve been. And then the new name lands like a hammer: Yisrael, one who strives with God. One who wrestles and does not let go. One who comes out limping and victorious at the same time.
The man who crossed back over the Jabbok River was not the same man who had camped there the night before. And the text is honest about this: he limps. The wound is real. The change is not metaphorical. Something in Yaakov genuinely died at the Jabbok, and someone named Yisrael crossed back into the daylight.
Hadas Lowenstern understands this instinctively. She did not say “I’ve grown through this” or “I’ve learned so much.” She said: I am someone new. The old me is gone. This is not denial. This is not bravado. This is the most honest thing a human being can say after they have passed through something that rewrites them from the inside.
The God of Israel is not afraid of rupture. He is not a God who only works with the polished and intact. He meets people in the dark, lets the wrestling go all night, and when the sun comes up, He gives a new name to whoever refused to let go.
