Sarisleahsghost - She Herself Is A Haunted House

Edward Robert Hughes

British, 1851-1914

Hand details

“I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again. I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it.”

— Richard Siken, Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone

“He was ahead of his time because he had such deep feelings. He had the privilege of deep feelings because he was deeply loved by his mother, Gladys. He was able to appreciate profound beauty in sounds. And he started a musical revolution. They say all revolutions start from love.”

Elvis with Johnny Cash, c. 1957.

Barbra recording the soundtrack for Yentl

Beware of the ghosts tonight 🎃

(x)

Hey Alma

Praying For My Friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin

Editorial note: This article was originally published in October 2023. We are republishing it following the news that Hersh Goldberg-Polin a

Editorial note: This article was originally published in October 2023. We are republishing it following the news that Hersh Goldberg-Polin and five other hostages were killed by Hamas.

I don’t really know how to write this story, but it starts at Myahn’s house.

Myahn invited me for Shabbat dinner; we were attending the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies at the time, and the other guests were all Pardesniks. I don’t remember much about the day, not the weather, not the date, nor do I remember which of my friends comprised the other guests, to be honest with you. But I remember what Myahn’s apartment felt like, the entryway cramped with as many guests as she could muster, the kitchen filled with her savta’s recipes and her roommate’s baked goods. I remember the warmth of being with my friends at Shabbat dinner.

And I remember Hersh GP.

Myahn’s apartment was being leased to her, furnished by a family connected to the Pardes faculty. That’s how so many apartments work in our parts of Jerusalem – Jews come from all parts of the world to study Torah at Pardes for a year or two or three, and they find furnished apartments filled with other families’ sefarim (Jewish religious books) and become a temporary resident of an ever-changing home. These apartments link generations of yeshiva students who pass the keys to one another, who share beds and kosher kitchen utensils, torchbearers of Shabbat meals and Torah study.

That’s how I found Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s bentscher, a small booklet that contains Kiddush, Birkat HaMazon (Grace After Meals) and various songs we sing on Shabbat. Bentscher culture is real, and it is amazing. I’ve seen thousands of bentschers in my day, for weddings, brises, mitzvahs both bar and bat, and for the most part, they’re exactly the same.

Hersh’s was unique. It was made to celebrate his bar mitzvah and customized more than any bentscher I have ever seen. Serendipitously, it was handed to me, and I remember smiling – the front cover had water imagery, and his bar mitzvah portion was Parshat Noach (as in, Noah’s ark). Clever. And then I opened it, and fell in love with the Goldberg-Polin family. The front and back inside covers contained song parodies, written by Hersh’s Safta Leah and Bubbie Marcy. Each page was filled with pictures of Hersh and his family, all lanky and smiling.

I think I interrupted whatever conversation my friends were having to show them the bentscher, in particular the wonderful parody of “Edelweiss” written by Safta Leah. We immediately sang it together.

Hersh G P Hersh G P

Jon and Rachel they bore you

Fun and bright

Sheer delight

This is why we adore you.

Interest in sports and with sharp retorts

Reads and learns most daily

Hersh GP

We agree

Now a perfect Israeli.

I don’t think I can really describe how weirdly obsessed we (OK, mostly I) were with Hersh. We sang his other songs (to the tunes of “The Marines’ Hymn,” “Old MacDonald” and “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean,” all certified bops). The small WhatsApp group we made to coordinate who would bring what to dinner, and what time we would eat, and all the other minutia of a Shabbat meal, was soon renamed “Hersh GP Fan club.” We were so enthralled by this guy and his bar mitzvah bentscher, without ever having met him.

After Shabbat, I posted about Hersh on my Instagram story. One of my followers saw it and sent it to Hersh, because all Jews know each other. Myahn also had mutual friends with him, and got his number and told him about my story. He replied, saying he’d always wanted to be famous. He sent me a selfie of him with his safta, saying he’d tried explaining to her that I loved her songs and posted them for thousands of people to see. She replied, “Doesn’t she have anything better to be doing with her time?”

It was an honor and privilege to be roasted by Safta Leah.

Hersh sent me pictures of his sisters’ bentschers and the personalized songs his grandmothers had written, based on “Chad Gadya,” “Oh My Darlin’ Clementine,” “Doe A Deer,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Bicycle Built for Two” and “I Have A Little Dreidel.” Soon after, a different friend randomly found Hersh’s parents’ wedding bentscher in another Jerusalem apartment. We’d sing Hersh’s “Edelweis” cover from time to time, a running in-joke for the Shabbat meal participants. We joked that we wanted Myahn to marry Hersh so Safta Leah and Bubbie Marcy would write her songs, too. I had custody of Hersh’s bentscher for my remaining time in Jerusalem, and I’d use it most weeks. It was such good, silly fun.

Two Shabbats ago, Hersh was abducted by Hamas terrorists from the festival and taken into Gaza.

I say this abruptly because the shock is what it felt like when I came across Hersh’s picture on my Twitter feed. It’s how I felt as more details have been released about Hersh’s kidnapping, and his extensive injuries. It’s how I feel now, every time I think about Hersh. Until now, this whole story was just a goofy anecdote from my group of friends at Pardes. Now that image of a silly bar mitzvah kid is shattered, and I shudder to think of where he is now.

I’ve never met Hersh GP in person, but the news that he was one of the festival-goers took the wind out of me. Because I know him. I know, thanks to the songs, that he only used to eat Wacky Mac and schnitzel. He likes the White Sox and the Chicago Bulls. As I write this, I cry. I think of his family, whose pictures I looked at so often, the grandmothers who so lovingly wrote these odes to their grandson. I think of his friends, and his parents’ friends, and his sisters and everyone who knows him, waiting in agony for any news they may receive.

And then I remember that the Goldberg-Polins are one of over a hundred families currently feeling like this. And of thousands of families that are in pain.

Their pain feels immeasurable. This pain feels astronomical.

I don’t have a novel message about this conflict, nothing new to add to the outpouring of grief and fear that so many people are feeling right now. But this week’s Torah portion is Parashat Noach – the 10th anniversary of Hersh’s bar mitzvah.

I think maybe that when Noah was on his ark, he couldn’t imagine seeing dry land again after being in the storm for so long. The ebb and flow of the water – unsettled, unforgiving and so vastly deep – became his new normal so quickly. But, as we know, a rainbow was just around the corner. A dove was close by.

I don’t think any of us can imagine rainbows right now, nor do we particularly want to.

All I can think about is my family and friends caught up in the conflict, about the victims of horrendous terror that we cannot begin to imagine, about families waiting to be reunited with their loved ones.

All I can think about is Hersh Goldberg-Polin. All I can do is pray for Hersh GP.

I saved this article months ago. It touched my heart deeply and was so illustrative of the connection we felt to Hersh, to his family, to the hostages, to each other, through all of this. The intention in my mind was to post it when he came home. I was so sure he’d come home.

And then a month ago that hope was shattered forever, and we all endured the heartbreak of knowing he, and the five beautiful people held captive with him, were never going to have the joyous reunions we’d dreamed of for them. I considered sharing it then, when we got the news, but the grief was such a raw thing. When I learned his birthday was only a few days before the first yahrzeit of the October 7th pogrom, I decided to save it for his memory on this day. Yesterday, I learned his Hebrew birthday this year falls on 10/7. They just recovered his blanket from the Nova Festival, drifting all this time in the lost and found.

May his light, and the light of Eden, Carmel, Almog, Ori, and Alex, of all the other hostages who have lost their lives, and all the souls taken on that dark Shabbat, continue to illuminate this world with the courage to make change and the hope for peace. May we remember them in goodness and love. May we hold onto the resilience of his mother Rachel’s words: stay strong. survive. May this new year usher in better days.

May the 101 remaining hostages return soon. bring them home.

i don't want to be making this post, i know none of you probably want to have to read this post, but i feel like i need to embed it into the establishing of this blog, and why, despite everything i built and created and shared there, the sense of community i thought i had, my previous one became unsafe.

if you are here, i am making the baseline assumption that you understand that the slaughter and torture of innocent people is wrong, will always be wrong, should never be celebrated, justified, or upheld as righteous, no matter who they are or where they come from or who's murdering them. i assume, even if you don't understand an entire complex situation or thousands of years of history (something you can do some cursory research on if you feel so inclined and would rather not spread harmful misinformation and outright bigotry about anyone), that you would not suggest that infant children deserve to be eradicated because of the country they were born, that women being brutalized don't deserve it because of actions committed by their government (a government many of them oppose). i assume that you understand that a terrorist organization that has written in their charter that their entire goal is the elimination of a specific people - regionally and worldwide - and causes active oppression, harm, and death to their own innocent people because they are more hellbent on killing and destruction than advocating for anyone (much less human rights), is not a bastion of freedom and dignity, and that conflating them is not only detrimental, but racist. i assume you understand that a right wing authoritarian government does not mean its people deserve to be massacred in their homes.

i assume you would not advocate for more violent death under the guise of progressive values. i assume you would not think that myself and half of my own family, unconnected to this by anything but shared ancient ethnicity, deserve to be exterminated. i assume you would find that inhumane and distressing to suggest.

i assume. but this is no longer something i know.

there have been people - mutuals, friends, i communicated with - who, over the past two weeks proved that none of this holds true for them. there were people instantly celebrating these deaths (that, in fact, was how the news was broken to me - by mutuals' jubilation over mass murder on my dash). there were people immediately justifying that, calling it necessary, saying that even the brutal assault of women "just has to happen" (or didn't happen at all, this from proclaimed "believe women" feminists). there were people spreading openly genocidal rhetoric about how a specific group of people "deserves to be erased" or "i hope they're wiped off the earth," using slurs, praising or mocking or denying the holocaust, and this website's terms of service wouldn't classify that as hate speech worthy of termination. there were people intentionally sharing debunked infographics or misinformed headlines which were later corrected (but never reading the corrections) or outright lies that come directly from n*zi propaganda (wish i was kidding) to call for more violence. vive la revolucion! was used to defend people chanting things like "gas the jews!" right in front of me, every day. there were mutuals reblogging the most vile, hateful people on this website without vetting what they were saying at all (i have a list of them, if you ever need it. did you know, for example, that her*tageposts is a n*zi sympathizer and north korean regime defender under the guise of being "communist"? yeah). the dehumanization and bloodlust and hatred on my dash was unlike anything i've ever experienced online, and what's WORSE, what made it such an agonizing betrayal, was it came from people i thought were allies, people i'd stand beside, who i thought understood and cared about human rights enough to not lust for murder and harm and destruction. i was, it turns out, wrong. all they needed was a reason.

on the surface, i know i am very disconnected from the horrors of this - i have no family in the region, by strict definition this is only half of my heritage. though as my dad would say, whether to g-d or the n*zis and their ilk, "half" doesn't matter. you are who you are, enfolded all the same. i have always loved and been proud of that. even when i was harassed and bullied and threatened and assaulted in my first two years of high-school about it. i always thought it was a beautiful thing to be a part of. i never felt terror around it until these past two weeks. i was consciously aware, but never felt it viscerally in my bones and like a weight on my chest, that people would want me dead. or if they did, they would be condemned as terrible, as fringe extremists, as far-right agitators. except that's not where this was coming from - this was coming from my own ideological side. this was coming from "friends." i don't think i can describe what that betrayal feels like or how profoundly wounding it is. people far more affected than i, far more connected and impacted, reached out to me in their hurt and anxiety, afraid of their mutuals, afraid of saying anything even remotely empathetic out loud, afraid of being attacked.

i have had tough things going on in my direct daily life for the past two weeks, but because of all this, i've barely slept. i can't remember the last day i got more than a few hours. i haven't cried this much since angel died. i have never felt such a pervasive sense of fear and despair. i never had panic attacks simply logging into my blog.

so again i say, if you're here, i assume you wouldn't participate in this. i assume you'd understand why it's dangerous and painful. i assume if i expressed grief or concern over the horrific loss of any human life, you wouldn't tell me i deserved it too. but this is not a certainty. this is not something i'll ever again know for sure. and if you're not, if you disagree with me that quantifying innocent lives' value *anywhere* with, "yes, but-," you don't have to stay, and i won't hold it against you. and if you're here, i love you, and i can only hope you're a safe person for me to interact with and love. but thats's what these past days and this rhetoric has done to me. and it's going to take me some time to not feel like the walls are closing in and to heal from that, though i know i won't forget it. so i hope you understand if i'm a little sad and a little skittish. i hope you don't mind that my most basic principle is that living beings of all kinds have sanctity, and no one deserves to die.

via shagey_