Just before Shabbat, on my recent trip to Israel, I received a message on Facebook from a man I’d never met. It arrived without preamble, without any attempt at persuasion. It was simply there, waiting for me. He wrote of the loss of his daughter. Of grief, yes, but also of something more difficult to describe: the strange, suspended condition that follows such a loss, when the world continues in its ordinary way while yours has been permanently altered. He wrote of the difficult, necessary work of continuing on in its aftermath. Not moving on. Continuing on.

His words carried that unmistakable quality of truth, the kind that does not argue for itself. It simply stands. I was deeply moved. And even though it was getting close to the time when the afternoon gives way to evening, I called him.

We spoke until the final moments before Shabbat began, when the weekday world falls away. When the emails go unanswered. When the phones go silent. When the illusion that we are the authors of our own momentum is, for a brief time, mercifully withdrawn. Our conversation had the feeling of something old and familiar. It was as though we were not introducing ourselves but remembering something that had long been known. 

The following Sunday, he came to my show in Jerusalem. I saw him before he saw me. He was standing quietly, taking everything in, neither apart from it nor entirely of it. When we met face to face, there was no awkwardness, none of the tentative gestures that usually accompany a first meeting. Not as a stranger, but as something closer. A friend. A brother.

His name is Chaim Richman.

He is a teacher of the first order. A sensitive soul, possessed of immense knowledge and tremendous strength of character — two qualities not often found in the same person.

In the weeks that followed, he invited me to join him on his podcast. I was honored to accept. We spoke about creativity, spirituality, loss, and the mystery and endurance of Jewish peoplehood. We spoke about the nature of redemption, the way a song can sometimes carry what cannot be spoken, the strange persistence of faith, even, and perhaps especially, in those who have been given reason to abandon it.

We spoke, too, about the possibility that what binds us together is not only shared history or shared belief, but shared longing: to make meaning from what has been broken, and to offer that meaning, however incomplete, back to the world.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)