There are times when we are struck by the simplest things: the shape of a tree, even one we’ve seen hundreds of times, or the sound of a bird in the morning as we wake. The one that’s been chirping for months outside our bedroom window. And now, for some reason, on this particular day at this particular time, we detect something we hadn’t stopped to consider. Or water, the very idea of water, which had become so common it no longer deserved a moment of our attention. Or words. How many words have we spoken or heard, read and forgotten, used to defend ourselves or to cheat others or to seduce or to betray, until at some point the words themselves seemed bereft of their ability to convey meaning?

Yesterday evening, my wife and I went to hear Rachel Goldberg-Polin use her words.

Those simple things formed from the interaction of teeth and tongue, palate and lips, a strand of flesh vibrating somewhere in the back of the throat like the string of a guitar. Today, having heard Rachel’s words, I have become once again astonished at their power, reawakened to their strangeness and to their potentially infinite value.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, to remind you, is the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the young man taken captive by Hamas terrorists after his left arm was blown off below the elbow while attempting to throw a live grenade out of a roadside shelter packed with young people. “It was as big a space as my bathroom,” Rachel said. He was held, tortured, starved, and eventually murdered in cold blood along with five other captives in a tunnel beneath Gaza.

So you see, Rachel has not only words at her disposal, but a story to tell.

“My name is Rachel Goldberg,” she said at the outset. “How many Rachel Goldbergs do you know?”

The crowd assembled at Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles laughed immediately. Every American Jew knows at least five or six........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)