Email to Slifka Students, from Senior Rabbi Alex Ozar, PhD, February 20, 2025
On That Very Day
Dear Slifka family,
We join the Jewish world in pain and compounded grief at the sight of the coffins bearing what are believed to be the remains of Oded Lifshitz and Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel Bibas. And in outrage and disbelief as we mark the now more than 500 days of captivity for those not yet returned. The pain has been ongoing but it is uniquely focused and pointed today.
Jewish tradition contains two blessings titled ha-tov v-ha-metiv (“Who is good and who does good.”) One, as I shared last month, is recited upon hearing tidings of joyous import for a collective. The other is the fourth paragraph of the birkat ha-mazon (the blessing after meals), which offers praise for God’s general beneficence toward us and includes the phrase “Who has done good for us, and who will do good for us.” According to the Talmud, this blessing, which has no reference to food in particular, was added to the regular birkat ha-mazon “on the very day that the slain of Beitar were handed over for burial” (Berachot 48b). These were individuals killed in battle against the Romans, and it was only after a significant period in which the bodies were cruelly withheld, compounding the pain and loss, that the Emperor Hadrian allowed the Jews to bury their dead. On that very day we thanked the God who has done good, in that “the bodies have not deteriorated” (ibid) and the God who will do good, as “they were handed over for burial” (ibid). And this dual thanks, so poignantly brought forth on that very day, was promptly woven into the daily fabric of Jewish consciousness and practice.
I wonder if the reason it was so clear that we would need to recite this blessing not only on that day but every day, after every meal, is how obviously, endlessly difficult it was and is to truly and fully thank God under such circumstances. This was never a state of soul we could achieve in a single day, or year, or lifetime. There is too much pain, too much shock, too much legitimate refusal to accept that this is how things are.
And so, yes, we today are relieved that at least we can give these sweet children of Israel a proper burial, and we must somehow, in time, give thanks for that. But right now we are and will be for the foreseeable future awash in grief and confusion and anger. And so we turn, less to an in-the-moment expression of gratitude than to a disciplined, daily regimen of discerning and acknowledging glimmers of divine beneficence where we can. Only in this way might we be able to steadily, gradually, cultivate the resilience to somehow continue, as we ultimately must, our work of bringing goodness into so broken a world.
Kol tuv,
Rabbi Alex S. Ozar, PhD
Campus Rabbi and Co-Director, JLIC at Yale