Our Cover

The outspoken Rachel Goldberg-Polin has become the emblem for families of the more than 240 seized by Hamas in the attack on Israel October 7, 2023 and taken captive into Gaza. She appears on our cover, and below we see her holding the Torah she and her husband had commissioned in honor of their son Hersh, then still alive in captivity. His left arm was blown off by a grenade in the initial attack, and he survived in Gaza almost eleven months before he was murdered in a narrow Gaza underground tunnel. His body was recovered by Israeli forces a day or two later, on August 31, 2024.

This poem by Rachel Goldberg-Polin was first published in Lilith in winter 2023–24, soon after the October 7 attack.

One Tiny Seed

There is a lullaby that says your mother will cry a thousand
tears before you grow to be a man.
I have cried a million tears in the last 67 days.
We all have.
And I know that way over there
there’s another woman
who looks just like me
because we are all so very similar
and she has also been crying.
All those tears, a sea of tears
they all taste the same.
Can we take them
gather them up,
remove the salt
and pour them over our desert of despair
and plant one tiny seed.
A seed wrapped in fear,
trauma, pain,
war and hope
and see what grows?
Could it be
that this woman
so very like me
that she and I could be sitting together in 50 years
laughing without teeth
because we have drunk so much sweet tea together
and now we are so very old
and our faces are creased
like worn-out brown paper bags.
And our sons
have their own grandchildren
and our sons have long lives
One of them without an arm
But who needs two arms anyway?
Is it all a dream?
A fantasy? A prophecy?
One tiny seed.