TIMES OF ISRAEL
The Weight of Words: Hearing Rachel Goldberg-Polin Speak
Peter Himmelman
May 4, 2026

…Early on, Rachel described feeling as though she had left this world entirely after Hersh’s abduction and murder. A friend was extremely helpful,” she said. “A Breslov Chossid — you know, long peyos, beard, the real deal — and also a psychiatrist with a medical degree from Brown…..He did not attempt to coax her back down into ordinary language or refute her feeling of existing elsewhere. “He told me,” Rachel said, “that I wasn’t entirely in this world anymore. That part of me was now in Olam Haba.”…What is Olam Haba? It refers to the “World to Come,” the world beyond the one we presently inhabit, beyond the rote and the overly familiar, beyond the normal shapes of trees, the ordinary sounds of birds, the commonness of water — or even of words themselves. READ MORE