Think Again - Saving Grace

“Saving grace” is that one redeeming quality that makes a person or situation easier to handle and easier to cope with. When everything else seems to be falling apart, when everything looks and feels hopeless, there is that one small bright light in the depths of our being that makes it more bearable - more survivable.

That is your saving grace.

The visit of the President of Israel to our shores, to the site of Australia’s worst-ever terrorist attack was a saving grace. President Isaac Herzog, together with First Lady Michal Herzog, spent four days here offering compassion, comfort, and love.

We are, after all, family. We are brothers and sisters. We are less than six degrees separated. Australian Jewry was shaken to the core by Bondi Beach, shaken by the brazen audacity of being hunted in public, in broad daylight. We were shaken, and we needed consoling. We needed reassurance. It did not always feel as though that reassurance was forthcoming from our own home. At times, it felt as though we, the victims, were being blamed.

President Herzog’s visit to Australia was a saving grace.

Miri and I, together with the President of Coogee Synagogue, Wilfred Lax, and his wife Elana Jacobs Lax, attended the deeply moving synagogue service at Bondi Chabad where the President spoke. Rabbi Ulman and his wife Shternie, together with their extended family, their daughter Chaya and grandchildren, were comforted. Adina Levitan and her family were comforted. The Russian community of Bondi, devastated by tragedy, felt embraced.

His visit was a visit from family. It was a shoulder to lean on. It was crying together. It was holding one another up. It was strength shared because we will need strength and koach to go forward. This is what Jews have done for millennia. It is what we are once again called upon to do now. His visit felt like a shiva visit.

President Herzog’s visit was a saving grace.

My daughter Simi has just arrived from Miami, Florida, together with her friend Chana Wasserman-Ainsworth, to pay a shiva visit to the Bondi Chabad widows, Chaya Schlanger and Adina Levitan, who lost their husbands, Rabbis Eli Schlanger and Yakov Levitan. They were classmates in the 2004 HSC year at Kesser Torah College.

All four women have suffered grievous loss. Simi lost her husband Shua to heart disease and is raising three young children on her own. Chana lost her parents, Itty and Zvi Ainsworth, in the tragic Miami building collapse of 2021 in which 98 people perished.

They have come simply to share - to cry, to sit, to weep, to lend a shoulder. What else can they do? What more can they give? How much more heartache can they collectively bear? Yet they will move forward for their sake and for their children’s sake.

Simi has become a tower of strength. She has embarked on a life of speaking and sharing because she knows she can bring comfort to those living with deep heartache. I am acutely aware of her daily struggle, her daily prayers. I see her strength.

Simi and Chana’s visit is a saving grace.

In my own rabbinate, I have saving grace. I have a rebbetzin. I have the merit of my parents and grandparents, in Hebrew, Zechut Avot - guiding me every step of the way. At times, I must walk narrow and uncertain bridges. Yet I feel guided in those crossings. The merit of my forebears steadies my steps and helps me make the right decisions, to reach the other side without fear.

Zechut Avot is my rabbinate’s saving grace.

As Prime Minister Gough Whitlam once famously said, words that still echo today: “Well may we say ‘God save the King,’ because nothing will save the Governor-General.” Those words marked a moment of national turning.

In our own way, we too find that there are moments when nothing seems to steady us, except grace.