An Episode of Tears | Healing through Jewish Wisdom

The conversation

Everything you believed in collapses all at once. One question, simple and brutal: where were you? And no answer to it settles anything. Gili Man Wolner knows that moment from up close. After a close friend of hers lost his only son in a terror attack, there was no room for tidy words of comfort, or for answers that put the world back in order. There was only staying inside the pain, without running away from it.

The truth

The episode was written after the only son of a close friend of hers, Shai, was murdered in a terror attack in Kiryat Arba.

Gili describes a deep crisis of faith in the face of the question of where divine providence was at the moment of the disaster.

She returns to the story of Job and to God's answer, which offers no comfort and only asks a question back.

Her connection with Shai started with a Facebook post and went on for three years without the two of them ever meeting in person, until the disaster happened.

They met face to face for the first time only after the murder, when she drove to Kiryat Arba to be there for him.

A book she found on the street the next morning, with a line in it about joy and sadness at the same time, felt to her like a sign of comfort.

Questions and answers

How did the connection between Gili and Shai start, and how did it grow?

It all started with a Facebook post. She wrote something, he disagreed and commented, she answered him back, and that started a discussion that turned over time into a deep connection. For three years they had philosophical heart-to-heart conversations without ever once seeing each other.

What did Gili find there that morning, and why did it touch her so much?

On a morning walk with her dog she found an abandoned children's book on a bench, and she felt right away that it had been waiting there for her. She opened a random page and came upon the question of whether it is possible to feel joy and sadness in the same moment, and that felt to her like a small answer, a touch of hope inside all the pain.

What did Gili do when she heard about the attack and tried to reach Shai?

She tried calling and sending messages and he didn't answer. She didn't know a single one of his friends and had no idea how he was, and she couldn't just sit at home, so she drove to Kiryat Arba, a place she had never been, to meet him face to face for the first time.

Gili's original episode description

In this episode I open my heart all the way.

This is a very personal episode, written after I lost, together with a close friend, the most precious thing he had: his only son, who was murdered in a terror attack.

We talk about pain that has no words, about the break in faith, about the silence in front of God, about the scream inside, and about how it is exactly there, in the most broken place, that it may be possible to find unity.

This is an episode about being human, about unexpected connections, about one real meeting in Kiryat Arba, about a bloodstained necklace inscribed with the words "I will sing to the Lord," and about a book found on the street like a sign from above.

This is an episode of tears. Not only of sadness, but of truth.