Rachel has shared numerous times the idea that her “family is comprised of normal people to whom an ab-normal, quite rare brand of torture happened.” Part of what makes Rachel’s writing so accessible is that we can see a lot of ourselves in her and her family, whether or not you agree that she is “normal.”

• How do you feel connected to Rachel and her story?
• What are the ways you see yourself in her story?
• Rachel writes about the connection not just between her and Hersh, but also between mothers and daughters and mothers and sons. Does the way she speaks of family resonate with you?

This reading guide is available to anyone, at any time, including questions previously discussed in the SVIVAH reading group. This feels fitting for the way the book itself moves through time: it’s not linear as we often expect narratives to be. Instead, it keeps circling back and forth through time and story.

• Does the movement through time in the book feel familiar to your own experiences of grief or loss?
• Does the structure change the way you experience Rachel’s story as a reader?
• Does this make it easier or more difficult to read?

It was so important for us at SVIVAH to read the book in community. This need led many of us to share Rachel’s book with friends and loved ones. No one could argue that this is an “easy” read, but many share our feeling that it is an important read.

• How would you introduce or explain this book to a friend?
• Is this book Torah? A teaching tool? Sacred text? A memoir? All of the above?
• If you only had 140 characters on a gift tag, what would you write? What themes would you highlight, or how would you offer an overview? Is this a book about October 7th? A book about motherhood? A book about grief? A book about Israel?
• How might you describe this book to someone who isn’t Jewish or who isn’t familiar with October 7th?

Many of us were already familiar with Hersh’s story and Rachel’s powerful advocacy before we started to read her book.

• What new information or perspectives did you learn from this retelling? What questions are you still left wondering about?

Throughout the book, Rachel is extraordinarily willing to be vulnerable. She is frank about her grief: how it felt physically and emotionally, what brought comfort, what felt unhelpful, and even experiences that she initially rejected but later came to see differently with time and perspective.

The book contains countless examples of people trying to help, both more and less successfully. Rachel is teaching us so much about community care as she reflects on practical support, emotional support, religious ritual, friendship, advocacy, presence, silence, and the challenge of accompanying someone through unimaginable suffering that cannot be fixed.

• Rachel often returns to the importance of responding to the person in front of you, rather than making assumptions about what they need. How did that theme resonate with you? What do you make of her advice to ask, “What does this person need?” rather than, “What would I want in this situation?”
• What does this book suggest about the role or roles of community in helping people to endure grief? What lessons do you take away from Rachel’s experiences for your own family, friendships, or community?
• What examples of support stood out to you as particularly meaningful or effective? Were there examples that surprised you, either because they were helpful or because they weren’t?
• How did Rachel’s experiences of grief interact with ritual and community? What role do structured communal responses to grief play? What might people from other traditions learn from them?

At one point in our initial WhatsApp group, R’ Dalia Davis shared:

“Reading Rachel’s words feels like paying a Shiva call.”

Shiva is the Jewish practice of gathering with mourners in the days immediately following a death. Family, friends, and community come together to offer comfort, listen, share memories, and help ensure that those who are grieving do not have to carry their loss alone.

R’ Dalia wrote:

“So much of visiting someone when they are sitting Shiva is about quietly listening as they speak about their loved ones and learning from them. It is truly special to be able to learn about the person who passed away from the people who were closest to them.”

• Does this resonate with you? How would you compare reading the book and hearing Rachel’s stories about Hersh with sitting Shiva? What lessons about Shiva do you take away from the book?

Others held hostage with Hersh have recalled that he often shared the idea that “he who has a why can bear any how.” This idea was originally coined by Friedrich Nietzsche and later quoted in the memoir of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

Or Levy, who survived 491 days of captivity and spent three of those days together with Hersh, found Hersh’s mantra so meaningful that he had the words tattooed on his arm in Hersh’s memory.

• Did your “why” come into focus or shift as you read and reflected?
• Rachel writes, “I will carry your why around the world.” What does it mean to inherit someone else’s “why”? How do you feel about Rachel’s immense commitment to publicly sharing Hersh’s story?

Rachel suggests that “hope is mandatory.” For many in the initial SVIVAH reading group, the idea of finding hope in Rachel’s story felt challenging. For others, just the idea of reading her book together and lifting her and Hersh’s story felt necessary and hopeful.

• What does it mean for hope to be mandatory rather than optional? Did this phrase land as comforting, demanding, impossible, or something else?
• Does the book feel hopeful to you? What hope are you carrying?
• How did your ideas about, or feelings of, hope shift as you read Rachel’s words?
• What do we learn from Rachel’s story, and how does this book change us or the way we see the world?