This story begins with an iconic Yiddish song translated below:
Let us reconcile, my Father in Heaven,
I am your child, take me back once more.
Too long have I wept, too long wandered in darkness,
I need Your love, I need Your gaze.
Let us reconcile, my Father in Heaven,
Let peace be renewed as in days of old.
Your child returns, with trembling and with longing,
Embrace me again, my Father, my King.
The Yiddish devotional plea “Lomir Zikh Iberbetn” Let us reconcile, Father in Heaven—was not merely sung by the famed cantor Yossele Rosenblatt in Eretz Israel in 1933; the words became more than music, they became a child’s trembling confession, a desperate call to be embraced again.
It is said that Rav Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook commented that hearing Rosenblatt was “like listening to angels.” It was not performance but revelation: reconciliation is never far.
For Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, repentance (teshuvah) was never a cold courtroom drama between judge and accused, but the drama of homecoming and reconciliation. “The sinner who returns,” he wrote in *On Repentance (Al Hateshuva), “does not stand before a tyrant king or a vengeful ruler, but before a loving and caring Father, who receives him with open arms.”
Words of rebuke themselves become words of memory, and memory bends back into love. As Jeremiah teaches: “Whenever I speak of him, I surely remember him still.”
Speech triggering memory?
Modern science, remarkably, affirms this. Speech itself triggers memory: to speak aloud is to carve remembrance into body and soul. Neuroscience has shown that spoken rehearsal activates not only memory centers like the hippocampus but also the motor and auditory circuits of speech, forging deeper memory traces. As psychologists Glenberg and Robertson argue, language is deeply embodied: to speak is to engage the body in remembering. Neisser, too, called such spoken retelling “narrative rehearsal,” where memory is socially anchored and thereby strengthened.
Speech awakens memory; memory awakens compassion and redemption. To utter a name is to recall a bond, and in recalling, to redeem it.
“Ephraim, a precious son to Me
Whenever I speak of him, I surely remember him still.”
It was the second day of Rosh Hashanah in the late 1970s at the Maimonides synagogue in Brookline, Massachusetts.
The air was hushed, the parchment unrolled, the Haftara from Jeremiah 31 chanted by Rabbi Professor Haym Soloveitchik, the Rav’s son, then in his middle age.
……
9. With weeping they shall come, and with compassion I will guide them. I will lead them to streams of water, by a straight path in which they shall not stumble. For I am a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn.
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12. They shall come and sing aloud on the heights of Zion; they shall be radiant over the bounty of the Lord—over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd. Their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.
…….
18. I indeed hear Ephraim lamenting: “You chastised me, and I was chastised, like an untrained calf. Bring me back that I may return, for You are the Lord my God.
The air was heavy with the promise of redemption and reconciliation.
Then came the words that pierced deepest:
20. Ephraim a precious son to Me, a delightful child. Every time I speak of him, I surely remember him still. Therefore, My heart yearns for him; I will surely have compassion upon him—declares the Lord.
At that moment, the Rav slowly, almost as if to prolong the moment, lifted his head and rested his gaze on his son at the reader’s desk. It was not a casual glance; his face melted into tenderness. It was a gaze that seemed to gather past and future into the present moment. His soft eyes held love, admiration, and pride.
At that moment, the Rav’s face became a living commentary on the verse. His lined features softened as memory, love, and longing welled up together. The sound of his son’s voice now carried the weight of years, collapsing past into present.
For me, that moment was an *Augenblick*. A moment, a fleeting instant embedded in my memory forever. In that synagogue, the verse of Jeremiah lived again, embodied in the Rav’s eyes, in the son’s voice, in the sacred hush of the congregation.
They say that the Soloveitchiks and the Briskers are cold and emotionless, and I say we do not know where to look...
Let us reconcile our Father in Heaven
I am your child, take me back once more.
Itzhak David Goldberg MD, FACR is Professor Emeritus Albert Einstein College of Medicine