On a typical Shabbat, a full synagogue might hold a handful of travelers needing to say a special blessing, a mother who recently gave birth saying the same, perhaps a bar mitzvah boy his first time rising to bless the Torah, and three or four mourners reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish.

But when the time came for Kaddish that morning, the entire sanctuary—hundreds of congregants—rose as one. A chorus of voices echoed, “Yitgadal v’yitkadash shmei raba” (May His great name be exalted and sanctified). Every one of them was standing for a loved one lost on Simchat Torah of that year, or in the grueling months that followed.

The sheer volume of their grief brought another memory rushing back. A year earlier, in the synagogue at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, I had witnessed the exact inverse. There, a sudden line had formed: half a dozen fathers waiting to name their newborn daughters, alongside families celebrating three different circumcisions.