“Justice, justice you shall pursue.”

It is the most famous phrase from this week’s Torah portion. It’s one of the most famous phrases from all of Torah.

But it is too late for the six Israeli hostages who were murdered last weekend. Ripped from their homes, the arms of their loved ones, and from a peace-filled music festival, they became, even in death, pawns in a struggle between warring governments. As are the remaining 100 or so hostages who are still in captivity.

How can we pursue justice when we can’t agree on what is just and right?

I stared at that last sentence for a long time. I don’t know the answer.

Exactly 52 years ago, on September 5, 1972, the Israeli Olympic team was attacked in the Munich Olympic village by Palestinian terrorists. Two Israelis died that day, nine more during a botched rescue attempt for those who were taken hostage.

Which brings us today, and a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun.

Perhaps that is why something startling and beautiful happened among the thousands who lined the streets this week, waiting for the funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents fought so hard, so publicly, to save their son.

Inexplicably, the crowd began to sing the mournful line from the high holiday liturgy, Avinu Malkeinu:

“Our Father, our King: favor us and answer us for we are undeserving; deal with us charitably and kindly and save us.”

The Israeli writer Daniel Gordon wrote, “I’ll confess to having been momentarily taken aback when the thousands of people assembled began to sing … I wondered why the person who began singing had chosen it.

“Maybe, I thought, simply because the words are so very, very true. Because … in so many ways, in ways more numerous than we could begin to point to, we desperately need to be saved.”

How do we begin? Together.

And perhaps we begin by revisiting the phrase “justice, justice you shall pursue.” My friend Rabba Claudia Marbach reminded me that the Torah, notoriously parsimonious with words, repeated the word justice for a reason.

She gave several interpretations, but the one that most resonated with me was this: “The doubling reminds us that justice must always be coupled with rachamim, compassion, which we emphasize in our Rosh HaShanah prayers.”

Justice and compassion. The path to peace, to reconciliation, to freedom from the chains of a situation that has so deeply enmeshed two neighboring communities that it seems impossible to achieve.

Just days ago, I wrote that we are stardust. True. And we are so much more. The Torah teaches that God scooped up dust from the ground and breathed God‘s breath into it, and that’s how humans were created.

We come from the lowest and the highest, merged together into the improbability that is humankind.

We are dust, and we are souls who reach for the stars, reaching back to that from which we were created.

And any Israeli will tell you the secret to the tiny nation’s success: The impossible is only impossible until we make it possible.

Together.