Rachel Frenkel is the dean of students at Nishmat, the Jeanie Schottenstein Center for Advanced Torah Study for Women, and the director of Matan’s Hilkhata Institute at Matan Women’s Institute for Torah Studies.

The Jerusalem Post described Frenkel as “a symbol of the period of unprecedented social unity, prayer and faith, a period that carried on into the rocket-racked days of Operation Protective Edge,” after her 16-year-old son Naftali was kidnapped and murdered along with two other teens, Eyal Yifrach and Gilad Shaar, in June 2014.

Frenkel recently led a discussion at Beit Avraham Yoseph Toronto Congregation in Thornhill, organized by the BAYT Sisterhood and the Canadian Friends of Nishmat, about the loss of her son and how her life and the climate in Israel has changed since then.

In the time since your son was murdered, you’ve been seen as a public figure, a national heroine, a strong female religious leader. Are you comfortable with these labels?

[Laughter] None of them. It’s not that I’m shy or humble. I’m trying to stay away from labels and just do the things that we feel connected to and that are important to us both in the field of Torah learning and involvement of women in Torah and in this thing that I’ve been thrown into – reluctantly is an understatement. I would not choose this for obvious reasons, but beyond the tragic side, and that never goes away, there was tremendous… it creates awe.

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You stand in front of the people and in a world where so many people are murdered all the time and nobody winks, here there were three kids who didn’t come home from school and millions of Jews around the world lost sleep over it. It is almost miraculous, and we felt so grateful for the support and everything that was going on at every stage – if it was prayers, if it was rallies, if it was memorials – the whole idea that the whole Jewish world stood together like that, it speaks volumes about who we are and who we could strive to be. My role in this is really minor. It is the people that presented themselves.

I can say this about Israelis, and I know it is partially true also about Jews around the world: when Jews remember it, they remember the tragedy, but they also like who they were at the time. Something about our self-image. We showed our best at that time, and the ability of different segments of the Jewish world to stand together, to pray together, to connect, it can’t be taken for granted.

You are often widely praised for your grace and composure, and I think it comforted a lot of people. From where did you pull your strength at that time?

I don’t feel comfortable with that description. We dealt with things very intuitively as things came, and sometimes I feel like saying with so much support, zeh lo chochmah (it’s not hard).

In a difficult world, we derive strength from whatever gives us strength, and if I have a share in that, it is a blessing, and I take no credit for that. We all play our roles in trying to do more good in the world.

I don’t know, I might be embarrassed, I don’t have an objective view, and I don’t think anything we did was extraordinary. That is why I’m uncomfortable.

During that time Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora were praying and grieving together, but do you feel that Jews living abroad can even truly feel one with Israel in these circumstances?

In Israel, they say we are very good in emergency situations, but in day-to-day life, we’re not so nice to each other. Of course, I wish our everyday experience would be much more solidarity, etc., etc., but the mere fact that we are capable of being there is part of our identity. I think it is something to aspire to and build towards. We don’t always have to be at the peak, as long as we are in the right direction.

Have there been any long-lasting effects?

That’s a difficult question. I remember after that summer, a few weeks after it was all over, there were two images I was playing with. One was of a person walking in the dark and they are stumbling and can’t find their way, and then there is lightning, which shows the reality that surrounds them and the lightning goes away and it is dark again and they are stumbling again but they have some inner knowledge of where they’re at. It’s truth, it is not an illusion.

And then on the other hand, when I was asking myself, “Will any of this last?” I was given the metaphor of a person that experienced love. And that couple might have not worked out eventually, but it’s a life-transforming experience.

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Hopefully, some things did stay with us. And sometimes the memory of that story, of that summer, evokes or awakens that place in us. There are no one-summer solutions to anything. In Israel, a few months later, we were in the middle of an election period and it was back to normal.

In your role as an educator, with women in particular, there are some people who see you as a feminist in the Orthodox world. Do you consider yourself to be a feminist?

I’m sure everything we are enjoying today in the development of Torah by women is directly related to the feminist movement – not the movement, but the changing role women are taking in the world in general. On my side, it would be an ingratitude to badmouth feminism in any way, because I think women all over the Jewish world, especially the ones taking their place in learning, in religious commitment, in religious involvement – and I’m talking in the Orthodox world at the moment – they are all gaining from the changes in women’s standing in the last 100 years or so. The way the question is presented, it’s as if it is a bad word. I don’t have a problem with the word, and I’m thankful to think that it enabled so much for us.

My major motivation is not a gender motivation, but a Torah motivation. I seek Torah because this is what I wish for. This is what I want to develop. This is where my religious life wants to grow. It is not the gender agenda pushing this, but definitely, it has enabled a lot of what has happened. The motivation is a love of Torah. It is a religious motivation. It is wanting to grow to the highest levels within Jewish life, and Jewish life was always connected to learning. If you don’t learn, you don’t experience the religious value of Torah life.

This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.