Everyone is grappling with their own private circumstances and horrors.
Mine? Being a member of the media tasked with covering events as they unfold, analyzing their implications, and providing some measure of support for readers. Finding images that convey the seriousness of what we’re enduring, without being too graphic.
Each wartime Magazine issue, October 13th, 20th, and now the 27th, has a distinct focus, bringing its own set of challenges.
That first week, it was pure shock and being at a loss for what I could possibly offer.
The second week, it was learning how to approach the stories of survivors, victims, and soldiers with honor.
This week, it’s been merely getting through the material.
The subject matter – speaking to individual hostage’s families – holds incredible gravitas. Too many in the world are antisemitic, arrogant, and unashamed, gaslighting our nation and our people, pretending events didn’t unfold as we saw them with our own eyes. That the terror we feel in every cell of our body is not real, that we are not victims but aggressors.
Bearing witness to the truth and sharing the testimony of hostages’ families, allowing them to express their pain, to tell us who their family member really is and how they so desperately want them back, could not be more important at this time.
So I force myself to plow on and look through the pictures of hostages Evyatar David, Nik Beizer, and Elya Cohen.
To see their sweet, beloved faces, and those of their ravaged families, and decide which to print.
To peruse the monstrous images of their captors (I don’t even want to say their movement’s name), may God eradicate them swiftly in our days, for images that will be appropriate but not overly frightening.
I’m grateful for this opportunity to do something to contribute. And I’m grateful that you, the readers, provide me with a space to distill my complicated emotions.
Books to get you through trauma
HAVING BEEN through my own personal grief journey this past year, I know it’s impossible to get through such experiences alone. I’ve relied on a few books to guide me through the trauma and toward the light (all on Amazon):
- A Time to Heal: The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Response to Loss and Tragedy by Mendel Kalmenson – I owe a big thank you to Rabbi Avraham and Nechama Dina Hendel, of Chabad of Baka, who gifted this to my family. (Also available in English and Hebrew at Jerusalem’s Heichal Menachem bookstore.)
- The Blessing of a Broken Heart by Sherri Mandell – I read this when it came out in 2003, and it made a lifelong impression: first, strengthening my desire to truly join up with the Jewish people in times of joy and pain, and make aliyah; then, how to grieve with honesty and dignity (I found myself thinking of phrases from it at various times this year). Sherri’s column on the page opposite this one provides further guidance.
- Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss – A traditional psychotherapist stumbles upon past-life regression, changing his life and those of his patients, opening a pathway to the universal wisdom of what it means to have a soul. I myself stumbled upon this material as a teenager, in the basement of my aunt and uncle’s New Jersey home, and it has informed my life philosophy ever since – providing meaning and order in a world that so often seems to thrive on chaos.
I hope they will be a comfort to you as well.
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