By choice, I’ve worked with victims of war and atrocity. During my lengthy career as a psychologist, I’ve cried with scores of Holocaust survivors and their children. I’ve visited the killing fields of Poland and written extensively on the psychological impact of genocide on survivors and their children. I experienced the rage, guilt and terror of traumatised Vietnam vets, abandoned by their country, left alone to battle the demons of a brutal war. One learns that the human heart was not constructed to comprehend loss on an industrial scale, so it compartmentalises and focuses forward.
I travelled to Beirut, Lebanon in 1980, five years after the civil war was presumed over. It wasn’t. The remnants of a once beautiful city lay scattered among mounds of rubble and ash. I heard harrowing accounts of torture, beheadings, and rape. And by the seventh day, when I thought I was beyond shock, I watched, horrified, as two children in a Beirut refugee camp kicked a human skull back and forth like it was a soccer ball.
I’ve lived in Israel for 37 years. Like many Israelis, I’m no stranger to rocks, bullets, suicide bombers, and the blast of missiles fired from Gaza and Lebanon. Confronted with these things, I was never confused about what I felt. I can recognise fight, flight, and freeze from the pumping of adrenalin, a racing heart, and a closed fist. Sadly, with enough experience, you learn your instinctive responses to danger.
But nothing prepared me — nor my fellow Israelis — for October 7.
October 7 was Simchat Torah, a holiday of love, joy, and gratitude. On Simchat Torah, we dance seven times around the Torah. Seven symbolises a cycle, a completion — both an end and a beginning. Time and growth are cyclical, according to Jewish tradition. Every seven days — on Shabbat — we read a portion of the Torah (The Old Testament) and on Simchat Torah we read the last parsha (portion). Completions deserve a day of joy. So we dance, sing, and eat.
Or run into bomb shelters.
On the morning of Simchat Torah, we heard booms from the Iron Dome shooting down missiles fired from Gaza. Because I don’t use devices on Shabbat and holidays, I asked Diana, my wife’s Filipino caretaker, what was going on.
“Doc,” she said, without her constant smile, “my best friend from childhood has been kidnapped and taken to Gaza along with her Alzheimer’s patient [an 81-year-old woman]. They dragged them into the trunk of a car.”
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