Beyond the byline: An Israeli journalist’s healing journey

On the morning of October 7, 2023, I awoke in a tent at a music festival like other young Israelis celebrating the holiday of Simchat Torah. By chance, my festival was located in Shittim, a small southern community one hour north of Eilat, and not the Nova festival at Kibbutz Re’im in which over 360 concert-goers were murdered and dozens more taken captive. As I corresponded with my editor, trying to understand the gravity of the situation, I heard the sobs of others around me desperately trying to reach parents who lived in the Gaza envelope and others besides themselves with worry for friends who were already considered “missing” from the Nova festival.

In the months that followed, as I embarked upon my first full-time journalistic position covering Israel at war, I would often think about the mysterious workings of fate – why I woke up in a tent surrounded by panic but not terror, while peers of mine woke to gunfire and death. This arbitrary fortune haunted me throughout my reporting on the war that followed and to the present day.

Documenting horror: The trauma behind the byline

Two weeks after the attack, a nation – and me with it – reeling in shock, I found myself in a military auditorium north of Tel Aviv with about 200 other journalists. The Israeli military had assembled us to view 43 minutes of raw footage from the Hamas attack, taken from terrorists’ body cameras and phones, in order to combat online disinformation and increase sympathy for Israel’s plight.

I watched as journalists from around the world reacted to the atrocities on screen. Some gasped in horror. Others stepped out early, unable to bear the images and sounds of civilians being murdered, children killed, and bodies burned. One French reporter later told me, “It was too much. I knew coming here that the hardest thing for me would not be the images but the sound, because you can close your eyes if the images are too much.”

I, too, closed my eyes at times, unable to bear the graphic imagery. Already at this early stage, I worried about the long-term personal consequences of covering such a brutal and graphic war on my psyche. Later, a therapist I saw encouraged a strategy of dissociation: keep these memories in a “war binder” in your mind, separate from the rest of your being.

Easier said than done.

I stayed for the entire screening, taking notes, observing reactions, gathering quotes – doing my job as a journalist. But I couldn’t separate myself from what I was witnessing. These weren’t abstract victims in a faraway conflict. They were my compatriots. They could have been my friends, my family. They could have been me, had I chosen a different festival that weekend. I wrote the article, filed it on time, maintained the professional distance expected. But inside, something was breaking.

The faces behind the headlines

Three days after the attack, I covered a press conference in Tel Aviv where relatives of missing American citizens pleaded for the US government’s help. Among them was Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who had been at the Supernova festival. She recounted how her son was last seen leaving a bomb shelter with his “arm severed,” and had reportedly helped save lives by tossing back grenades thrown into the shelter.

I am an alumnus of the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, where Rachel worked as an educator before the war, and have prayed at the same synagogue as the Goldberg-Polins in Jerusalem. In the months that followed, I pleaded with my editors for even more opportunities to write about the hostage families, as if the scale of life or death was balanced precariously upon my pen.

When the horrific news came that Hersh Goldberg-Polin had been brutally murdered in captivity alongside Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino, I felt not only sadness but also guilt and shame that I had not done enough as a journalist. I visited the family’s mourning tent, this time not as a journalist but as a fellow grieving citizen who was burned out. I told Hersh’s father Jon that I would pay tribute to his son’s memory at the Ganges River – embarking on the pilgrimage that Hersh had planned on taking before he was taken too soon.

Finding healing in the jungle

In the year since I left the country, I could not come close to leaving the war behind –  instead choosing to interview Gazan refugees in the Greek island of Samos, discuss the finer points of nonviolent philosophy in the context of Israel’s war with Buddhist monks in Dharamsala, and visit perhaps the most popular vacation destination for Israelis fleeing the war abroad: Thailand’s Koh Phangan.

That’s how I found myself at David’s Circle, intrigued by writing about a unique therapeutic refuge for Israelis who, in my mind, had suffered far worse than I: those who attended the other music festival, like David Newman of blessed memory, for whom the circle is named.

Except that when I sat down for coffee to discuss the story’s parameters with Yael Shoshani-Rom, founder of David’s Circle and trauma specialist, she quickly corrected my own dismissive attitude. Almost all those who attend the circle, she explained, feel like they are undeserving of treatment and that someone else suffered more and is thus even more worthy of healing.

For months, I’ve written thousands of words about this war – chronicling the hostages’ plight, the grieving families, the political tensions, the international reactions. But until now, I haven’t written a single word about my own experience.

Brené Brown, the renowned researcher on vulnerability, writes that “owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.” For a journalist trained to remain objective and detached, acknowledging my own wounds felt like crossing a professional line. But here, in this lush Thai sanctuary, I began to understand what Brown means when she says that “when we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.”

I went as a journalist, but I stayed as a participant. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to finally acknowledge my own pain in writing about this war as I pray for it to end soon.