Fragments and Gold: Israel’s Pain and Power

June 19 – At 6:55 this morning, I emailed a friend to let her know I was safe. I mentioned how grateful I was to have finally slept through a full night in Jerusalem with no sirens. Minutes later, at 7am, an alert sounded. When I checked the Home Front Command app, I saw that another siren had actually gone off just after midnight—which I completely slept through, no doubt due to sheer exhaustion. So this was the second alert of the day.

It took me a little longer than usual to make my way to the safe room, since I wanted to leave for my morning walk once the alert had passed. That slight delay above ground revealed sounds I would never have heard from inside the safe room—sirens wailing across the city, and the all-consuming, thunderous roar of missiles cutting through the atmosphere. My body was afraid. As I stepped off the elevator to take the stairs down to the shelter, I saw two hotel staffers in suits standing silently beneath the glass atrium ceiling, looking upward. The lobby was otherwise deserted. They immediately gestured for me to head downstairs.

In the safe room, the mood was calm. Two men in kippot and bathrobes discussed their plans to return to the U.S. through Jordan. I asked if they were leaving because they were afraid of what was going to happen, or if they needed to get home. Both said they were running out of medication. Another man in a baseball cap said he was afraid of running out of money, and he warned the others against going through Jordan.

I soon learned that Soroka, the largest hospital in southern Israel, had been directly hit by one of the missiles I’d heard screaming overhead. Dozens of people were wounded; six critically. Missiles also landed in central Israel, not far from Tel Aviv. One carried a cluster bomb that breaks apart and fragments into multiple exploding pieces, thus causing a wider range of destruction than a conventional missile—in this case, over a five-mile area. Some cluster bomb pieces fail to explode upon impact, and can remain dangerous for years, like landmines. Although it’s been hard to focus on much other than the news today, I continue to feel safe in Jerusalem.

Our trauma mission speakers have been excellent. Thursday we heard from three dynamic women who, in the wake of October 7, created innovative healing centers that treat thousands of people from diverse segments of the population—The Ariel Center, Healing Space Rishpon, and Niv Nirel. Using integrative body-mind approaches in nontraditional settings like basketball courts, oceans, and forests, the organizations they founded are manifesting so much goodness quite rapidly, with immense brilliance. I find it incredibly inspiring how Israelis can quickly take matters into their own hands and make a real difference in the lives of others. Our trauma mission team will soon launch a blog with links to all the presenters’ websites and projects, as well as posts by our participants. We’ll share the site as soon as it’s ready.

An image that stays with me from these presentations, and from my time here so far, is kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. It serves as a reminder that lives shot through with personal and collective pain can be transmuted—uplifted with dignity—into something more (not less) whole. I find it wondrous that pain sometimes catalyzes compassion and creativity, rather than more violence or implosion. This dedication to healing and wholeness is the secret of Israel, and exactly what makes it so compelling and essential to be here at this time.