I’m struggling, but others are far worse off…
My friend’s son is unraveling. On the morning of the October 7th, his father rushed south. Since then, reserve duty took his father away for over 500 days and ever since this boy has been suffering from extreme anxiety, stomach-aches, incontinence, nightmares, withdrawal from his friends and slipping grades.
My friend was overwhelmed, largely single-parenting through fear and exhaustion. She called his teacher seeking help, but the response devastated her.
“Everyone is dealing with this,” the teacher said. “I have three brothers on the front lines. Do you know what my mother is going through?”
Suddenly, my friend felt as though her cry for help had been unfair. Her worries were nothing comparatively.
Her son still needed help, but someone who was supposed to be there for him dismissed his struggles. Not because the teacher was cruel. Rather, because of an instinctive attempt at self-protection, shielding herself from absorbing one more person’s pain. The teacher was carrying her own fear, her own family’s suffering, her own impossible emotional burden.
Trauma can consume us so thoroughly that making room for another person’s suffering becomes extraordinarily difficult.
Since October 7th, I’ve heard versions of this same story more times than I can count. People who need support but feel, or are made to feel, that their emotional load is unworthy.
It points to something troubling happening in Israeli society: we’re developing a hierarchy of trauma. Not intentionally, but inevitably.
In a nation saturated by trauma, pain begins to triage itself and we rank it. Visible, acute tragedies rightly demand immediate aid and we rush towards those caught in the deepest riptides of what many professionals are calling a “mental health tsunami.”
But what happens to those sinking quietly beneath the surface or those drowning while trying to hold others up, even as the waves are crashing over them too?
According to 2025 government reports, nearly 40% of Israelis are suffering from trauma symptoms, while some recent academic and professional assessments suggest numbers as high as 70%. Israel is living through a mental health crisis of staggering proportions.
Because we are such a small country, most of us are not merely witnessing trauma from afar. We live inside overlapping circles of suffering and even those not directly impacted by the attacks, war and displacement are only one or two degrees removed from devastation. Personal trauma no longer exists in isolation, it unfolds within an ongoing collective trauma layered over daily life itself. We have all weathered repeated waves of rocket fire, sirens, shelter runs and the exhausting psychological toll of living without any sustained sense of safety.
We continue showing up: working, parenting, serving and caring for others. Yet for so many Israelis, no place feels fully secure and an important question emerges:
Who still feels permitted to ask for help?
In my work, I repeatedly encounter this hidden cost of our rapidly developing hierarchy of trauma. People disqualify their own suffering or shy away from validating others’ pain. But untreated trauma doesn’t disappear by minimizing it. It festers, migrating into our bodies, our relationships, our coping behaviors and our ability to function, parent, work, concentrate, connect and hope.
And when emotional resources become scarce, another dangerous question arises:
Whose pain is worthy enough to make space for?
The hierarchy of trauma developing around us is not unfolding in a vacuum. It is emerging against the backdrop of three forces already shaping Israeli society.
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- Social isolation: Trauma drives people inward, so we withdraw, numb out, compartmentalize and lose access to the very relationships that sustain us.
- Social polarization: Israeli society was already carrying deep fractures before October 7th and its aftermath layered collective trauma over existing fragmentation. When trust is strained, it becomes harder to hold complexity, difference and another’s pain.
- The powerful impulse to prove, to ourselves and to the world, that we are still resilient. A popular Israeli song states that we are “od yoter tov v’od yoter tov”/ “better and better” …that we can keep on keeping on despite it all. There is something admirable in this instinct. Jewish and Israeli history are filled with stories of endurance, rebuilding and refusing to be broken.
However, while our resilience is real, so is the emotional weight pulling us down.
Acknowledging one doesn’t cancel the other.
Perhaps healing requires us to remember something we already know as a People: Jewish tradition offers a different model in “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la’zeh,” that all of Israel is responsible for one another. This is woven into our cultural DNA. We survive not only because individuals are strong, but because communities step toward one another’s pain. Our people have regenerated throughout history relying on the principle of mutual responsibility.
In the days after October 7th, we saw that spirit everywhere. People opened their hearts, worked farms and helped strangers. But prolonged trauma leads to compassion fatigue and survival mode narrows our vision.
In my work with Kehilanu, I see that mutual support come alive again. Something powerful happens when people who would never voluntarily walk into traditional therapy begin opening up in unexpected spaces, like our Poker Support Group for Reservists, where cards create just enough structure and safety for conversation to emerge. From women working through triggered CPTSD via phototherapy to seniors in therapeutic collage groups, I see how profoundly intertwined personal and communal healing are.
Participants not only experience relief themselves. They begin listening differently to one another, showing compassion, validation and empathy toward suffering that does not necessarily mirror their own.
This is not a replacement for individual therapy. Israel needs far more accessible treatment, but we also need spaces that restore the communal muscles trauma erodes: the ability to listen, trust, belong, receive help and offer it.
There is a truth I return to often: People in pain often cause pain. People who are healing bring about healing.
The question is not whether Israel is traumatized, but what kind of traumatized nation we choose to become.
Do we retreat further inward, ranking suffering and pushing down our trauma? Or do we create space to acknowledge pain, support one another and heal?
Because trauma does not disappear when ignored and neither does our responsibility to one another.
