Peace, Love and Murder
My visit to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition
I recently flew to L.A. to visit the Nova Music Festival Exhibition. What I experienced that day was beyond words, beyond understanding, beyond belief. When friends asked me what it was like, unable to portray in words what I saw and felt, I would curtly point out how well done it was or how difficult it was to experience. How could I aptly describe the indescribable? So today, on the one year anniversary since that tragedy at Nova in the western Negev in the wee hours of the morning on October 7, I sit down to write so that I can finally share the experience.
Walking into the dark, cavernous exhibition space, I quickly realized that this was not going to be a sterile, historical account edited for gentele American eyes and ears. This exhibit was immersive, plucking all of the bodily senses, to enable us to truly feel what it was like for those people, lucky enough to be young, beautiful and carefree, but unlucky enough to have been there that day. Along a narrow passageway, we saw tents strewn around with other festival goers’ belongings: backpacks, water bottles, books, a lone sock, a shoe, a journal. Quotidian necessities to spend time with friends in nature, camping, and listening to music. But juxtaposed with these signs of life and leisure were large screens and iphones, positioned every few feet, looping videos of footage taken by the victims in real time as their nightmare unfolded. Each video on its own was viscerally terrifying, a thousand different Blair Witch Projects, real life horror films where we, the voyeurs, can do nothing but watch with our stomachs in our throats as the plot presents itself, even as we know the ending. But the effect of the layering of all the videos everywhere playing at the same time in the same large space created cacophony and chaos. It was overwhelming and all encompassing, enabling us to feel on a physiological level a sliver of the confusion, fear and terror those beautiful souls must have felt that day.
And what was striking–gut-punching–about those videos was not the gruesomeness or the gore (which was not gratuitously shown) but the realization that joy and celebration can turn into bloodthirsty terror in a flash. That the unshakable freedom and safety that we all enjoy every day, and that in fact is the very foundation of the lives we are able to live, can be instantaneously crushed, illuminating the painful reality of our naive sense of security. Because—another striking illumination—the festival goers are us. They are our children; they are our friends. We can so easily map ourselves onto them, regular people, some Israelis but also Americans, Europeans, so many barely out of childhood, going to see live music with friends and to celebrate peace and life. The frailty of their safety and security is ours too. In an instant, it can all turn to dust, or in this case, an AirPod case and an empty tent.
Also striking in these videos is the incongruousness between these young people innocently celebrating at a music festival, with their beautiful braids, henna tattoos, and diverse array of styles that western culture enables them to choose, and the nihilistic terrorists laden in black, machine guns strapped to their chests, manic with eagerness to kill. This is not an army warring against another nation’s army to gain more land or to protest settlement policy. These are not soldiers. They are terrorists who exuberantly murdered and raped and maimed weary party goers who had likely stayed up to watch the sun rise that October 7 morning. Terrorists who vengefully exclaimed “Alluha Akbar” before committing these crimes against humanity in the name of their God. This was a terrorist attack just like 9/11, just like the World Trade center bombing and the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The initial target this time may have been Israeli Jews, but the broader and ultimate enemy is western freedom and democracy.
The division between good and evil could not be any starker. Between humanity and cruelty. One video showed a man hiding near a ditch on top of a woman who was hurt. He was trying to call the injured woman’s mom so she could tell her she loved her one last time. Another showed a young woman who had been shot in the leg, bleeding profusely, hiding in a dumpster with other victims, as they tried to create a tourniquet for her leg. Many of the videos showed people trying to call their moms to tell them they loved them one last time. In one particularly heart wrenching recording, a girl tried to ease her mom’s suffering by telling her that she is ok, not to worry and that she loves her, even though she knew she was about to die a horrible death. This young girl suppresses what must have been unimaginable fear to console her mom.
Once we walked into the main exhibition room, amongst some of the remains salvaged from the site like burned cars and bullet-ridden port-a-potties, festival music playing in the background, more videos streamed. These were mostly survivor and first responder interviews. Their detailed descriptions of what they saw and experienced, like nails on a chalkboard, were excruciating. To enable my mind to process the words they were saying took everything that was left of my brainspace. Many survivors still cannot sleep or get out of bed or function at all. Neither can their family members.
While I had thought about it before, now seared into my mind was the lasting trauma that October 7 has caused for these people, and their families, and their future families. There is now a new generation of survivors that has come into being just as the last living Holocaust survivors are dying. The term “survivor” that for the past 75 years has meant one thing now refers to a new cast of characters from a new tragedy. We said never again, thinking that atrocities like the mass murder of Jews were consigned to the annals of history, but it is clear to me now that, for Jews, there is no history. Our history is inescapably present, boomeranging back to us and melding our souls with those of our forefathers. On Passover, as we recite the seder, we are supposed to see ourselves as though each of us had escaped from Egypt. With the unabashed rise of modern Pharaohs who seek to destroy us, it is now an easy mental exercise.
As I experienced Nova, feeling what it was like for the victims, I kept thinking that if the world could only experience this too. If everyone could see what I was seeing then they would understand. Yes, the world learned about much of it the very next day, but experiencing it through the victims’ eyes without any of the perversions of fact or rationalizations or political judgments would sharpen the lens and lead everyone to the same indisputable conclusion. I hope that many fellow Jews will visit the exhibit, but I pray that it is not just us mourning our own deaths as the world keeps on spinning. Teachers, government leaders, companies across all industries, high school and college students, people of all backgrounds–everyone should see this. While many illusions have been shattered since October 7, I am still hopeful that peace-loving people will be able to see the simple contrast between good and evil. And to bear witness. May their memories be a blessing.