We Need Space to Heal – We Need Peace in Our Homes

Image supplied by the Nova Music Festival Traveling Exhibit and courtesy of Hadassah.

A recent parashah (Torah portion) asks us to seek peace in our homes, to find compromise and paths toward claiming successes – even partial successes – as a blessing. Like hot water meeting the cold, the hot water can claim it’s not too hot and is cooling down. At the same time, the cold water can claim that it’s not too cold, since it’s clearly becoming warmer. That’s snatching conflict from the jaws of defeat. That’s compromise and progress.

Recently I went to see the travelling Nova Music Festival exhibit in Los Angeles with two friends, who happen to be Hadassah sisters. I don’t know what I expected, only that I wasn’t too keen on viewing catastrophe—an in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre by Hamas on October 7.

Some of you have seen the extensive news coverage of the October 7 massacre or the Sheryl Sandberg documentary Screams Before Silence, in which she interviews multiple eyewitnesses to Hamas’ sexual violence. Some of you have already visited the Nova Music Festival exhibit. Some of you have read what the exhibit purports to represent.

Let me walk you through my experience, remembering that the war still rages. Hostages are dead and/or are still held captive.     Ceasefires are being stymied. Talks are being halted. Hamas seems unstoppable and thousands and thousands of people are being killed as collateral damage or intentional targets. Nicht gut (Not good)!

Initially, you enter the exhibit through a huge labyrinth in a warehouse setting. The first room is long and dark, outfitted with two long, narrow, low benches for you to sit on as you watch and listen to the festival celebrants enjoying this joyous day. (I felt thrown back to the sixties: braids, henna tattoos, fringes, tie-dyed mini tents or awnings.) You hear music, music and more music– only rivaled in sound by laughter, conversation and singing.

Then the screen goes black, and you’re prompted to enter what is a serpentine path through the next room where the music and laughter is present but fading – overpowered by what you might mistake for a truck back firing – until it repeats and accelerates, and you realize it is gunfire as screaming becomes all you hear over that gun fire. The revelers are alerted by the officials that this is not a drill. “Get out of here. Get out of the bathrooms, find shelter. Get out. This is not a drill.”

As you become a part of this moment, stepping through sand and breathing cordite and sand dust, you see shredded tents and bloody towels as computer monitors place you into the fray.

As you walk through the exhibit, there are different call outs: “I’m in the car. Come to the car. Not the tree. Don’t go up that tree. Over here, I’m shot. Where are you?! Call my mother. Get help.” Or “Dad, I can’t believe it – I just killed six of them.”

Then you hear “Bang, Bang, Bang” in rapid succession. Then you hear, “No, three more. Dad, I did it!” The computer monitors are placed left and right at your feet, maybe five feet apart. The sand is dwindling. The scent is filling your nostrils. The odd, abbreviated cell phone call is heard. Everything is in tatters.

The scene of the massacre is recreated to a “T” because the Nova Music Festival victims filmed it on their cell phones: an eerie, horrifying documentary for us to witness.

Continuing on, you enter the next phase of destruction, walking through vast rooms until you enter an oasis where you can sit and have a coffee or buy merchandise. I can’t even explain it but, somehow, after seeing the pictures and the shoes and the lost bracelets, bandanas and cell phones of the captive and killed, somehow you need that.

And that brings me to shalom beit (peace in our homes). I have no roadmap to get there, no plan. My heart bleeds for any child or civilian laid to waste. I love Israel. We need peace. The families need space to recover. The country needs to heal. We need peace in our homeland and we Hadassah sisters have been called to help. We are answering that call.

Hadassah’s #EndTheSilenceCampaign and Yellow Nail initiative have brought global awareness to the violence perpetrated against women at the October 7 Nova Music Festival.  Visit the links to see how you can be part of this campaign.

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Ronnie is a member of The Hadassah Writers’ Circle, a dynamic and diverse writing group for leaders and members to express their thoughts and feelings about all the things Hadassah does to make the world a better place, to celebrate their personal Hadassah journeys and to share their Jewish values, family traditions and interpretations of Jewish texts.  Since 2019, the Hadassah Writers’ Circle has published nearly 450 columns in the Times of Israel Blog and other Jewish media outlets. Interested? Please contact hwc@hadassah.org.