חוסן של אמת

Prologue | The Eyes

A few months after October 7, I invited ZAKA volunteers to one of the resilience workshops I was leading. I didn’t know any of them, and they didn’t know me either. I walked among them, trying to remember names, to match faces to the stories that had stayed with me.

Then he stopped right in front of me. And suddenly, without either of us saying a word, we simply began to cry. There are tears that defy explanation; they just find their way out. It took me a moment to remember. It was Ari Miller. I’d first met him in Shora, at the identification tent, when we were together supporting the family of the late Shachar Gindi. There, too, at the moment of parting, we stood side by side and wept. When I met him again now, that moment immediately came back to me. Once again, it was our eyes that connected us. He—a Belz Hasid, a father of six from Beit Shemesh. I—a secular psychologist who never imagined that one of the most profound encounters of her life would be with a person whose world is so different from her own.

If someone had told me a week before October 7 that one day we’d stand like that, face to face, and shed tears without saying a word, I would have smiled politely and thought it was a nice story, but an unlikely one. But life, as I’ve since learned, isn’t concerned with what seems reasonable to us.

On the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. How did I even recognize him? After all, I didn’t remember his face, nor his beard, nor his voice. And then I realized: I remembered his eyes.

For a moment, we hardly looked at each other’s faces, nor at each other’s bodies. We looked into each other’s eyes. It seems to me that amid everything that was there, they were the only place where it was still possible to encounter the soul. The person.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul. Following my reunion with Ari, I realized that back then, inside the tents, when our hearts could no longer bear what our eyes were seeing, we learned to look differently: not only at what was broken, but also at what remained.

And there was another moment that etched itself clearly in my memory.

After a few days of shifts, I noticed that almost every body I accompanied bore signs of a confirmation of death. I wondered if this was a coincidence, or if most of the bodies arrived that way. I approached one of the commanders at the base and asked him. He replied that this was indeed the case. I will never forget that moment. I was stunned by the intensity of the cruelty, by what I experienced in that moment as something beyond the bounds of humanity. Stories of the pogroms from our people’s history came to mind, as well as Auschwitz and the Holocaust—all those stories of my people who were murdered and massacred simply because they were Jewish. History, which until then I had known as a story passed down from generation to generation, ceased at that moment to be merely the past. It stood before me, in the present.

The fact that many of the victims bore signs of having been shot to ensure their death led me to realize just how deliberate the intent was—not only to kill, but also to leave an indelible mark on our collective memory for generations to come. Later, something new became clear to me regarding the dual commandment concerning Amalek—“Remember what Amalek did to you” and “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek” (Deuteronomy 25:17–19): to remember, but not to let the trauma that evil left within us define who we become or the emotional legacy we pass on.

And amid the shock, a calling began to take shape within me: that all of this would not be in vain. That if these memories had been entrusted to me, I bore the responsibility to bear witness.

To tell the story of the cruel and criminal deaths of my people and to give voice to those who can no longer speak for themselves. Out of the deep pain I felt in the face of the terrible suffering reflected in the faces of the victims, and upon hearing the heart-wrenching cries that echoed through the identification tents, I felt I had to do everything in my power to help our people—if only so that we might be worthy of those who are no longer with us.

Only later, as I began to connect the dots—my grandfather, the sole Holocaust survivor from his family in Greece; the silences he carried with him; his sister, Rosa; the cancer patients I accompanied; the families; Shachar Gindi’s sister, who asked to see only the pink nail polish she’d applied to her sister’s nails; and Ari—did I realize that all these stories are not separate. They are intertwined. They spoke to one another. And they spoke to me.

I don’t know if “The Lens of the Spirit” was born in that moment, but I do know that my encounter with the ZAKA volunteers expanded my capacity to listen to what had not yet found words, and deepened my recognition of the profound need for a space and tools capable of holding everything that longs to be said.

Only later did I realize that Ari’s eyes were not just a memory for me. They raised the question that kept returning and accompanied me along the way: What remains in a person after everything they have seen, and what enables them, after seeing all of this, to continue seeing life as well?

This book was born out of an attempt to find answers.

Since when?

“Since when” is the very first word that opens the Babylonian Talmud: “Since when.” Perhaps this is also the question with which this book begins—at what moment does the way a person tells the story of their life change?

For me, the answer begins with a message I received on WhatsApp: “I’m waiting for an assignment to accompany the families of the victims.”

On the Way to That Day

There are days when we remember every detail, and there are days when all that remains of them is a collection of moments. Like the day Rabin was assassinated. Like the day the Twin Towers fell. October 7 has also become one of those days.

Even today, when I try to reconstruct it, it doesn’t come back to me as a single sequence. It comes back in flashes. A phone call. An alarm. A screen. A WhatsApp message. A song playing in the car. One headline. And a whole world split in two.

On the morning of October 7, around 11:00 a.m., Efrat, my best friend, called me. I’d known her voice for years. But that morning, I heard something in it I’d never heard before. She sounded different. “Ili isn’t answering.”

I’d seen him just a few days earlier. It was during the Sukkot holiday. He was on leave, and just before he returned to the base for his new assignment, we ran into each other by chance. He was on his way to a party. I stood up to greet him and said with a smile, “Ili-chok… you look so handsome. Have fun at the party. And good luck in your new role.” It was a conversation that lasted just a few seconds. The kind of conversation you don’t stop to remember. It never occurred to me that this would be my last conversation with him. Even after talking with Efrat, I still couldn’t imagine it. We thought maybe there was no signal. Maybe his phone was turned off. Maybe he’d be back soon. We wanted to believe he’d call soon, and that there must be an explanation.

But as the hours passed, the explanations grew fewer and fewer. Meanwhile, the images began to come in. At first, we were still trying to make sense of what we were seeing. Later, it was impossible to look away. Desperate cries from families inside the bomb shelters were broadcast live. People whispered on the phone so the terrorists wouldn’t hear them. They begged for someone to come. An entire nation sat glued to their screens. We saw everything. And there was nothing we could do.

I remember feeling as though my body refused to believe what my eyes were seeing and what my ears were hearing. I knew only one thing: I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit idly by when so many people needed help. The first thought that came to mind was to contact Gabi Peretz, the former national psychologist for the Ministry of Health. It was clear to me that if we started setting up a support system for people, he’d be there. At 8:42 p.m., I sent him a message: “Gabi, how are you? If there’s anything I can help with, let me know.” I didn’t know what to expect. I thought maybe I’d help answer people’s calls.

I thought about perhaps compiling a list of psychologists who would surely want to pitch in, whether from afar or up close—any way we, as professionals, could help. Later that night, he replied, “I’m waiting for an assignment to support the families of the victims.” I didn’t know that at that very moment, the path that would lead me to that line was beginning to open up before me. I don’t remember hesitating. I only remember my fingers typing. First I wrote: “I want to help.” Then I added: “Can I join you?” Only after I sent it did I pause. I wasn’t working at the Ministry of Health at the time, I wasn’t mobilized, and my three daughters were at home. There was no logic to that request. I was sure he’d say it wasn’t possible. Instead, he replied, “They’ll schedule a shift for you. This is going to go on for a long time.”

Later, he wrote that my first shift would be the next day at midnight. In an instant, it all became real. I set my phone aside. It was almost 3:00 a.m.

I told my mom that I was leaving that night for my first shift. She looked at me with a look I’ll never forget. “Vered,” she said quietly, “how will you handle this? How will you be able to see these things? And what about the girls?” I looked at her. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle it. I didn’t even know what a line base was.

I said just one sentence to her: “I just have to go.”