[Theme music plays]

Nahanni: Hi, it's Nahanni Rous, here with a special episode of Can We Talk? to mark the anniversary of October 7. We’ll hear thoughts from women in Israel, including Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed, professor of Jewish mysticism.

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[instrumental version of "Who By Fire" plays]

A year ago on this now infamous date of October 7, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. They killed over 1,000 people, raped women, burned houses, and took 251 people into captivity in Gaza. Israel’s response has left over 40,000 Palestinians dead, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

And the war is far from over.  Hamas is still holding 101 hostages in Gaza, 33 of whom have been confirmed dead by the IDF. Israel is fighting on multiple fronts—with Hamas in Gaza, with Hezbollah in Lebanon—while war threatens to explode with Iran.  It is a terrifying time to be marking the first anniversary of a terrifying day.

Later in the episode, we’ll speak with Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed. But first, we’ll check in briefly with three Israeli women in the Can We Talk? orbit.

Lee Hoffman Agiv: Can you hear me now? 

Nahanni:  Yep, yep. That's good.

Lee: Oh good. I apologize in advance if there might be, like, a siren alarm all of a sudden.

Nahanni: Where are you driving? 

Lee: I am driving to my therapist. 

Nahanni: Sounds like an excellent idea.

Lee: Exactly. I'm driving to Ramat Hasharon, it's like the Sharon area in the center of Israel. And we just had a missile attack, like 15 minutes from here, like in the Sharon area. It's outside the Israeli border, but we saw the missiles and it's from Lebanon. This is the first time it was so close, it’s like a few kilometers from here.

Nahanni: Lee Hoffman Agiv is the field operations manager of the feminist organization Bonot Alternativa, or Building an Alternative. We spoke to Lee last fall about the emergency response efforts she was involved in. More recently, she’s been working with the families of hostages, pressuring the Israeli government to prioritize their return. Now, she’s thinking about how to mark the anniversary of the biggest national trauma she has lived through.

Lee: It didn't end yet. I just saw a missile, the hostages are still in Gaza. I have, during the last week or something, I had flashbacks.  I feel the feelings of October 7 all over again, and I can’t imagine what the families are going through and what the hostages are going through and the survivors.

Like, I committed to myself that I am still holding the hope in my hand. First of all, I look around and I see a lot of good people working together to fight for this country. I always tell hostage families, I’m holding the hope with you. You’re not fighting this war alone. I’m not giving up. I feel like I have no choice, because I have two daughters and I’m committed to create a better reality for them. And if I give up, then it means many other people already gave up as well. I think we have a lot of responsibilities.

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Stav Salpeter: My name is Stav Salpeter. I’m 25 years old. I live in the Jezreel Valley, in the north.

Nahanni: Stav works at Itach Maaki, an organization of women lawyers working for social justice in Israel. 

Stav: It’s hard to imagine that it’s been a year. It feels like one long nightmare of a day— it doesn’t feel like the day has ended. And then at the same time it feels like the longest year that I've lived through. And there’s a lot of guilt, I think, associated for me with this day, with this anniversary. To think that, you know, it’s been a year, and we’ve seen tens of thousands of people being killed in this war and that we haven’t managed to stop, and that we’re still seeing it escalate, you know?

In 2006 I experienced what it was like to be a child running to bomb shelters. And it’s horrible to me that now my little cousins up here in the north are facing the same thing again. And we’ve failed. We’ve really failed to protect this whole new generation of children. 

[instrumental music plays]

Ruby Russell: My name is Ruby Russell. I am 22 years old. I live in Tel Aviv, in Israel.

Nahanni: Ruby is an alumna of the Jewish Women’s Archive Rising Voices Fellowship. She made aliyah by herself when she was 18. She served in the Israeli army and is now a reservist.

Ruby: I was drafted for a month in February and then I was released from that mission. And then I was drafted for another two months for a mission in the south over the summer. When things get even more heated in the north, I will go. I will have to go.

I still see myself in these young hostages, who are my age. Young Jewish girls whose life is ahead of them. And they love dancing, and they love their community, and they love people. And their future was ahead of them. And they’re there. I don’t know what’s happening to them now. 

In order to keep moving ahead, we have to be in a little bit of denial. The point of ceremonies and memorials is necessary. I know that the Jews have been through a lot in history and we’ve always made it out the other side.  And that’s how I’m here today. But on the other hand, I’m like, how is it that we’ve done this before and we’re doing this again– fighting the same war in the same places? It makes no sense. It’s insanity. 

I had this deep, deep sadness at the beginning of the war. I felt like all chance of peace with our Palestinian neighbors was ruined. But we’ve gotten so far from that, that I have to believe that okay, maybe we’ve shattered this so far and done so much damage that maybe, just maybe, something completely different that has cost us so much, will bring us something that we didn’t imagine. That on the other side it will be totally different and… and more sustainable and somehow better.

[instrumental music plays]

Nahanni: Thoughts from Lee Hoffman Agiv, Stav Salpeter, and Ruby Russell on the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks of October 7. A few hours after we spoke with Ruby, she was called back to the reserves.

[instrumental music plays]

This first anniversary also falls in the midst of the Jewish high holidays. A few days before Rosh Hashanah, I turned to Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed for some spiritual guidance on how to approach the Days of Awe, how to close a traumatic, painful year in the midst of an escalating war. 

Melila is a professor of Zohar and Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. She has also been an active member of the Sulha Project for 20 years.  It’s a group of Israelis and Palestinians who meet for face to face dialogue.

In our interview, Melila and I talk about what the group has meant to her this past year, the questions she’s wrestling with, and where she is finding meaning. She starts by talking about atonement and redemption, the hallmark of this period in the Jewish year.

Melila Hellner-Eshed: What does it mean, forgiveness, this year? Who shall we ask forgiveness from and who might forgive us and what are we asking forgiveness for? Right? What are we asking that big selicha? Where will we be able to access that experience of being washed from the dread and the horror and the blood? 

It's been a year of incredible shock. And it's been a year of response, right? Responding to responding to events that nobody taught us that we're gonna have to deal with.

And it's been a year of acknowledging that what happened to us has happened to us. The horrific things that have happened to us and to acknowledge simultaneously the horrific things that we're doing to others.

Many people in Israel say, okay, my heart doesn't have the capacity. Right? People say, I don't have enough volume right inside my heart to have compassion for the other side. I can't at the moment. It's like, I'm totally concentrated on my experience. I find that with Israelis, I also find that with Palestinians. And I think it's very human. 

Just like we say in the Gemara, you don't judge a person when a dead person, their beloved dead person is lying by them, and you don't judge a person when they're in a state of extreme rage.

But I think the work of holding polarities, of holding difference, of holding opposites—I just think that that's the sacred work. The people that know how to do that work just have to, you know, be there, be present, and hold that.

Nahanni: It feels to me like it's never been harder to do that. 

Melila: Well, not in my lifetime. It's never been harder—never, ever been harder. I think we have such a horrific experience—at least from my point of view—that we're stuck, that we're asking forgiveness on our knees from the hostages who we haven't managed to bring home, you know, we haven't managed, it. All the displaced people are not home. We're in a war in the north. We're in a big mess in Gaza and we have so much blood on our hands. So much blood.

You know, be it just that we had to have this blood on our hands, or not. I'm not even, you know, making a clear cut statement about that. But how shall that be atoned? How will that be washed away? What will allow us to experience ourselves clean from these rivers of blood? What? It's not clear to me at all.

So I think it's also acknowledging that it's never been so hard. This is bringing us all further and further into our humanity, you know, the heights of human love and the depths of human brutality. This is what people do and this is what people can do to each other. And it is heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking.

Nahanni: Are you still involved in the Sulha meetings?

Melila: Well, I think one of the most important and life-giving experiences for me this year, after the 7th of October, was the work of the Sulha, which is the organization that I've been involved with for over 20 years.

Four days after the massacre,we started the first grief circle for Israelis and Palestinians. And it was so needed that for the following two months, we held such a circle every single week. 

You know, there's this notion that in grief, every person should go back into their, you know, identity group. And that's how we do grief. But I think that being a person who's doing peace work, Israeli-Palestinian peace work, for many years, it's really learning that, No,we can do this together. We can stand together in moments of joy and we can stand together in moments of deep grief. I can stand with my Palestinian friends who are mourning for other things, right? They're mourning the death of many members of their family in Gaza. I'm mourning what is happening to us Israelis.

The experience of sitting together in a room, Israelis and Palestinians, knowing that outside is this raging storm of so much hatred and so much dehumanizing and so much racism that we managed somehow to keep that outside of the door and the windows was so strengthening.

There's so many forces at this moment just wishing to keep us further and further apart, that we’re saying no. We will not do that. We will uphold our faith that we have all been created in the image of God and that we must return the faces to people on both sides of the conflict. 

Nahanni: How are you thinking about the actual day of the anniversary of October 7?

Melila: I'm dreading it. I'm dreading it because a year is a long time and it's no time at all. And suddenly we're all gonna be in that same crack in time.

Nahanni: Yeah. Do you think there's a way in which that's really important, to be put back in that crack in time?

Melila: Well, you know, if you think of it Jewishly, yes, you have a yahrzeit for things, you know, we do it. That's part of our generations and generations of traditions of making days to note and to remember terrible events, to remember wonderful events, to remember births, to remember deaths. We have to be able to do that. 

We have to remember that, you know, memory is something that's alive and and changes all the time, and we have to see what is it that's gonna really strongly come out in the first anniversary, which might be totally different of what might come up in five years and in ten years and in a hundred years. But I'm saying a hundred years because it's an event that is so huge, it's so vast, that I'm pretty sure it's gonna make its mark on the calendar.

Nahanni: Is there a text that you're turning to that feels helpful for this anniversary? 

Melila: I feel that throughout these months, the Bible has been an incredible source of inspiration, because the events have been so biblical. I mean, the size, the intensity, um, kind of left otherlevels of language on the wayside. 

But I would say that the most powerful moment or image or verses that I have been in conversation with is the description of Jeremiah, speaking about the terrible destruction of the first temple and the exile of the children, and he says, Kol baramah nishmah, a voice is heard on high Rachel mivaka et baneyha. Me’ana lehinachem al baneyha ki einenu. Rachel mourns, weeps over children. And she will not, me’ana, she will not be consoled, she will not be comforted for her children for they are no more, ki einenu.

That image of Rachel, standing as the mother of all the children, right? Humanity. She is the mother and she is weeping and she's unconsolable because of what is happening, you know, because of the killing, because of what we are doing to each other. And whatever allowed Jeremiah to have that incredible image, it's as if it's speaking to us right now. We can look at that image of that weeping and identify and allow ourselves to be standing with her.

Nahanni: You recently said to me that during this war, shechinah, the feminine aspect of God, has been savaged. What do you mean? where do you see that?

Melila: Wartime, in many ways, just takes the feminine and thrusts her to the ground or just says, go to another room now, this is the time for the boys to do their thing. It's that moment of banishing. You know, in Kabbalah we read so much about the state in which shechinah is thrust to the ground, and she's lying there in the mud.

What does it mean when the Zohar says the shechinah is lying in the mud? It means she cannot be present in the world, in her full power, beauty, presence, right? She's dimmed. She's exiled.

After the 7th of October, it took about 24 hours, and you had all these generals and all these commentators, you know, like, taking the microphone and explaining to you what is happening. I meant, there was something maddening about it actually. There was like verbiage, so much talking.

Nahanni: What was missing? 

Melila: I think what was missing was, first of all, that shechinah was missing. The howl. The howl, the tearing of our clothes, the sitting, sitting by a river of tears. 

There was something so unbalanced about it—that was my strong feeling, that the shechinah is like this bird, you know, lying, bleeding on the ground. And we have to uphold her. We have to hold her, we have to tend to her. We have to nurse her back into life. We have to have faith that she will stay alive. 

The greatest spiritual exercise at the moment for me, and I suppose for many others, is, you know, learning to walk in the dark, learning to sit in the dark, learning to read the signs in the dark. And awaiting some kind of light that's gonna dawn on this, but knowing that it might be a very long, dark, and that we can't just lie down and die. You have to learn how to work with the current state of reality.

[instrumental music plays]

Melila: You know, whatever this year brings, may it be better than last year and may the good things that happened this year, you know, be sevenfold. Like, may we experience them more and more. 

Nahanni: Amen. Amen. Amen.

Melila: Amen. Ken ye’hi ratzon.

[instrumental music plays]

Nahanni: We remember the victims of the October 7 massacres and the thousands upon thousands of people who have been killed in this war. May it come to a peaceful end. 

Please visit jwa.org/canwetalk to hear our other episodes related to October 7th and its aftermath, including stories about the peace activist Vivian Silver, zichrona l’vracha, who was murdered by Hamas on October 7. Also the Women's War Room, the sexual violence of October 7, A Pocket of Hope, and Getting Out of Gaza.

JWA has been collecting stories about Jewish women’s experiences since October 7. Visit jwa.org/october7 for question prompts. Submissions can be in writing or audio, in whatever language you choose.

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Jen Richler and Judith Rosenbaum. The music for this episode is a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s "Who by Fire," played by Rabbi Matisiyahu Tonti.

I’m Nahanni Rous. Until next time.