* Translation by Yehoshua Siskin ([email protected])
Last night I interviewed Tomer Wiener and Shuval Robman. They managed to escape from the scene of the music festival that turned into a massacre. They spoke about how they have taken upon themselves to spread ahavat hinam (love for its own sake) throughout Israeli society. Afterwards I interviewed Lotan Ben-Porat, who also fled from that scene while saving six additional individuals.
Psychologist Dani Friedlander was in the studio and he explained how important it is to repeat our personal stories to ourselves. As it says in the book of Job: "I will speak and be relieved." Speech creates a feeling of calm. We need to explain to ourselves how everything happened (Where were we when we heard the siren of a missile alert? What happened after that?) and tell ourselves that this difficult period will soon come to an end. We need to remind ourselves that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is order, and a process is at work.
This is a story that is not only being written individually, but collectively. The current chapter is difficult to write, but we know that -- since we are writing the story together -- it will end well.
Dani Firedlander noted that, in the therapeutic world, it often happens that, within crisis, growth in new directions occurs. This is true not only for individuals, but for entire nations as well. Let us pray that our nation is writing such a chapter today.
