What a rabbi hopes to offer the wounded and grieving in Israel

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

At a hilltop hotel just outside this ancient city, there's a small dirt path that leads to a sitting area. Under the shade of scrubby pine trees, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie holds a roll of stickers.

AMICHAI LAU-LAVIE: You know, I left in a hurry and just, like, wow, packed within an hour. And somehow on my colleague's desk is this entire roll with, like, hundreds of stickers that said fragile, please handle with care, thank you. So I just grabbed them, and I've been handing them to people.

SHAPIRO: Rabbi Lau-Lavie was born in Israel and has lived in New York for decades. For the last week, he's been doing pastoral work all over Israel.

LAU-LAVIE: For families that are sitting Shiva, that are in mourning, families that are dealing with wounded in the hospitals and families who have kidnapped abducted relatives. And I want to say the sounds we're hearing are children who have been evacuated from one of the worst-hit kibbutzim on the south, Netiv HaAsara. They found refuge here in this hotel outside Jerusalem. And they seem to be giggling now. And goddess knows how kids and everybody responds to trauma.

SHAPIRO: When you as a rabbi show up and people are wounded or people have lost their families or people have survived atrocities, what do they ask for from you?

LAU-LAVIE: I think the first thing they want is to be heard, to know that they're not alone in this horror, that others care and have their back. The second thing is they just want to tell their story again and again. We know that that is usually the response to trauma. Storytelling is our tool of healing. I spent a few hours yesterday with a mother of a young soldier who died on October 7 trying to defend his unit, and all she wanted is to be heard. She wanted her hand to be held. And she wanted to repeat again and again how her life will never be the same again. And then she asked us to pray with her. So the response is really either just hear my story, let me share. And in some cases, you know, Israel is a very mixed place between secular and religious. I've sat with a lot of secular people who don't have the language, but some religious people have prayers to turn back to.

SHAPIRO: I know that this is your training, this is your calling, this is what you do. And nevertheless, is it difficult for you to be the receptacle of all of these stories and all of this pain?

LAU-LAVIE: Yes. I'm very lucky. Nobody in my immediate family is mourning at the moment. Everybody in my immediate family and circle of friends is mourning someone else. I have 15 nephews who are on the front lines right now, mobilized in uniform. They have left their wives and lives and children to defend. I have a 94-year-old mother who's in Jerusalem who's gone in and out of bomb shelters this week. I'm a peace activist and way on the left. I've been fighting for humanitarian solutions to this conflict throughout my life, and that will never change. But right now, my country has been attacked by a - murderous terrorists. I won't even call them an organization. And though I understand where they are coming from, I understand the root cause of this terrible tragedy, for me and my family, it feels like a monster has come down from the deep and bitten off part of our limbs.

SHAPIRO: Do you feel like the peace activist part of you has to sort of stuff itself into a box in this moment?

LAU-LAVIE: I am trying very hard not to lose the both and position that, yes, I stand with Israel at this moment of hurt and will do everything I can to ensure that we defend ourselves against terror. At the same time, I stand with my Palestinian friends who want freedom. I abhor and decry Hamas as a terrorist organization that has hijacked the Palestinians and now 200 Israelis. It's a both and, and the both and is tricky and very unpopular these days. And yet I think that is the only way to make any headway out of this mess, the humanitarian approach, knowing that face to face, eye to eye is the only way we'll get through this, not revenge, not blaming. It's very hard to say this in Israel right now, and so I'm very careful when and how I say it. For some people, it's not only betrayal to say that I have sympathy for the Palestinians. It's defeat.

SHAPIRO: We're speaking to you on Friday afternoon. Shabbat is going to begin in just a couple hours. And you are leading a Kabbalah Shabbat, welcoming the beginning of the Sabbath here at this hotel for these people who have been displaced from the kibbutz that was so brutally attacked. What is that going to be? What are you hoping to offer? What are you planning to say and do?

LAU-LAVIE: If we're quiet for listening, we can hear the muezzin, the Muslim call to prayer. And if we're even quieter, we can hear the wind. What I'm hoping we can give these people who've been through so much loss - some of them have loved ones whose faith they don't know right now, many have buried people this week - I cannot imagine the trauma they went through for that entire day. I would be so honored and grateful if I can give them the sense of serenity, if only for a moment, to be quiet and hear the wind, to know that prayer doesn't mean a belief in a God who's omnipresent and is a super creature that comes in and saves the day. No, that the divine is a sense of being present with what is, and that we have tools at our disposal as humans and as Jews and Muslims. We have tools at our disposal to help us deal with trauma. Those include taking a quiet moment and breathing and, yes, praying upon the Great Spirit that is so much bigger than us to give us help and solace.

Shabbat is a helpful tool in our toolkit of how to unwind and shower and change your clothes and sing a song and light a candle and drink a glass of wine - in this case, maybe five. And Shabbat means stop. Shabbat means pause. It is a sanctuary in time. And I think we are so much in need of a sanctuary. And if that can help them reach a sense of soul in the middle of this chaos, that's a lot.

SHAPIRO: Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, thank you so much.

LAU-LAVIE: Thank you, Ari. Sorry for the circumstances, but it's really good to see you again.

SHAPIRO: You, too. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.