None of us is untouched

Yesterday, I sat with former h*stage Sasha Trufanov on Zoom.

We connected because I will be interviewing him at the Get Help Israel conference on Monday, and we wanted to talk about what he wanted to share, what he believes clinicians treating trauma in Israel need to know, and about his experiences with healing. He's a brilliant and sweet guy who has a tremendous amount to offer.

I was left with a lot of strong feelings and an eagerness to have our conversation on stage, but something in particular really struck me.

His story about what happened to him is so surreal. As are the stories of all the h*stages. Each one is layered and unique in its own ways, in its own particulars, and in its own meaning-making.

But face to face with someone who survived captivity in G*za, I realized just how close it all is. How thin the membrane is between all of our lives. Between the before and the after. Between home and rupture. How Israeli society has been fully submerged practically or mentally in the h*stage experience, on different levels.

But there we were, having a conversation; two ordinary people, one having survived a nightmare in an extraordinary way.

This war tore our country open. That October rewrote the nervous system of a people.

Our conversation yesterday reminded me of how shocking it is that survival, captivity, and return are no longer distant concepts.

Those topics sit at our kitchen tables, in our WhatsApp threads, our Zooms, and in the faces we recognize from the news.

There is no neat line between trauma that happened somewhere else and the trauma that now lives inside our bodies, our communities, our children.

Israel is so small.

The impact of all of this is so vast.

It touched every layer of who we are—personally, collectively, spiritually, psychologically. Some through direct loss. Some through waiting. Some through fear. Some through responsibility. And some simply through the unbearable closeness of it all.

What stayed with me most from sitting with Sasha wasn’t only what he endured. It was the reminder that we are now a people who live alongside the unthinkable, and are still asked, every day, to keep choosing life.

On Monday, Sasha and I will have a conversation about survival, isolation, return, and healing. But beneath all of it will be this larger truth:

That none of us is untouched.

And none of us is living the same lives we were before.

And maybe the most sacred work we are being asked to do now is to learn how to hold one another inside this new, fragile, complicated reality, with as much honesty, patience, and humanity as we can.

And I already know that what will happen on that stage will ripple far beyond the room, because in a country this small, nothing stays contained.

***Thank you, Sasha, for sending me this picture.