By Rabbi Healy Slakman
Adapted from a sermon given August 2025
It felt different in Israel this summer. Of course, in some ways it was obvious that it would. But it was my first time back since October 7th, and I didn’t know how it would sink in. Many important things were the same—my beautiful family, both immediate and extended, the way we laugh and sweat and gossip and snack on dusty stone balconies or in little backyards with fake grass, plastic lawn chairs, and stray cats. Shabbat felt mostly the same: the collective, frenetic hustle and bustle of Friday afternoon gradually melting away until the Shabbat horn is sounded. Somehow the air itself feels different when the gentle but firm, temporary but shared stillness takes over. When suddenly, the quiet sounds of children’s conversations, silverware clanking, and soft singing become loud and defining.
Shabbat felt mostly the same— except for the moment right before the Shabbat horn, when a rocket siren sounded instead. We had thirty seconds to decide whether to turn the oven off and risk the food not being cooked in time for Shabbat, or to leave it on and risk everything burning, not knowing how long we’d be in the shelter.
Shabbat felt mostly the same except Motza’ei Shabbat, the end of Shabbat. When my fantastic and upbeat brother’s disposition would change. Somber laundry, nervous chores, and packing. A noticeable heaviness and exhaustion settled in each week as he prepared to take yet another pre-dawn bus back to his military base—like so many thousands of others, with the full spectrum of rage, distrust, and deep disapproval of the government’s actions, societal attitudes, the war, etc., still legally bound to mandatory service all the same. Shabbat was mostly the same but it never felt like enough to relieve the country of the heaviness and exhaustion I saw in my brother.
And then there were the things that simply didn’t feel the same. The list is inexhaustible, so I will just name a few. The memorial stickers for people who have died on and since 10/7—everywhere. Train platforms, café walls, tourist sites, central bomb shelters, and small-town alleys—thousands and thousands of stickers: personal grief pressed into the stones of public life.
While the designs, colors, shapes, and sizes vary, almost all the faces are young, and include a photo, name, and lifespan. Most carry a traditional Jewish mourning phrase—either “May their memory be a blessing” (ז״ל), or a phrase perhaps less familiar, used specifically when a person is murdered: “May God avenge their blood” (הי״ד). Some stickers include a motto connected to the person’s character or outlook— excerpts from diary entries, favorite song lyrics, or lines from Jewish texts: “Be good,” “We will dance for you.” “Don’t forget to smile when you wake up.” Everywhere. Adding to the shock of so many vibrant young faces morbidly turned into a backdrop of collective longing are the subtle ways in which people are anonymously interacting with, editing, and defacing these memorial markers. I noticed, more than once, sharpie scratches and omissions—“May their memory be a blessing” crossed out and replaced in haphazard handwriting with “May God avenge their blood.” And the other way around.
These stickers are not the only new markers impacting the atmosphere since October 7. On previous trips to Israel, the graffiti that stuck with me were cartoon depictions of famous figures like the Lubavitcher Rebbe or Herzl, or tags around the city that read תלתלים הם החיים (curly hair is life). This year, instead, around countless corners, in dark red paint: אנחנו עושים שואה בעזה (we are committing a holocaust in Gaza). Around other corners: ‘Make Gaza Jewish Again.’ Both sentiments in bold, screaming letters.
I was in Jerusalem for T’sha B’av, the day set aside to commemorate and reflect on the long history of destruction and trauma experienced by the Jewish people. I sat on the ground, as is traditional, to absorb a reading of Eicha (Lamentations): “For these things I weep, my eyes overflow with tears,” we read. Themes of exile, misery, and harsh servitude: “we dwell among the nations but find no rest.” “We risk our very lives to get our bread, in the face of the sword of the wilderness.”
How different it is to recite these ancient words now— when deprivation, violence, and exile are not only metaphors but such present, lived realities. When there are people literally being held in captivity. How absolutely bewildering and shameful it felt to listen to a text that returns again and again to images of hunger in order to illustrate the full weight of human suffering when people are starving in Gaza fewer than 50 miles away.
I don’t know what to say and I don’t know what to do. And I know that is grossly unsatisfactory and even obscene in the face of such devastation and violence. I am thinking of entire families killed together in Gaza with no one left to mourn, grief buried under rubble. I am thinking about the Palestinian woman whose story was recently shared on Humans of New York, who is raising her four children and four other children whose parents were killed, who removed shrapnel from their bodies and her own with a kitchen knife. In her interview, she says, “I cannot cry. Before the war—any little thing, it would make me cry. But now I cannot make myself. I want to, but I can’t, even when my heart is breaking.”
No space to mourn. No space.
I thought about that the entire time I was in Israel. How the wounds remain open, and how they continue to fester. How there is no time, no room, no distance to let anyone process and take stock of all that has been lost, because the uncertainty continues to mount, and the losses continue to grow, with no end in sight. How we are in a time when even the most basic human act of marking death is contested. How grief, rage, trauma, and fear drive us into alternate realities so non-communicable that we are left stranded across widening gaps—often on opposite sides of the same unfathomable loss. There is no space to grieve, only space growing between us.
As we approach the Days of Awe—a time set aside for communal reckoning and personal reflection—I wonder how we face this gaping chasm: as individuals, as a community, and as people striving to seek clarity in relationship with others and with the world. Every year I oscillate between being comforted and disturbed by our High Holiday refrain—וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה—“teshuva, tefillah, tzedakah do not erase, but soften, the harshness of God’s decree,” our reality, and the future still to be written.
This year, may we practice empathy and humility, difficult honesty and openness, generosity and patience toward others and also toward ourselves—not to erase, but perhaps to soften the harshness of this moment.
This article originally appeared in the September/October/November 2025 issue of the Vine.