/ Beit Midrash for Israeli Rabbis

NPR’s Morning Edition spoke with rabbis in Israel who are providing pastoral care for those traumatized by the October 7 attacks and the subsequent war. Hartman’s Tamar Elad Appelbaum was among the rabbis interviewed.

Scripture lends language to people too traumatized to speak

Among those offering pastoral care at hotels filled with displaced people is Rabbi Tamar Elad-Applebaum. She recounts a recent visit with a family far from their home.

‘I saw just as I entered one of the hotels, a child hiding himself underneath the table and holding on to the leg of the table,’ Elad-Applebaum says. ‘And I remember seeing his mother going down underneath the table and sitting next to him.’

In the same way that the mother, traumatized herself, sought to comfort her child, Elad-Applebaum says rabbis figuratively sit underneath a table and hand Jews the tools that are closest to their hearts to understand and process the trauma of Oct. 7.

Elad-Applebaum has been a rabbi for more than two decades and helps direct Jerusalem’s educational Shalom Hartman Institute.

‘One of the first things that trauma creates is the loss of language’ she says. ‘You just have no language for what you saw. You have no language for what your eyes witnessed, for what your heart trembles from.’

But when one’s own language fails, Elad-Applebaum says that’s where scripture and tradition can lend words.

‘At the beginning of the Torah — the Hebrew Bible — it says that God saw that there is an abyss,’ she says. ‘And only then sending his spirit onto it, he created light. So light is something you plant only on the abyss.’

The aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that left more than 1,200 dead and hundreds taken hostage has been an abyss for many Israelis. It’s also a dark time for the people of Gaza, where more than 26,000 have been killed through Israeli military action, according health officials there.

During the months Elad-Applebaum has been visiting the displaced victims of the Hamas attacks, she has kept these words from Psalm 1 close to her heart to keep herself and others from growing bitter:

‘Blessed is the person who does not go in the ways of the cruel,’ she says, switching back and forth between English to Hebrew, ‘who does not stop where cruelty sits.”

Read the full article and listen to Morning Edition on NPR.