Interview'The importance of kindness has become so clear to me'

Israeli author Shiri Artzi reflects on her antidote for despair after the Oct. 7 horrors

The novelist and screenwriter discusses writing an obituary for a massacre victim whom she never met, leading a workshop for evacuees, and the power of love in times of adversity

Shiri Artzi (Avishag Sha'ar-Yeshuv)
Shiri Artzi (Avishag Sha'ar-Yeshuv)

Shortly after the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza broke out, scriptwriter and author Shiri Artzi took part in a project in which Israeli writers wrote obituaries for the many victims of the Hamas-led October 7 atrocities who were from Kibbutz Be’eri.

Known for her books “Mud” and “Stories From the Breakup,” Artzi, 52, also led a workshop for evacuees from Kibbutz Be’eri taking refuge near the Dead Sea.

The members of Kibbutz Be’eri were among the many in the Gaza envelope forced to flee their homes after Hamas’s terror rampage, which saw 1,200 people brutally murdered in southern Israel and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.

“The workshop was the kindness of looking and listening, the kindness of bowing your head to hear an inaudible whisper, listen to what others needed,” Artzi said.

Artzi lives in Tel Aviv with her husband, actor Yiftah Klein, and their three children. We conducted our interview over Zoom after two in-person meetings were canceled — once when this reporter came down with COVID-19, and once when Artzi did.

The Times of Israel asked Artzi about the experience of writing an obituary for someone she never met, how writing helps her in difficult times, and how she finds beauty and life in the aftermath of a massive tragedy.

The Times of Israel: How are you?

Shiri Artzi: That’s a simple question that has become so complicated. It’s a question that has placed us, since October 7, in a state of embarrassment and searching for words. Every answer sounds clumsy and stuttered. I am fine, but in general, everything is terrible shit.

Perhaps I’ll respond with a story: Three months ago, I gave a three-part writing workshop to evacuees from Kibbutz Be’eri at the Dead Sea. Rather early on, they asked me not to ask how they were doing. They said it wasn’t a good question. So I asked what I could ask, and they suggested, “How has your week been? What nice things happened to you this week?” We sought alternative questions because it really is complicated to answer a question like “How are you.”

But if you still insist, I have a post-COVID sore throat, and I have a tiny hope in my heart, like the flame of a match that you shield with your hand, for a hostage deal. There’s a crack for hope now, so it’s important to go out to protest.

Israeli author Shiri Artzi, June 24, 2022. (Moshe Shai/FLASH90)

And how is your spirit holding up?

I hear the apologetic tone that comes with your question, but I think the spirit is almost the most important part.

In continuation of the question of how I’m doing, I want to tell you another thing: One of the things that has happened to me during this time, like in Buddhist practice, is that I have come into the present. I’ve never been closer to the present than now. But because the future is so unclear and so foggy, and the past seems irrelevant in a world that has been turned upside down, all that is left is this moment.

For many years, I’ve tried to practice mindfulness, and the practice helps me deal with reality because I think everyone who tries to seek control is heading to double the suffering. The uncertainty and lack of control lead to great distress and I try to let go of that.

I enter the mindset that the only thing that exists entirely is the current moment, and that’s where I try to exist. And another thing: More than ever, the power of love is clear to me. I feel that it is the only medicine.

What do you mean when you say love in this context?

I have met people who look like rocks made of grief. I have seen the dense molecules of the pain and the unfathomable compressions and detachments of people whose lives fell apart and found themselves in complete horror. They’ve lived in hotels for months. The importance of kindness became most clear to me following those meetings.

The writing workshop aimed at trying to chip away a bit at the pain rocks and turn them into words. At one of the meetings, I asked them to describe a day in their lives. Some suggested that everyone read their text under the name of their hotel room number. They wrote beautiful and moving things.

An Israeli soldier inspects a damaged home in Kibbutz Be’eri, Israel, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023. (AP/Ariel Schalit)

One of them, a woman in her late 30s, brought the perspective of a mother dealing with the unraveling of her family and the fact that they are all scattered into different rooms with no unified family space. She wrote about the attempt to maintain a life, that thing that mothers do instinctively. They embroider the family tapestry and suddenly, they drop the thread. How do they restitch the tapestry when everything has come apart?

And then she wrote how every morning, she goes downstairs to the dining room, and Khaled, the waiter, remembers to put some oat milk aside for her coffee and how she goes out to smoke a cigarette and forces herself to gather the strength to want to live today as well. And the oat milk that Khaled brings her every morning — what is that if not love?

Meaning, the ability to look at other people beyond the pain and struggle and be a good influence.

You know, I’ve seen how significant a real hug is, even in unfathomable tragedy. There is so much significance in the moment a person feels like they can share the weight of their grief with another person.

It’s not really possible because, at the end of the day, people are alone, but if there is one moment where you let someone share some of the weight with you and say to them, “It’s okay, lean on me, I can take it. I can only handle a little, but come, put your head on my shoulder,” there’s love in that. And I feel that it’s possible and important for everyone to hold each other up as much as they can.

The workshop was about the kindness of looking and listening, the kindness of bowing your head to hear an inaudible whisper, listen to what others needed.

The hallway in a hotel in the Dead Sea to which residents from Kibbutz Be’eri were evacuated. (Shiri Artzi)

Erich Fromm writes exactly that in his book “The Art of Loving.” He writes that love is an activity and a decision, not a passive outcome.

Love is remembering how someone takes their coffee.

What did those meetings do for you?

I think meetings where we’re really authentically present affect us, even change us. I carry those people in my heart and keep in touch with them. Like in the song by Avtipus — “You told me yesterday you dream of me at night / it’s such a nice thing to know that someone is dreaming of you…” — I also think that when you dream of someone, you create doubles of them in the world, another possibility for them.

And this time has created a race for doubling, for remembering. It’s a war against forgetting. So many people were murdered that day and every piece of memory is so dear. There are a lot of people to remember.

A few days after the disaster, leading up to the funerals of 100 people from Be’eri who were murdered, there was an obituary writing project. Like in many kibbutzim, in Be’eri they write a kibbutz obituary for a person who passes away. They tell a little about their life. The shocked members of Be’eri couldn’t face the number of obituaries that needed to be written, so they contacted authors and asked them to take part in the effort.

Before I started writing, I took part in an emergency Zoom meeting with Delphine Horvilleur — a French rabbi who wrote the book “Living With Our Dead” and who helps people navigate mourning. We asked her to guide the obituary writers on how to approach talking with the victims’ families for information. I needed to write an obituary for a woman I had never met and talk to her daughter and sisters. I needed to ask who she was to be able to write about her.

And what was said in the conversation with Horvilleur? How do you approach people in that situation?

It was a beautiful talk, and I remember that one of the things she said was that proximity to death and mourning is a spiritually high place and therefore you need a high frequency of listening and attention. You must hear things that are hidden from the ear or the eye, that are in a twilight zone between here and somewhere else. You need a frequency like whistles that only dogs can hear, that get lost in the day-to-day roughness. Again, it’s connected to the thin note of kindness.

Especially because this time has been heartbreaking, I’m far more alert to the thin strings and the golden sparkling webs in it– the thin webs of beauty. Even on a morning walk with the dog, I see the yellow bloom on a tree that I don’t know its name and the part of me that is jovial is awake and sharper than ever, especially given the general awful gloom.

French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur poses on the red carpet, as part of the 49th edition of The Deauville American film festival in Deauville, western France on September 6, 2023. (LOU BENOIST / AFP)

Can you call that insisting on life? Choosing?

I’m not sure, but I’m full of wonder in the face of the yin and yang of life. The simultaneous existence amazes me. The situation is so extreme to the point that on the one hand, it blunts us even if you’re not part of the direct circle of people who were affected. Because how long can you carry suffering? How much can you read the news without desensitizing? So of course there’s a growing callousness, but in a strange way because of the mountains of suffering, the beauty of our continued, thin, and insistent existence stands out more.

Today is very green.

Yes, I’ve been weaving myself a web of beauty and kindness to continue living.

As a scriptwriter and author, writing is a central part of your work. How do you keep it going these days, or maybe a better way to ask is how does it keep you going?

I’m in the midst of three screenplay projects that began before October 7. They are for three television series for adults, two of which are already in the writing process. The one that is still in development is based on my book, “Stories From the Breakup.”

I work with partners. In this world, things take a lot of time, and in the first moments after October 7, everything froze. We couldn’t do anything.

After we came to our senses a bit, we asked ourselves what we were doing. It seemed impossible to me to continue with the script as it was because the characters didn’t experience October 7. They live in an old world. With time, things changed and took on the prism of now. How could they not? I see how everything I do takes a turn. Like a body that was hit hard and everything moves. The layers settled themselves differently.

Kibbutz Be’eri residents seen at a hotel in the Dead Sea, on October 20, 2023. (Yossi Zamir/Flash90)

And how do you bring back together what has separated?

There’s a saying that always comforts me: “The path is wiser than those who walk it.” I remind myself that we see only a small part of the processes that began long before and will continue far ahead. I need to try and understand the inconceivable in my consciousness, but the words cannot seem to hold reality’s new definitions.

My internal struggle is reaching some sort of understanding. I know it’s a lost cause, but I try to understand, and in order to understand what cannot be understood, I try to expand the picture internally, I try to understand historical processes and events, I read a lot of articles about the history of wars and regimes. Somehow, it gathers me up.

Trying to understand the division is like trying to read a foreign language, a language that doesn’t live in the soul. I guess you don’t speak the language.

Since October 7, I’ve felt the gender division even more, including at home. In conversations with men around me, I hear “There’s no choice, we have to retaliate.” It’s an aggressive and powerful take in which I hear their inability to come to terms with defeat and helplessness, and I purposely choose to have the world helpless. The most unbearable impotence for men is the feeling of defeat and the inability to defend.

I’ve never heard from men around me such extreme reactions to sexual violence as I did concerning what happened to women that day. This might sound blunt, but the defiled women also defiled the honor of ownership. The war touches the primal parts of the soul.

On the one hand, we’re living in 2024 where we have artificial intelligence. On the other hand, we’re like tribes in caves and it’s hard to grasp the dissonance. In the end, everyone has the instinct to protect the children, but in wartime, we go back to primitive places — the man goes back to fighting for the children’s safety, and the woman gathers all the children to her, even those she didn’t birth.

Demonstrators gather during a protest decrying sexual violence against women in the October 7 massacre, outside of United Nations headquarters in New York City, on December 4, 2023. (Yakov Binyamin/Flash90)

And within these gaps, does the passion and taste for creation still pulse within you?

More than ever. I’ve never sat to write for so many hours before. The art is my safe room, that’s what I’ve understood, and it almost doesn’t matter what sort of art because the act of creating is healing while it happens. The movement of fingers on the keyboard is the movement of the heart and movement against freezing, fossilization, and petrification.

Passion for art is a haven, a place to run to, to be comforted in, and this is also connected to beauty. In the face of the feeling that everything is chaotic, I have to hold on to something solid. My reading has also changed accordingly.

What has changed about it?

I have a lot of compulsory reading. I read a lot more texts that I have to than ones that I really want to. But the way I read now is similar to how I learned to look at the yellow blooms in the street. Sometimes, I’m breathless because I’m so in wonder.

In the last few years, I’ve led a book club. This is a group that has come a long way with me. Once a month, we choose a book and read it together, and out of these meetings, we discover a collective bare spirit, and it’s wonderful. People place themselves in the room through the story and kindness takes place.

Lately, I led a meeting about the novel “In Front of the Sea” by David Fogel, and it’s like an infusion of beauty, and I feel that I need infusions of beauty like that.

When you read, you’re ready to put yourself in the shoes, eyes, and soul of another person. You go the farthest from yourself and at the same time, the closest to yourself. Reading is also a ticket to new lands like a magic broom that allows you to be launched into another soul and the arrow that shoots you into the deepest parts of yourself. Reading allows you, sublimatively, to experience far-reaching things. Reading is wonder. And so is writing.

Israeli author Shiri Artzi, June 24, 2022. (Moshe Shai/FLASH90)

Yesterday, at a family dinner, I suggested that everyone say something good that came into their lives recently. I shared that the good thing that came into my life was teaching. I started teaching writing.

What work of art touched you recently?

“An Uninterrupted Life” by Etty Hillesum. I think it’s the manual of this time. It’s all the things I tried to be focused on. Everything is written there sublimely.

So could you say that it’s not only beautiful literarily, but it also changed something in you?

I want to believe so. I think that what I adopted through her writing was an understanding of where to turn my gaze. I feel like there’s a choice there, to maintain a simultaneous gaze and to be alert to the pain as well as beauty. I’m there.

Without survivor’s guilt?

No, and I’ll tell you why. I understand that guilt is not a productive feeling. Once, Yiftah, my partner, said to me when I whined about some recurring guilt: “Shiri, this is defeat. Either stop feeling guilty or find something to do to fix it, improve it.”

So I try as much as I can not to feel guilt, but love. Every Friday night, I light candles and say a prayer. I adopted this rite seven years ago after my aunt, Nava Semel, and my grandmother passed away. I pray for my friends, my loved ones, and the whole world, and always at the end of the prayer, I ask God to be a pipeline of love.

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