Meeting Extreme Trauma with Extreme Love   

So, who is “us,” and why would liberal-leaning schools want their students to sit with us? Firstly, my medical training was in a somewhat obscure specialty called psychoimmunology. You can look it up. I live in the central part of Jerusalem and have been blessed to author three books — Be a Mensch, A Wholly Life, and the new Amazon release, Extreme Trauma: October 7 as an Outlier in the Range of Human Potential.

I’m also the co-founder of Israel’s Be A Mensch Foundation, which brings polarized Israelis together in dialogue about big issues that historically fuel the fires of division. When others hear what we’ve been doing for a decade-plus, they often look askance. How is it possible to get secular Jews to interact meaningfully with chareidim? Why would uber-leftist students engage for three hours with members of our team, who are visibly uber-religious? Why do they all want to meet again — and again? And why would schoolteachers, administrators, and parents tell their peers, “You’ve got to meet these Mensch people”?

Before October 7 last year, it was partly curiosity inspired by two Israeli hit TV series, Shtisel and Srugim. They’d met everyone else — the Bedouins, Peace Now, the Palestinian Authority, the advocates of alternative lifestyles, and, prior to October 7, the opponents of judicial reform. But 22% of Israel’s population — the dati-chareidi mix — had been excluded from classroom conversations, except in derisive characterizations.

After October 7, everything changed. The social schisms so pronounced on October 6 vanished as a sweeping new national unity emerged on October 8. People modified their interactions.