Art as a Beacon to Navigate Chaos

Sketching my path before and after October 7th

I had to read Meital’s WhatsApp messages four times before my chest gained 100 pounds and the space behind my jaw started to pulsate like a drum. 

I had arrived on a red-eye flight from Tel Aviv to New York, landing on Friday, October 6, 2023 at 5AM. So I had exactly 23 hours of hazy jetlag before waking up to strange texts from dear friends I’d just hugged goodbye.

My black carry-on sat unpacked, across the room on the floor. Inside were souvenirs from art exhibitions I visited over the last month. Postcards and tote bags. Maps and magnets.

The Pompidou and the Van Gogh Museum became instantly irrelevant.

How was this even possible? Are my friends and their families safe? Will they stay safe? When will we know for sure? What does safety mean anymore? Why did I leave when I did? Should I go back? 

My suitcase stayed unpacked for a week.

I.

Tel Aviv was the final stop on an enlightening four-week journey across Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin. 

The European leg was about art. Getting lost and found at museums, seeing a friend’s show in Berlin. In each city I was a restless sponge, filling up on insights and releasing them into my notebook. Many moments were too special for social media so I captured them with pen or pencil instead. 

I saw why paintings and poems are often born in pubs. 

First I spent five hours at the Pompidou in Paris, soaking up the surrealists, luxuriating in a series of large blue Míros. I twisted and stretched my mind at the Dalí museum in Montmartre, and wrote down quotes of his in my notebook like, “Those who don’t want to imitate anyone don’t create anything.”

In Amsterdam, I cried in the chapel of a church without knowing why. Now I wonder if it was a premonition. 

I ordered cider from the same seat at the same bar two nights in a row, the kind of bar where there isn’t any music playing but you don’t notice its absence. I sketched a girl in a black hoodie, her brown curly hair in a bun. 

Sketch of girl at a bar in Amsterdam. Sept 14, 2023

I disappeared into the Van Gogh Museum for six hours, and after waiting for 20 years to visit since studying him in college, I emerged a more integrated version of myself with enough inspiration to last the rest of my life. I never wanted to leave, and considered applying for a barista job at the museum café. 

Next, on a train from Amsterdam to Berlin I became a grumpy pretzel until a dark epiphany made me smile.

We sat at the station for 40 minutes hearing announcements in Dutch and German. A woman nearby translated, “Overbooked.”

I didn’t have an assigned seat, so for five hours I sat on the floor between cars, crunched beside my bags, the bathroom door, and the feet of passengers who remained standing. After an hour of back cramps and wishing I had flown instead, I realized something. It was the evening of Rosh Hashanah, an auspicious day to spend in Germany, let alone arriving on a train. Things could be worse, I thought. There have been worse train rides to Germany.

From this sharpened perspective I opened my notebook and sketched my white Nike running shoes wedged against the bathroom door. 

My view on a train to Berlin. Sept 15, 2023

Berlin was about visiting my artist friend Roxanne, who was in a two-woman show. We met in New York in 2018, when a bartender introduced us because he knew we were both painters. We became good friends and he became a memory.

Roxanne’s a surrealist painter, a deep thinker, and a great listener and we had a three-day conversation about art, creativity, relationships, and whatever else there is to discuss.

II

The Israel leg was about people, focusing on the present and avoiding nostalgia. 

Man reading at a Tel Aviv café, Sept 24, 2023

I lived in Tel Aviv from 2008 to 2012. Though it’s been over a decade since I moved away, my friendships there are blood thick and bone deep. I was there to reconnect with old friends — mostly Israelis, a few Brits and one American — and to spend time with their kids. 

Nina picked me up from Ben Gurion airport wearing big dark sunglasses and a bigger smile. She’s like my big Israeli sister I met through a series of connections, favors and luck. She hosted me for the first three months I lived in Israel, in 2008.  

She was coming from work and her short dark hair looked effortlessly perfect as usual. We screamed and laughed the whole way to her airy apartment on Rothschild Boulevard, in central Tel Aviv.

I washed my face, she changed her clothes, and we walked to Café Noir, our favorite restaurant. We shared the same dishes we’ve ordered for over ten years: a fattoush salad and druze pita filled with lamb and veal, eggplant and pine nuts and a side of tzatziki. 

For two weeks I stayed at friends’ apartments, sleeping in colorful playrooms with walls covered in drawings of animals and shelves full of Legos, books and toys. I went with Meital to get her daughter from kindergarten. I watched Ellice run a household on a moshav with three boys, a husband, two dogs, a lizard, a snake and many chickens. I saw Rotem decorate the house for her son’s 12th birthday, and I watched myself transform into an old person when I said to him, “You were one day old the last time we met!”

He laughed and asked “Ba beyt-cholim?” 

I replied, “Yes, at the hospital.” I visited Rotem with the rest of our team the day after she gave birth. We had stood by her bed, celebrating the end of her IVF journey she started when we first met.

III

My favorite painters reflect the mood of a challenging era. 

Expressionists like Van Gogh, surrealists like Dalí, and Dadaists like Picabia seek to provoke more than please. They excavate the human condition, embrace absurdity, and ask hard questions with no answers. They offer images that tickle the mind, like a woman’s torso that is also a chest of drawers. Or an egg. 

Artists shift reality by creating new ways to see the world. Sensitive souls often use art to alchemize chaos. 

In other words, “It’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times.” 

This quote by Nina Simone is taped to my bedroom mirror. It’s been an emotional lighthouse for when the rest of the world feels like a bottomless pit of despair. It offers me solace no matter how much dust has settled on my easel and brushes.

It was useful during Covid, inspiring me to put on canvas what New York City felt like those first few months. This led to a solo art show at my local bar.

Since October 7th, the quote has taunted me. I haven’t drawn a thing.

IV

Know Hope

On October 10, 2023, I stopped crying long enough to change my clothes for the first time in three days and went on a run. 

I selected an episode titled “Why Leonard Cohen Ran Toward War” on Bari Weiss’ podcast, Honestly. Since it had aired on September 17th, I could take a break from the real-time horrors without disconnecting from the bigger picture. It offered a lens to view the current situation in context.

I learned that in 1973, Leonard Cohen announced he was done with music. Later that year, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in what became the Yom Kippur War. At a low point in his life, Cohen flew to Tel Aviv without a plan or a guitar. Yet a group of soldiers recognized him at a café, and convinced him to perform for the Israeli troops at the Egyptian border. He wrote many songs inspired by his experience during the war, and continued to play until his death in 2016.

The podcast’s guest was Matti Friedman, a Canadian-Israeli author of a book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.

During the episode, Friedman said, “Any meeting of art and war is hallucinatory.” 

I stopped in my tracks.

He was describing Cohen’s revitalized creativity and the impact he had on future generations of Israelis. 

That’s the beauty of art: it lets you change your world with a song that strikes a chord, a painting that hits a nerve, a film that makes you cry.

Van Gogh’s brushstrokes are the physical marks of an energy transfer, from one state to another, from chaos to beauty. 

Art can be used as a balm to soothe a wound, a valve to release emotions, or a channel to champion a cause.

Art can reflect and impact public consciousness. 

Tel Aviv is covered in political street art reflecting a spectrum of issues, emotions and hot takes. You can feel the pulse of the city in real-time by paying attention to the messages on sidewalks and buildings. One of my favorite artists of all time, Know Hope, is an Israeli street artist who has helped me navigate my own feelings since first moving to Tel Aviv. Another is Dede Bandaid, who created the Kidnapped poster campaign to raise awareness of the hostages. 

The separation wall between Israel and the West Bank is also covered in politically charged street art. I once visited the West Bank and will never forget the “other side” of that wall, itself a physical representation of the conflict. It contains messages of resistance, pain, and also hope, including several by Banksy.

V

Looking at photos from my recent trip feels too painful so I play a reel of snapshots in my mind instead. Hot, cloudless walks in hipster neighborhoods. The warmth of the ocean and the sound of matkot (Israeli beach paddle ball). The multisensory chaos of the Carmel Market on a late Friday afternoon: shouting, spices, trinkets, and sales. Drinking coffee at my friends’ kitchen tables as their kids laugh at my accent. 

My favorite memory is Shabbat dinner at Nina’s, with her mom’s Yemenite meatball soup and the poppy seed cake I got for dessert at the market that afternoon. Nina’s kitchen is loud and bright, with conversations in three languages; her parents speak to me in both Hebrew and English, and her husband speaks to their daughter in Dutch. We have ice cream and tea, and it’s as if I never left. 

Then, the screen goes black. 

I remember. 

A violent wave of dark water washes these memories away, pulling me to the current nightmare that is the world “after” October 7th. 

This whiplash is endless and acutely felt when thinking about my trip for more than a few seconds. It’s like getting kicked in the head from inside your own skull. Since receiving those WhatsApp messages the morning after my trip, I am frozen in a liminal state. Indefinitely.

As the war in Gaza bleeds onto our social media feeds and college campuses, it’s getting harder to express what’s coursing through my nervous system. Words are heavier. Weaponized. Language feels insufficient. By a twist of fate, I joined an online writing class that began October 1st. I’ve started and stopped writing scattered sentences for weeks, unable to focus or commit to a line of thought, let alone publish a piece. I almost dropped out because it was too hard to participate.

I’m writing this on November 7, one month since the massacre. One month and one day since I left behind a version of Israel I will carry with me not just in my mind but in my throat, my stomach and my chest. 

And I can’t get the words of Leonard Cohen’s biographer and Nina Simone out of my head: 

Any meeting of war and art is hallucinatory…

It’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times…

Writing this was excruciating yet necessary. 

Publishing it feels like tearing open a new realm.