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Ealeal Semel ’07

Posted on March 8, 2024

My name is Ealeal, and I live in Tel Aviv with my partner, Nizan, our baby Emmy, and Shoko the puppy.

October 7th was supposed to be the first performance of a new cast in a play I produced at the Gesher Theatre, Someone Like Me. In the play, written by Roy Chen, five young actors play the characters of teenagers who are inpatients in a psychiatric hospital. It has been performed successfully at the Gesher Theatre for around four years. After it successfully survived the COVID-19 pandemic, including innumerable challenges and upheavals, I thought there was nothing else that could prevent this play from reaching an audience. On October 7th, when I woke up to a siren in my Tel Aviv apartment and I was standing in the stairwell with my partner, carrying our two-month-old baby in my arms, together with our dog, I sent a message to Roy: “But what will happen to the play?”

This is the way it is with big events. At the time, we do not understand that they are big, and we think first about ourselves. I felt like a bride whose wedding has been cancelled. How could there be a war now?

I am one of the people on the margins of the war – I am not fighting on the front; I did not lose my loved ones or people who are very close to me. In the first days of the war, like many people, I scrolled through Facebook in terror, scared to discover who I knew among the murdered and the hostages, but also too scared not to scroll. I did discover that there were people among my second and third circles. Friends of friends, friends of acquaintances. The familiar faces that were part of a larger story kept me up at night.

My brothers-in-law were enlisted to the army; my friends sheltered in place at home, close to their safe rooms; others were forced to evacuate their homes. I was scared to read what people I knew were writing and doing in the name of revenge. I was scared of the magnitude of loss of humanity. In every part of the war, I found people I knew, but none of them was me. And I felt relief.

I erased all my news apps. I dedicated myself entirely to maternity leave. I dedicated myself to the small gestures that helped me feel like I was doing something meaningful – collecting clothes and toys from mothers in the neighborhood, pumping breast milk for babies whose mothers are not with them.

I am one of those people who was once again sent home because they are not essential workers – the artists. But this time, unlike during the COVID-19 pandemic, I knew, with a lot of confidence, that we would return. Not because art provides some sort of magical healing, and not because it provides entertainment or a respite for the soul. Rather, art is the only thing that enables us to imagine the day after.

And in fact, in January we came back to perform Someone Like Me, just as we had planned. Almost. The cliché is that in theater, the play is different every evening. Because we are different every evening. Because we can tell ourselves a different story. The play that I worried would be irrelevant in a time of war, because who would want to see a play about hospitalized teenagers in times like these, turned out to be very relevant.

On the stage of the theater, I was able to imagine the day after, as far away as it might be. I was able to imagine healing. I was able to imagine a day when there would be restoration and peace throughout this land and for all who live here. All of the pessimists and realists cannot convince me, because art obligates me to hope, incurably. To imagine. And I see in my mind’s eye the day when the impossible becomes possible.