Posted on April 9, 2026
“My prayer is that we learn again what it is to truly meet, and let the magic of true meeting mold our sense of what is possible.”
My name is Danny Cohen, Bronfman Fellow 2004. I grew up in a South African Jewish family in Charlotte, North Carolina and made aliyah in 2011. After many years in the Jerusalem area, I now live in Kiryat Tivon, in the lower Galilee. My personal and professional path are about restoring and exploring what it means to be alive together, healing and cultivating a sacred connection with life: in ourselves, with each other, and with the Divine.
Practically, I offer trainings rooted in Nonviolent Communication (NVC), teach a Jewish approach to meditation and mindfulness, offer somatic and attachment-oriented therapy, and am deeply engaged with collective trauma healing. I co-founded and teach with Or Halev – the Center for Jewish Spirituality and Meditation – and work with individuals and groups in Israel and internationally.
There’s a Mishnah in Masechet Middot describing how when pilgrims would enter the Temple Mount, they would enter from the right. But if they were in mourning, they would enter from the left – so that everyone coming from the other direction would be required to face them, to greet and bless them, so they would not be left alone.
My teacher, Thomas Hübl, an Israel-based mystic and one of the world leaders in collective trauma healing, often speaks of the core need we have as human beings to feel felt, to be seen. And I think that is both central to what’s dear to me, and so much of what is needed in our fragmented culture. So much of the reason trauma becomes trauma is not (only) because really intense things happen, but because we’re not accompanied in metabolizing them together.
A month or two after October 7, I was speaking with my colleague at Or Halev. We were asking ourselves, what can we do, how can we help in this drastic reality? We came up with the idea that we can support the therapists who are supporting those who’ve been most impacted by October 7 and the war (on the Israeli side – alas, we don’t have access to support Palestinian therapists, though I would welcome such). They give so much, but they’re only human and don’t have endless supplies of capacity and energy. Some of them lost family members and friends on October 7 or in the war. Many lost clients or community members from the Otef [the Gaza Envelope]. And then the ongoingness of two-plus years of being the ones who are supporting others and absorbing their pain. So many are just burnt out.
So we started running subsidized retreats for therapists. Four days in a beautiful, human-made oasis in the Arava desert. Every morning we get up and watch the sunrise and chant. Sometimes it feels like a kind of collective detox – a discharging of what’s been held in individual and collective bodies. We try to help restore the nervous system’s capacity to shift from a state of chronic sympathetic arousal into rest-and-digest, and tune in to inner resources. We teachers provide a lot of support, guidance and teachings on how to meet what comes up with skill and care. It’s very powerful trauma work.
It’s also a silent meditation retreat: participants don’t talk to each other and are freed from the demands of presenting oneself and responding to others, available to be with themselves. So much of our energy goes into reacting: what am I going to say? How am I going to respond? When we take that away, it frees up attention to notice what’s usually below the threshold of awareness – our patterns, feelings, what’s happening in our body. That awareness is where choice begins. Without it, it just feels like it’s happening to me. The practice is learning to be aware – where is my attention going? – and then to choose where to direct it. And rather than getting swept up in the whirlpool of the negativity bias – always looking for proof of what’s wrong – we can notice, bit by bit, what’s okay, teaching our nervous system to take in signals of okayness.
I sometimes offer a drash on the word retreat: to re-treat – to tend again the things we’ve only had a habitual relation with, and meet them this time with love, or with gentleness. One practice I created for this work is the Feelings Welcome Game: in pairs, one person notices and names, in one word, a feeling they are experiencing in this moment. The other simply echoes it back and adds: “Welcome.” Then we switch. It sounds simple, and it is, but the effect in the room is powerful, this sense of deep co-regulation and attunement. Afterwards, I invite participants to do both roles for themselves: to be both the welcomer and the welcome. In Pirkei Avot, Shamai says, וֶהֱוֵי מְקַבֵּל אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם בְּסֵבֶר פָּנִים יָפוֹת – Receive every person with a welcome countenance. Another rendering could be: Receive the entirety of a person with a welcome countenance. For most of us, this is life-changing – learning that we can bring a welcoming relation to whatever we’re experiencing, that we can safely move through – rather than around – our emotions.
Amidst the current round of war with Iran and Hezbollah, as the regular missile sirens activate layers of fear and stress, I find my years of training, practice, and inner work serve me well. Personally, I’m accessing a new channel of tears and finding how much they help the stress and sympathetic arousal move through and out of my body. That outlet is most readily opened through an inviting relational space – where I can be met, and not fixed or advised, in a feelingful and resonant way.
Living here, reckoning with this reality, has been… hard. To say the least.
I had a friend who was taken hostage on October 7, along with her kids, husband and mother. Her father was murdered. For such a long time, until her husband was finally freed, I spent every day searching for good news, for some sign of progress, constantly hoping, waiting and worrying.
At the same time, witnessing the horrors of the destruction and death in Gaza, and so much numbness, hatred and dehumanization from many Israeli Jews towards Palestinians and Arabs, has been heartbreaking. As a Jew who made aliyah to be part of building a society around the fundamental tenet that every human being is created in the image of the Divine, it’s devastating.
And still, I feel a deep sense of belonging to this land, and of purpose here. This is where I feel most called to contribute. Having spent eight or nine years now exploring collective trauma and healing, and training as a therapist, I have a very helpful lens to make sense of what’s going on with people. Not to excuse it, but also not to just see it as a moral failing – which one could also do – but to understand what’s going on underneath. When there’s more complexity than a fragile nervous system can handle, when there’s a history of being victims – to hold that complexity, or to acknowledge being a perpetrator, takes quite some capacity. On the other hand, it also takes mature discernment to own what’s ours without denying responsibility of the other.
It can be challenging to stay in touch with the humanity of people who are saying things that are morally intolerable, without overriding one’s own reaction, without giving up one’s own voice and values. People often polarize into aggressive-defensive moralizing, or override their own clarity in service of pseudo-harmony. The first is a fight reaction, the second a fawn reaction. To stand in one’s own moral clarity AND stay in relation means we need to learn to host big energies, like anger and hate.
Hate and anger have really important functions but are often unskillfully held and acted upon. Sometimes we throw the baby out with the bathwater, thinking we shouldn’t be angry because our image of anger is violence. But that’s a coupling of a feeling with a particular behavior, and we can uncouple them. The raw feeling has a protective energy: I, or my people, deserve to live, are worthy of dignity. When I can tap into that and embody the energy, I’m not angry in the same way – I’m empowered and standing strong for something. And from that place, it becomes possible to feel into what’s going on underneath what people are saying – enabling me to rehumanize them, from awful racists to struggling, suffering, often scared human beings. Which doesn’t excuse any particular behavior. But it does enable a shift from polarization into humanization, and opens a potential path of meeting.
Rabbi Menachem Froman, who was a leading figure in interfaith dialogue and spiritually-based Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, often pointed to the flawed framing of the conflict: “it’s either my land or your land,” “it’s us or them.” The pattern holds at both the national and individual levels. So much of our conflict, burnout, and trauma is rooted in a deeply defensive experience of scarcity – the sense that there’s not enough to go around, that it’s either your needs or mine.
In NVC terms, that’s a conflict of strategies rather than a meeting of underlying needs. But when we learn to connect to what’s alive in each of us, we shift out of our limited and limiting defensive systems into the potentialities of our deep divine nature.
I love the “Torah” of relationality. I often hearken back to Adam and Eve: וַיִּֽהְי֤וּ שְׁנֵיהֶם֙ עֲרוּמִּ֔ים … וְלֹ֖א יִתְבֹּשָֽׁשׁוּ – The two of them were both naked … yet they felt no shame (Genesis 2:25). It’s a model – perhaps the model – of what’s possible between two people. Unashamed, unabashed intimacy and togetherness.
לֹא־ט֛וֹב הֱי֥וֹת הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְבַדּ֑וֹ – It is not good that the human should be alone (Genesis 2:18). We need to find and cultivate relationships, where what’s alive in us can be brought forth, where we’re met in a way that helps us feel deeply felt, seen, and heard. When we feel safe and seen then, very naturally, our state shifts – without even needing to try. And when our state shifts, our sense of what’s possible – what we believe to be true about us, about people, about the world – naturally expands.
The Kodesh Kodashim – the Holy of Holies at the heart of the Temple – is described as containing two golden cherubim, face to face, their wings touching overhead. And between them, the concentration of the Shekhinah, the most intense divine presence, dwelling in rectified relational space. As mythic symbolism, it shows us how to tend a sacred space – through a deep meeting and being met. My prayer is that we learn again what it is to truly meet, and let the magic of true meeting mold our sense of what is possible.
