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Feb. 22, 2025 - Epoch Times
10:59
The Resilience of Israelis: Chava Floryn Explores Trauma and Healing After the October 7 Massacre
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Chava Florin, such a pleasure to have you on the show.
It's a pleasure to be here, Jan.
Thank you for having me.
Hamas released bodies of hostages and a few infants, one nine months.
What do you make of that whole situation?
It's a very, very difficult situation, Jan, and it has tremendous...
Tremendous pain that a lot of people have been suffering from as a result of this news.
This is very serious.
And if a lot of the stories that we told in our film was surrounding children and the effects of war that it's had on children and on families.
And the one thing we've seen is how it affects children's sense of play, sense of safety, and really on both sides of the aisle.
This isn't just one.
There are children who are suffering in a way that we cannot even begin to imagine generationally how this is going to impact so many people.
Obviously, what happened in the last few days is it's beyond devastating.
And my whole goal in making the film resilient was to create a space for people to take in ways that we can heal during the crisis and afterwards.
To figure out a way to move forward.
And it's going to take time.
It's going to take a long time.
But I do believe that one of the things that I noticed when I was in Israel, 16 weeks after the war, was in the fields where the Nova Massacre happened, the anemone flowers were blooming.
And it looked like a carpet of just red.
Blood, if you want the truth.
And it just made me cry because it made me realize that within every area of loss, there's always birth that comes afterwards.
Always.
And that is really what the Jewish people and what the Israeli population stand for, is our ability to move through life and to choose life every single time, even in the wake of such tragedy and darkness.
Yeah, I mean, there's even some reports that one of the bodies that was returned was not the person.
It was not Shiri.
It was not the mom.
Yes.
Right.
Very upsetting.
And so, I mean, this plays kind of directly into the work that you're trying to do, it feels to me, right?
The question we have to ask ourselves is how do we move through such devastation?
How do we move through it?
How do we show up the next morning when we're feeling so brokenhearted?
How do we do it?
And the one thing the Israeli population taught me when I was there is they do it through community.
They do it through song.
They do it through showing up and finding purpose and mission.
One of the people that we interviewed was this incredible man named Aryeh Dabular, who every single day would go to all of the hotels and just deliver teddy bears to the children who were displaced.
There were 200,000 displaced families as a result of October 7th.
From the North and from the South.
And you know what?
We had the LA fires two weeks ago.
And I thought to myself, my God, I would love to pay it forward.
So I called one of our donors and I was talking about this.
And she said, well, let's do it.
Let's do a teddy bear drive for the children who have lost all of their toys in Los Angeles.
And we did.
And within 30 minutes of me asking a few friends, I got 13 pallets.
We gave out 5,000 teddy bears to children all over the Los Angeles basin as a result of what I learned from the Israeli population in Israel.
5,000 children who had lost their toys, who had lost their homes, had a little bit of love.
And the one thing that we put on the teddy bear was this little sign that said, Mr. Rogers once said, that when bad things happen, you have to look for the helpers.
And all over Jerusalem and all over Israel, there are helpers.
People who are doing incredible things to create meaning and purpose in the wake of this horrible conflict.
Like 150,000 or maybe it was 200,000 volunteers that showed up within four months to help pick the oranges in the beautiful gardens right outside of the kibbutzim that were attacked because all of the Thai workers had either been killed or had fled.
We're talking people from all over the world, Jan, who had shown up in Israel's time of need.
There are so many beautiful stories coming out of Israel.
People from all over the world going there and volunteering and helping and participating and bringing healing.
Like the neuropsychologist that we interviewed in our film, Dr. Orly Petr, she's incredible.
And she created an initiative called the Israel Healing Initiative.
And the goal is to go in there and not just bring healing to the Israeli population but also to the Palestinian population.
You know, it's our goal.
We would love to send in vagus nerve stimulators to help calm people's nervous systems down.
I mean, this is an epic moment in history for the whole world.
We're in a post-COVID world where everybody is suffering, where everybody is dealing with crisis management.
Where emotional depression is on a massive rise across the globe.
And I just saw what was happening and I thought to myself, there's got to be something we can learn from how the Israeli population cope.
Well, so that's interesting because I was going to ask you about the genesis of the film.
And indeed, I think you started answering that question.
And also, kind of your background and your work fit into that.
Tell me about that.
So I've been a filmmaker for 20 years, but around the time of COVID, I realized that there was a real problem within the communities of people coping during the lockdown.
So I started a podcast called The Nurture Series, interviewing therapists and healers and all different kinds of people way smarter than me about how to cope during crisis.
How do you parent better?
How do you couple better?
How do you nurture yourself?
And from that, I ended up writing a book called Everything's Gonna Be Okay, How to Nurture Yourself During a Storm.
And the reason why I called it Everything's Gonna Be Okay is because when I was a child, my father used to tell me a little cute thing.
He would say every time things were going rough, he would say, which meant everything's gonna be okay.
And he knew that things don't always turn out okay.
He was nine years old when he lost his father, who was a World War II veteran.
He had experienced a lot of loss in his life.
And every time we experience any kind of loss in our family, my mom and my dad would always say EGBOK to us.
Because it's not about necessarily knowing that things are going to be okay.
It's about having the intention you're going to make it okay.
And I ended up really trying to heal myself.
I was diagnosed with severe PTSD. Authorities had said that my father was actually murdered, and we dealt with a lot of questions around how he died when he was 60. And in that year, I had lost 10 different friends and family, and it was very intense.
So as a result of going through my own PTSD, I started really researching ways to heal myself, and ended up...
Learning that I had this gift of being a healer, a somatic healer.
I have a practice in Beverly Hills, and I sometimes practice in Florida as well.
And that's why I went on this mission.
There was this mental health mission I was invited to go to in Israel.
And I was invited on a Saturday night, leaving on a Wednesday.
Tuesday morning, I thought to myself, I think this could be a documentary.
I had no, absolutely nothing planned.
Not one interview.
But I figured I would find the stories because Israel is just so rich with them.
And now we have a feature documentary.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
I love the focus on helping people kind of get through.
I've watched parts of the film and I can see the focus is on helping people get through the trauma.
Yes.
One of the things that we saw...
When we were there was we had kind of taken a look at what a brain looks like when it hasn't gone through trauma versus a brain who has been running for seven hours for their lives.
And you can see that the network of a brain that's been running for seven hours and is severely traumatized and dealing with PTSD is not as fired up, which means that they're in fight-or-flight mode the whole entire time.
And there's all these amazing, innovative ways that people are moving through dealing with recalibrating the nervous system, which is what I do every single day.
I get to do this with patients.
But I just, I think that this entire event is going to just take so much of our effort to take a look at ways that we can heal ourselves as a population.
And that, to me, is a human story.
That has no sides.
Fantastic.
So where can people watch the film?
Well, right now we're doing the film festival circuit.
We're going to be at the NRB Christian Media Convention next week, screening it several times with Jerusalem Tours, who is our co-sponsor, which is very exciting.
And we're really kind of waiting for more distribution.
We were in the Miami Jewish Film Festival, the Boca Jewish Film Festival.
Last night we were screened at the Golden State Festival at the Chinese Theatre.
So we're making the rounds.
We're looking for distribution.
And I know we're going to find it because it's resonating with audiences.
You know, this is a human story at the end of the day.
It's how do you move through crisis?
And how do you do it valiantly?
And how do you cultivate life in the midst of darkness?
Lohava Florin, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you, Jan.
It's so nice to be here.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
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