How much can you sanitize a massacre? Should you sanitize a massacre?

Last Sunday, as the country reeled with the news of terror and war and families stayed together indoors, I logged into Zoom to participate in an editorial meeting.

There was a magazine to plan, but where do you even begin? Nothing was clear.

“The magazine should just give chizuk and support,” one editor said.

“But is that your only job?” another editor asked. “This isn’t a shul newsletter, it’s a magazine. Part of what we do is news.”

He was right, in a sense. People do look to us for news. But it was very, very black news — darker and more barbaric than perhaps any breaking news event we’ve ever covered. How much can you sanitize a massacre? Should you sanitize a massacre?

On the other hand, we are a frum family magazine. We wanted to produce something eminently appropriate.

So we got to work and tried to convey the dimensions of the horror within sensitive parameters. No photos of overt abuse or torture. No images of lifeless people. No blaming or shaming of any presumed-culpable fellow Jews — not this week. No gruesome details of the killings, just vague hints in the testimony of a Hatzalah volunteer.

There was very little time to discuss and debate, consider and reconsider each detail of each decision, as we usually try to do. We had to make many judgment calls as our own emotions were on overload and while the facts were still emerging.

We also faced intense pressure from air-raid sirens puncturing the workday, frightened children at home, the printers threatening to leave early so they could stock up on batteries and nonperishables in accordance with the Home Front Command’s instructions — all while working with a skeleton staff.

This is context but it is certainly not an excuse. If you put out a frum family magazine, you must be committed to doing it right even if your workday is interrupted by stints in a bomb shelter. And from what I saw that day, everyone was fully committed to doing their best.

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till, I left the office shaken — not just by the new rounds of details that kept emerging, but by the fear that we may have betrayed your trust. After the magazine hit the newsstands, we received feedback of both sorts.

Many readers said they appreciate the balance they found: an immediate, chilling portrayal that brought the tragedy home while not crossing red lines.

One American reader told us that she immediately hid the magazine in her room so her children wouldn’t leaf through it until she and her husband had reviewed it (I have friends who do this every week of the year, as is their right and some would say their responsibility — certainly this week many felt it would be prudent). After going through the coverage, this reader made the deliberate decision to show it to her older daughters. Because as much as they were all davening, she knows that at 6,000 miles away, they are cushioned from the reality that Jews in Eretz Yisrael are enduring. Knowing, seeing, visualizing, conceptualizing, could charge their davening in a powerful way.

“Definitely don’t show the main magazine to children. Definitely don’t read it on Shabbos,” a different reader posted. “But yes, I think it is all stuff that Klal Yisrael needs to know.”

Not all readers agreed. Some were disappointed, upset, even outraged. The magazine they trusted for their children (and themselves) had crossed one of their red lines.

My first response after reading this feedback was a deep sense of failure. I hate letting readers down or causing them pain. Along with that emotion, I also began to wonder: Was our presentation of the events inappropriate, or were the events themselves just too horrific for Shabbos reading? Was the magazine “deeply disturbing” because of the images or phrases we chose, or because the events themselves were impossible to stomach?

Even if the material was not technically graphic or gruesome, it depicted a terrible reality. And our advisors felt that it was not irresponsible — but actually the opposite — to convey that reality.

As I discussed this mixed feedback with fellow editor Rabbi Gedalia Guttentag, he made an insightful comment: Maybe some readers want to skip the initial stages of mourning — they wish they could just bypass the horror, avoid internalizing the losses, not dwell on what it all means for the victims, the families, the would-be rescuers who found death instead. They want to skip all those scenes in the too-familiar galus horror story and fast-forward to the emunah-despite-it-all finale.

No one can blame a Jew for wanting to fast-forward through it all. But can we? Should we?

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week later, I don’t think anyone on staff can claim with certainty that we got last week’s edition right. It’s more likely that we got at least some part of it wrong. Not for lack of trying or davening or emotion, and I can attest not because of any lack of respect for the victims and their families, whose names and fates have haunted us since the news broke.

We got at least some part of it wrong because this is uncharted ground. Because everyone views and processes things differently, depending on personality, inner mettle, life experience, pain threshold, even location. Because we are limited human beings, and while we try our best, we’re not perfect. But also possibly because the nature of the events was so heinous that at that “meiso mutal l’fanav” moment it was impossible to package them in a way that would meet everyone’s expectations.

We apologize if the magazine did not meet the standard of sensitivity that you expect. We hope that no future issues will ever have to cover such terrible events. We will continue to daven for the seichel to make the right decisions and consult with advisors who can help us make appropriate judgment calls. As long as this situation continues, however, you might want to review any war coverage before sharing the magazine with your children and filter as you deem necessary. We hope that very soon, war coverage will be a thing of the past — and we dream of the magazine that will feature only the joy and brightness of Mashiach’s arrival, when our current darkness and doubts dissipate as if a faraway nightmare.

—Shoshana Friedman

Managing Editor

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 982.