Hundreds of homes in Israel have either been destroyed or are left uninhabitable following the Iranian strikes. In the case of property damage, Israel’s Tax Authority (“Mas Rechush”) is the body tasked with providing compensation, while municipalities generally handle meeting the immediate needs of their citizens impacted by the strikes.

As of the beginning of this week, over 30,000 claims have been filed to the Property Tax Compensation Fund since the start of the war for damages to buildings and vehicles or contents and equipment.

Representatives of the Tax Authority head to every impact site to do an immediate appraisal of the damage and provide a determined first response to any citizens harmed.

“Of course, it’s horrible to have to sleep in a hotel, to lose all your privacy, to feel like you’re just hanging in the air on a string,” Reb Uriel says. “But in order to get through it, we need to get them from a place of helplessness, a place of ‘I can’t’ to a place where they can begin to reveal their internal reserves of resilience.

“We impress on them that they’re not alone, we help them find the resources so that they can get through the first devastating twenty-four hours, and connect them with the people who will be helping them along the way.”

Perhaps the most important assistance, according to Reb Uriel, is from the outset to frame the event in a way that it doesn’t take over their entire psyche, so that they’ll still have the capacity to move forward.

“The natural reaction of the brain and the emotional center is to focus exclusively on the event, to blow it up so that there’s no room for anything else,” Belams explains. “We don’t have so much time with them — maybe half an hour at most — so we initially try to frame the event so that it doesn’t take over everything. We do that by helping them focus on the total picture, asking them to think about, ‘What were you doing before the siren? What did you do yesterday? What were your plans for tomorrow that got derailed? The event, the attack, that caused the house to be destroyed is over. It took a few seconds and it’s over. It’s not something that’s continuing. It’s over. So now what?’ This way the survivors can place the event in a manageable timeline, which will help them move forward.”

But how do you move forward when you feel paralyzed? “We hold their hand and guide them: ‘Here, the Tax Authority guy for your claims is here on the site. There is a medical team here. There is someone here from the municipality who will find a place for your family to stay.’ We give the event context: What happened before, what is happening now, and what will happen within the next few hours.”

It’s true that the event, the strike, took but a second, yet the repercussions are forever.

“Yes,” Reb Uriel says, “but in order for the person to be able to survive this and move forward, he has to shut one door before he can open the next one. As long as the brain is stuck in the trauma of those twenty seconds, it can’t access the inner resilience for the next stage.

“And so I tell them: ‘Yes, there was an explosion, a blast, aftershocks, lots of falling debris, your apartment collapsed. That happened. It’s all so overwhelming and incomprehensible. But now you’re in a safe, more organized place.’ So we’ve moved on from the blast and we break it down into manageable parts. ‘They’ll find a hotel for you to stay. They’ll get you clothes. They’ll give you food.’

“We also have a K-9 unit that has been remarkably helpful. We take these specially-trained dogs to the disaster site, and they’re trained to get the people, specifically young people, to open up and start to talk. The dog can establish a very deep connection on a very primal level with the person, getting them to open up if they don’t want to talk about the trauma.”

Surely, a person who dusts himself off and walks away from the devastation is grateful that he and his family are alive, but can that gratitude be a fair match for the second that he looks up and sees how tons of cement and steel and debris have buried the physical life he knew until now?

“It really depends on how the person is internally wired,” Reb Uriel says. “Is he an optimist by nature, or is his general outlook one of gloom and doom? And there is another factor as well: Has he flexed his emunah muscles in quiet times? Because even if you’ve never been challenged like this, just having the language of emunah can help you access your resilience.

“When I approached one of the survivors in Bat Yam, whose home was totally destroyed, he told me, ‘What’s the worry? We’re walking out of here on our own two feet — what else matters?’ And there are others who see only devastation and catastrophe. But either way, although it’s way too early to start planning the next stage and we generally don’t do follow-up ourselves, what we want to leave the person with is the inner knowledge that they’re capable of dealing with this, that they have the inner capacity to get through it. This is our first aid. Later, they can get ongoing help from the municipality’s social workers and psychological teams.”

AT every disaster site, Belams says he hears about one miracle after another, and not only from people who are considered religious. “One fellow told me, ‘I ran out of the protected room to get a sefer Tehillim from the living room, and the second I ran back in and closed the door, the missile hit the house. The entire house was destroyed except for the safe room, and we walked out without a scratch.’ We’re constantly seeing how Hashem is guiding every hit to the millimeter, how every unintercepted missile should result in hundreds of casualties and instead people walk away from the rubble — it’s impossible to look at it any other way.

“And what I’ve seen is that the greatest, most significant factor of inner resilience is emunah. When a person has for years been working on the idea that Someone is running the show, then even in the face of a catastrophe like losing his home, of course it’s challenging, heartbreaking, overwhelming, but he doesn’t fall apart. He doesn’t lose his equilibrium. We’ve been seeing this over and over. He can take the tragedy to a place of moving forward instead of sitting paralyzed in internal chaos.”

That sounds nice if you’re listening to a shiur, but most readers who just imagine their home crashing down on them surely feel that they’d fall apart. Even if we’ve gone through religious institutions and have heard about Hashgachah pratis all our lives, at the point of catastrophe, do we really have the internal wherewithal to get through something of that magnitude without it crushing us?

“Yesterday I was in Bnei Brak in a hotel for those who’ve lost their homes,” Reb Uriel relates. “What, it’s not excruciating for them that they’ve lost their homes? Of course it’s painful, but the conversation is different. The way they process it is different. The emphasis is more on where will the kids learn now, what will be with the all the sifrei kodesh, the tefillin, what will be with next Shabbos, how will we manage to maintain all the components of our religious lifestyle, and not so much on the material things that were destroyed.

“It’s not just paying lip service to the idea of ‘emunah‘ — people who have this language really are on a level where they can deal with all the curveballs from a less chaotic place. Many of us saw the clip of the fellow whose house was in shambles yet sat down at the piano that had survived the blast and began to sing ‘Od Yoter Tov’ with his kids. And I’ve spoken to several people this week who are making weddings, where the halls have cancelled due to Home Front restrictions. Their attitude is really inspiring — ‘everything will work out, this is what Hashem wants. It will be just as sameach if we make the wedding in a schoolyard or shul or private garden as in a fancy hall. This is where Hashem put us now. Baruch Hashem we’re having a wedding.’ Because when you have emunah, your reserves of resilience are multiplied. You have an anchor that is connected to something infinite.

Belams has spent every day since the Iranian assault at sites filled with the most devastating scenes, people screaming, parents hysterical, their lives crumbled before their eyes. How does he stay strong and solid amid all that? Is it possible to decompress and continue with “normal” life after being in the thick of so much tragedy?

“You know, there’s something about the orange vest that’s like a barrier between our personal selves and the event,” he says. “I can’t let this become my personal tragedy, my personal event — it’s their event and I’m here to help them. Because as soon as I become emotionally intertwined in their catastrophe, when their pain becomes my pain, then I lose the ability to be a care provider. I will also become a casualty.”

Because of all the stressors, the psychotrauma team is careful to care for their own, providing in-house assistance to help their members preserve and maintain good mental and emotional health and balance. “Because if I’m in a fragile place, I can’t be of service to those traumatized people at the scene of the strike,” he says.

But really, Reb Uriel clarifies, dealing with trauma isn’t only about having your home collapse on you.

“Our lives are very complex and challenging all around, and dealing with the daily stresses is a skill that will help us deal with the ‘big’ things. If I’ve learned how to use my internal reserves to de-stress my everyday life, to find tools to achieve balance and calm amid the everyday challenges, then when it comes to a crisis, I’ll have the capacity, the reserves of resilience, to get through it. If you live like this daily, finding a place of inner calm and emunah instead of running on a treadmill of stress and hysteria, you’ll be able to pull up those reserves to get through anything.”

“YOUR MIRACLES ARE WITH US DAILY”

Motty Buktzin is no stranger to the most shocking, traumatic scenes imaginable. As a veteran ZAKA volunteer and the organization’s spokesman, he’s spent decades on the scenes of terror attacks, was a private celebrant in Meron when he was summoned to deal with dead bodies who just minutes before been dancing together with him, and worked nonstop for weeks sifting through the unimaginable horrors on the kibbutzim after the Simchas Torah massacre that he even had a physical and emotional collapse.

These past two weeks, he’s been to every missile explosion site, donning the blue gloves and expecting a mass casualty event. Instead, he keeps landing in a minefield of miracles.

One of those was in Petach Tikvah last week, when a missile crashed into a 20-story high-rise residential building.

“I live in Petach Tikvah,” he relates, “and as soon as I heard the boom, I ran into the car — these days I sleep in my clothes — and zoomed over to the site, expecting the worst. Amazingly, there were no serious injuries, just light injuries that we were able to treat on the spot. We knew there were about eight hundred people in the building and we had to evacuate them — we were sure we’d find dozens of bodies on every floor.”

It took about half an hour to evacuate everyone, most of whom were able to extricate themselves. And then the ZAKA people went in with the army’s specially-trained search team looking for serious injuries or those who didn’t make it.

The missile had hit right between the fourth and fifth floors and a safe room took a direct hit, killing the couple inside. The apartment above exploded as well, the refrigerator flying against the front door and barricading it. The search team climbed through an adjoining open porch and found another victim, and one woman in the next building was killed by the strength of the blast.

“The fact that the missile lodged between those two floors, hitting the reinforced layer of concrete of the safe room, might have stopped it from taking down the whole building,” Buktzin says. “True, four people were killed, but eight hundred were saved, most of them in their safe rooms as their homes caved in around them.”

Most of the residents walked away without a scratch, although, “with such a strike on a building, you can expect dozens or hundreds of casualties,” he says. “Anyone who opens his eyes sees Hashem with us every second of this war.”

He mentions dozens of miracles within “nature,” such as the fact that the night before the strike on the old building at Soroka hospital in Be’er Sheva, the head of the surgical department decided on his own to evacuate all the patients in the building to the reinforced basement two flights down; or the Belzer chassidic family from Haifa who were saved when they dived under their dining room table at the sound of the siren (their building didn’t have a shelter), their entire apartment having collapsed around them.

“The number of missiles that fell over Israel in the past week should have literally wiped out half the country,” Buktzin says. “These days, when I say ‘al nisecha shebechol yom imanu’ in Shemoneh Esreh, it’s on a totally different level.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1067)