This piece is part of our Witnessing series, which shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the experiences of Jewish writers around the globe in the aftermath of October 7th.
It is critical to understand history not just through the books that will be written later, but also through the first-hand testimonies and real-time accounting of events as they occur. At Jewish Book Council, we understand the value of these written testimonials and of sharing these individual experiences. It’s more important now than ever to give space to these voices and narratives.
This is a work of fiction and the views and opinions expressed below are those of the author.
Until October 6, 2023, I was a much-envied Netflix content reviewer, called a Tagger. (Now I am still a Tagger, albeit less-envied.) Though I do have a degree in film studies, I’m the one with that cousin in California. I choose words from a pool of about 1,000 to help categorize forthcoming movies and TV shows. You’ve read my work: “Familiar Favorites” or “Comedy Movies Starring Women.”
But my job as a Netflix Tagger was nothing compared to the intense role my dear friend Moriya was stepping into in the months following October 7 2023.
It took five three-hour Zoom classes before Moriya would confess that she was triggered. Triggered as in transported back in time to three decades ago. Moriya was forty-seven, a decade younger than me, so although we were best friends, I still felt maternal towards her at times. This was the moment I was waiting for.
I listened with empathy and then tried to convince her to drop this ridiculous crusade to become a volunteer on a hotline. This volunteer training course was engulfing her body and soul and now she had qualified to take actual calls. It didn’t suit her at all — a woman who couldn’t keep a plant alive, disliked dogs, and, well, let’s just say she was lucky her only daughter was so independent. Someone had to tell her she wasn’t suited for this role before she botched it up.
In Israel, where we both live, it had been October 7, 2023, for months. But for twenty minutes, and off and on for a few hours after that, it was 1993 for Moriya. Good. I mean, bad for her, but now I had concrete evidence that years of working on herself would be reversed if she pursued this pivot.
She didn’t have to compensate for having no sons descending into the “Gaza metro” by listening to heart-wrenching accounts of others’ trauma on the phone for hours on end, then entering it into some computer application, experiencing it all over again. She had no sons at all, no one to grieve. Some people would consider that lucky.
“What was the part that triggered you?” I didn’t add, finally.
I didn’t want her to know that as soon as she told me she’d signed up for this course, I had concerns for her. I couldn’t tell my friend what to do, as though she were my child. Instead, I turned over a mental hourglass and titled it “Worth the Wait.”
“Bingeworthy” would have been cruel. It would have felt like a harsh critique, a variation of “I told you so,” and I’d heard enough of that already. There is the promise of always and the promise of never, and Moriya never should have taken this volunteer course. This decision would come back to bite her, drag her down into a swamp of memories, maybe even make her question why she came to live in Israel in the first place. From what I’ve heard about her childhood, even the Middle East wasn’t far enough away.
She should have made sandwiches until she couldn’t feel her fingers or picked fruit until all she could feel was her back, like every other civilian in the country since the war began. But Moriya had a tendency to tip over the margins. Her skirts were often flared with added contrast trim or colorful mesh, sometimes even ruffles. She was the type who headlined whatever she was doing so that people looked at her twice: “We think You’ll Love These.”
Don’t get me wrong. Moriya is my closest friend. We met in a small slice of time when we were both Orthodox mothers in Jerusalem with a mutual goal: seeking mommies for a rotating playgroup. Her daughter and the last of five boys had no more than fourteen months between them. We’ve shared our lives ever since, speaking weekly for hours on the phone, and daily since the war. Until she took this ridiculous course and began volunteering. That has to stop.
Today, we’re having coffee on my shoebox-sized balcony in Tel Aviv. From here, we can see the Mediterranean Sea and the promenade. Last year, I would have mentioned all the tourists, but this year only locals fill the beaches. With the exception of a few solidarity visits, tourism has been wiped out.
Moriya is visiting me from Jerusalem. I’m her no-longer-religious best friend. My love affair with Orthodoxy spanned fifteen years — just a year more than my marriage. Though lately, I’ve been chatting with my ex more. Shared sons you can’t locate in combat will do that.
These days, when I do my work for Netflix, I watch on automatic, alternating between checking news or, even more exhausting, trying not to check news. No one tells me how lucky I am. The content on my screen between work and real-life blends and blurs.
For five months, I was known as “the woman with four combat soldier sons in Gaza — God help us, God help them — and one on the border with the North — God watch over us, God watch over them.” The words loop in my mind. Phoning Moriya calms me; her commanding voice has a soothing effect. I need to hear it, especially when the days drift by like heavy stones, the weight of which feels like bodies. No colleague has said anything, but I haven’t received any “Get in on the Action” movies for a long time.
When Moriya and I hang out together, it’s usually like “Girls Night In.” That’s nostalgia now. Everything has changed. Since October 7, there aren’t tags for what we’ve been living through. “Seventh Century Living Nightmares for You” isn’t in my 1,000-word pool.
Moriya has no one in the army, not even a cousin or a nephew. She moved here by herself from another country, so that makes sense. Still, the scent of shame surrounds her when she’s asked about it. She bites her lower lip and won’t look the questioner in the eye. Then she quickly diverts everyone’s attention to me, asking about my boys, especially the one she took care of once a week for two years in our rotating playgroup. Then she backtracks because maybe I’m worn out from people asking. Then she apologizes for backtracking because she’s worried I’ll think she doesn’t care or used to care but has become numb. Emotional numbness is a real thing that nobody wants to admit they have around here, like it’s 2021 and people no longer let on when they test positive for COVID.
I hardly hear from any of my sons in Gaza and my ex is a career soldier, in and out of reserve duty since day one. When I do manage to get a son on the line, all I get about the tunnels is a weather report: they are humid, they are dusty, they are silent. They don’t mention how little shelter there is in Israel’s North if one of the dozens of rockets fired daily lands anywhere near them. With so many explosives close by, anyone in the area will be instantly blown to pieces. We all knew that going in.
I used to love that I worked alone; now with everybody gone, Moriya is my lifeline. Since she’s taken this course, when we talk, all we create is a soggy word salad, leaving an unsatisfying void, yet neither of us hang up, so we’re trying an actual face-to-face coffee: “Rugged Reality TV.”
“The class that did it to me?” Moriya asks.
I had forgotten my question. That’s another new part of my reality. My mind runs loose like a wayward drone. Is there a living person in this whole tiny country who can think straight?
“You want to know what triggered me?” Moriya leans in. Her smile is one of surrender. There isn’t a drop of happiness in it. I just have to get her to admit it.
“Mmmhmmm.”
“Clothes.”
“Clothes? You’re a seamstress. Are you trying to be ironic?”
“The social worker said neglected children often wear the wrong clothes for the weather or lack seasonally appropriate clothes. Then I saw myself in the cold— no coat, boots with no lining, bussing to school for forty-five minutes both ways, every day. And I was back there, freezing.”
Moriya grew up half-naked in Winnipeg. That’s why she learned to sew. She was a planet away from my own childhood in sunny California next door to my cousin who would become a Hollywood writer, with plenty of Netflix shows on her resume. There’s a “Mood Booster” tag right there.
“They put out a notice that the media was releasing a video tomorrow of the kidnapped female soldiers.” Moriya has changed the subject. Flipping from your personal life to the war is expected among Israelis at this point. “You know? Those poor nineteen-year-old girls on the border. God only knows where they are now.”
“Hopefully, He’s not the only one who knows.” I memorized every one of their names and I can see their smiling young faces in my mind as Moriya speaks. Sometimes their expressions merge with those of my youngest son. “Go on.”
“They said to be ready for an increase in calls on the hotline. The video will set off a lot of people.”
My coffee lurches over the rim of my cup. Hot liquid splatters around my feet. “Oh my God. Are they displaying them to the whole world?”
“Some people think the world should know.”
The coffee cup slips out of my hand and falls. There’s a crack in it now.
“Are you okay?” Moriya hands me her napkin and picks up the leaking mug.
“I don’t know.”
We don’t say more as I mop up the spill. In the background, a lifeguard yells at some kids to get away from the red flag zone or he’s coming in there himself. This is the fourth warning and there won’t be a fifth.
“So, how do you prepare for a phone call flood?” I ask.
“I’m reviewing the class recordings. This is ridiculous. I should be comforting you. That’s why I came.”
“We all have to comfort each other.”
The words tumble out, but they lack conviction. The only comfort in Israel these days alternates between raw and glacial, and now even my best friend is preoccupied with the fates of absolute strangers. I missed my cue. Instead of rambling about mutual help, I should have pressed her about her triggered-by-clothing story and how it was affecting her.
“Let me get us something fresh,” she says.
I hear Moriya moving around in the kitchen and then heading to the bathroom. I notice her diary sticking out of her beach-bag-sized purse. I can’t resist — I pull it out and flip through it, hoping to find more information that might convince her to quit this course before she sinks any deeper.
Description: Client met with man on Tinder. Tinder is an application for meeting people. They had an intimate event. Consensual. She discovered he used a fake identity. Can we help?
Description: Client met a man in a bar. They had drinks and left together. She doesn’t remember anything after that. She woke up naked from the waist down in his bed. Worried he took photos. Can we help?
Description: Client said she grew up ultra-Orthodox. Someone did “something to her thirty years ago” and she can’t forget it. Many descriptive fantasies. After two hours, I started to think she was putting me on, that she wasn’t a woman at all but a man seeking a female reaction to his fantasies. I grew uncomfortable and wanted to hang up, but what if I was wrong? Some women have voices that are—
“What are you doing?” Moriya asks. She puts the pitcher of ice water and lemon on the small table between us.
“Oh,” I answer, “this was falling out of your bag.”
Moriya’s lips thin into a line, but she doesn’t say anything.
“It must be hard for you,” she says, her voice soft. “So hard. What would I really know?”
As she speaks, she’s rifling through her bag as if something is missing. She brings the bag as close to her face as possible without poking herself with a measuring tape or a phone charger. Band-Aids and spools of thread spill out the sides, and she stuffs them back in. Her volunteer hotline journal, already buried at the bottom.
“Well, I try not to — ” I begin, feeling my cheeks redden. “I mean, as long as Netflix keeps sending me content, I have a lot of distraction. I can work as much or as little as I want. That’s more than many others have.”
Moriya’s expression suggests she doesn’t believe me, not about the miraculous distraction my job provides, and not about my reading her journal.
“So does this triggering mean you might quit?” I ask. I drain a glass of water and suck on the lemon slice.
The sun has shifted. There’s no shade at all now and we’re both sweating.
“Quit?” Her face closes off. “You think I should quit?”
“Well, yes.”
“Why in the world would you say that?”
“Your phone’s busy half the time and you seem overwhelmed. You’re a seamstress.”
“A dressmaker.”
“You’re not a people person, and you’re clearly consumed by this in an unhealthy way.”
The sun glares into her eyes, and there are circles of sweat under her arms. We should move inside; it’s a death wish to be out here at this hour.
“What I’m hearing is that you tried to phone me and I wasn’t available, is that it? I’m sorry. I really am. I know it’s only been a few months.”
There’s so much I want to say. Why am I fumbling? I want to ask her if she hung up on that man who was pretending to be a woman. How long did it take her to figure out he was disguising his voice? I want to read the final description; the one I didn’t get to. I imagine Moriya in her look-at-me skirt searching for the number of the caller. “Dramas Based on Real Life.”
I know I tied up the line. How could she have taken a shift on Remembrance Day? Abandoned me. If she had anyone she could call a son, it was him. She watched him grow up.
Description: The client was unwilling to talk or schedule an appointment. She asked me to breathe with her. We proceeded with the breathing exercises from class. She requested that I stay on the line with her and not hang up. Although she refused to provide her number for a follow-up, I remained on the call. The waiting and breathing continued until the sky blackened, like the middle of an eye, and it was technically Independence Day. Then, she simply whispered, “Thank you.”
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author, based on their observations and experiences.
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Canadian Gila Green is a writer, editor, and EFL teacher. As the daughter of a Yemenite- Israeli father and an Ashkenazi- Canadian mother, she often writes about the immigrant experience including dislocation, alienation, and racism. She is the author of The Inheritance (Montreal, 2025) With A Good Eye (Montreal, 2024), No Entry (Australia, 2019), Passport Control (Virginia, 2018), White Zion (Boston, 2019) and King of the Class (Vancouver, 2013) . Her stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines in five countries.