*About Gentleness | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | March 20, 2026*
This week I wrote a post in which I shared how, exactly a month before her death, I wrote to Shoshana Struk because I had a feeling she died - and how she replied, and I relaxed, until a month later I discovered that it became true. That the worry had, in the end, come to pass. Struk is the daughter of the Israeli minister of Settlements. About a year ago, she began publishing videos in which she testified that she had undergone ritual sexual abuse in her childhood. In one of my recent Facebook posts I stated explicitly that I had no idea what had happened to her, neither in the past nor this week, but I also explained why I always choose to believe any woman who says she was raped. Why I simply believe that anyone who says she was raped was indeed raped.
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It was not a political post, of course. But amid the political frenzy that raged across the networks this week, it was the post that drew more hateful messages and threats than anything I have ever received. Alongside thousands of kind responses, for several hours I deleted and blocked and read, with a pounding heart, terrible words written to me and threats upon threats. And only toward the end of that day a friend said to me: put all of this down. Go outside. Connect to nature and to your body, and as much as possible - ground yourself.
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And I did. I left the dozens of cruel comments behind and walked to a café. And when I sat down, I saw an elderly couple in front of me. They had just risen from another table. He got up quickly, but she rose more slowly. She took her light coat and slowly slipped one arm into it and then the other. The movement was difficult for her. He helped her with the second arm. She lifted her bag and he arranged it on her back so that the strap would sit beneath her hat. Then he brought her walking stick. All the while, as she did things very slowly, he simply stood close and watched her. He did not rush her. He did not help where help was not needed. He was simply there in front of her, with her.
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And then they left.
She and the cane, and he beside her, at a slow pace.
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And I watched, as if spellbound. It was so measured, and soft. His gaze. The hand. The sleeve. The bag. The chair. I felt I was watching, in slow motion, something I had not even realized how much I needed, how much I was missing, how thirsty I had been for it, and for how long - gentleness.
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And not only because of that post and the threats that followed.
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And not only because of the war and the alerts, the sirens, the headlines, and the worry.
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But because of the language of war that has been ongoing for three weeks now and leaves very little space - not for another kind of speech, not for another tone. A dense language. Saturated with exclamation marks. One that somehow takes over other areas of the soul as well. Until everything becomes war - you fight to sleep, fight to eat, fight to understand how everyone is. Fight to manage to hold on to something of who you once were.
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This soft and slow couple from the café felt like a greeting from another life. And all at once, I could breathe again.
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The next day I gave a lecture for Women’s Month. Who even remembers it is Women’s Month? The entire month of March has been canceled and postponed, with all its gatherings and lectures pushed to other months. And as usual, we postpone talking about feminism until after the war, after things settle, after it is good. But one large international company that had invited me months ago decided not to give it up - they held the lecture on Zoom.
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It was a morning talk. When I opened the screen, I found women and men looking back at me, and even without knowing them I could immediately see who had not slept at night. They were in sweatpants, or in uniform. They had children on Zoom, dogs, cats, and every so often some of them would get up when there was an alert where they lived. And I, too, sat across from them like that - upper half in a shirt and necklace and lipstick, and lower half in sweatpants and socks. My daughters around me in different Zoom meetings. And somehow, within all of this, we spoke about feminism.
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And it happened again. There was again a gentle moment in reality.
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Within the dense reality, I found people who insisted, with me, on listening to something else - to ideas, to thoughts. To imagine a different world.
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And when I finished the meeting with them, I was left with three thoughts.
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The first, that none of us is managing the war, and none of us can influence it - not now. And in the hope that it will achieve its goals soon and come to an end, for now perhaps this is what we can do: be gentle. To demand this gentleness in every crack of reality in which it is possible. Not to pass it by.
And the second thought I was left with is that gentleness is the counter-movement to war. It is the way to resist what war does to our lives, this dense, constricting turbulence. Gentleness opens. Makes space. War is fast, and gentleness unfolds in a slow, soft motion.
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And the third thought is that before anything else, we must now be gentle with ourselves.
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I remembered that my mother used to say this to me. Every time I was overly stressed about an exam at university or some deadline. Every time I was demanding of myself and did not sleep enough or did not eat enough. Every time I struggled to forgive myself for some failure. Or when I criticized myself too harshly. Be gentler with yourself. That was my mother’s sentence. That is what she would say to me, again and again.
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And the truth is, she said it so many times - because I was probably not gentle enough with myself, again and again - that it was engraved in me. Be gentler with yourself.
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May we all have Shabbat Shalom, and gentleness,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*
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