*Heart, Heart, Heart, Prayer | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | March 6, 2026*
On Sunday this week, 24 hours after the war began, I opened my Zoom meeting and saw with my own eyes what people mean when they say “Am Israel Chai” - and not as a slogan. That sentence is so worn out. Defiant. Encouraging. Annoying. But this Sunday I saw something else, more delicate than that: from the shelters and safe rooms, the sirens and the endless running of the first day of the war, I met several hundred people who were not only alive, not only pale and sleepless and surrounded by children and neighbors, not only blurry-eyed and surviving - they were full of the will to live and full of life.
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How is that possible?
Later, videos also appeared - Purim parties in shelters. Yoga classes in underground train stations during sirens. Even a wedding inside a shelter! But before all that, on Sunday morning, I had already seen it on Zoom, when I opened a new season of community writing, and only one writer out of more than 400 people asked me hesitantly whether the meetings would be postponed because of the situation. The other 400 had no doubt. Not even when at ten-thirty in the morning, exactly as we were about to begin, massive missile fire started across all regions of Israel and we postponed by ten minutes. From that moment we had an understanding: we show up to the meetings with headphones, a notebook, and a phone - and whoever needs to go to the shelter takes the meeting with them, along with all of us.
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And I linger on this because it was unbelievable. Every few minutes another group of people stood up and walked with the Zoom meeting into their protected space. And then from there they continued to read, to learn, to write, to listen to poetry - at any cost.
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In the background: gray walls. Children. Adults. Alerts.
And when I finished the meeting in tears, I understood that I had witnessed not only how people invest their efforts to get up, get dressed, go to the shelter, and protect themselves from the dangers outside - but how they invest that same effort in finding a protected space for the soul: headphones, a notebook, pushing away the outside noise as much as possible. Because even when the body survives, the soul is still exposed. And this week I saw with my own eyes what it looks like when hundreds of people insist, in every circumstance, on hearing their inner voice.
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Did everyone write in that situation? I’m sure not! Even the most skilled writers I know have found themselves silent for a very long time. Some have not written for months or years. And one of my friends - who has published several books - told me he cannot remember himself writing even a normal WhatsApp message recently. He has switched to communicating only with emojis.
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I had not given it that much thought until this week, when I noticed that Telegram replaced the emoji of the current Iranian flag with the previous one. In other words, they replaced the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran - which has been the official flag since 1979 - with Iran’s historical flag with the lion and sun symbol. The regime in Iran has not yet changed, but Telegram wanted to say something about it without words. To express a wish. Or perhaps to bring the future a little closer. And like my friend, they did not say it with words. They said it with emojis.
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I remembered that during COVID, data was published showing that emoji use had increased by hundreds of percent. It felt then, along with the lockdown, each person in their own cave, as if modern language had ended and we had returned to hieroglyphs.
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And so, after I finished writing in actual words with my writing community, I asked my readers on Facebook something completely different: what emoji have you been using most lately? And I want to tell you what I learned from this unrepresentative sample of the 626 responses I received.
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First of all, here is the ranking of the ten most common emojis among my readers:
1 - In first place: ❤️ the red heart. By a large margin over the rest. It appeared dozens of times.
2 - In second place: 🙏 praying hands. I know some people suspect these are actually two hands giving a high-five, but I believe we all mean prayer.
3 - In third place: 🤦♀️ / 🤦♂️ facepalm. The same sign of “oh no,” and also of emotional overload.
4 - In fourth place: 🫶 hands forming a heart.
5 - In fifth place: 💔 the broken heart.
6 - In sixth place: 😂 / 🤣 laughter with tears. Or perhaps survival humor.
7 - In seventh place: 😔 / 😪 / 😩 the whole range of tired and sad faces.
8 - In eighth place: 🪬 / 🧿 / ✋ hamsa and protective eye.
9 - In ninth place: 💜 / 💙 / 🩷 hearts in other colors.
10 - And in tenth place: 🤷♀️ / 🤷 the shrug of uncertainty and helplessness.
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Wow.
What does this actually mean?
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First, that my audience speaks mainly in three voices: hearts, amulets of prayer and protection, and finally fatigue and humor as survival.
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Second - what is not here? There is no aggression, no symbols of army or power, and aside from two emojis out of hundreds there were also no flags!
In other words, without saying a single word, and using only small drawn emojis, my audience does not speak the language of war. It is occupied first and foremost with the heart, with regulating the heart, with acknowledging sadness and humor and helplessness.
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In addition, the number of prayer emojis was almost identical to the number of sad ones. And I learn from this that in times of war and lack of control, my audience does not respond with anger and attack. Quite the opposite. With requests and with love.
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What else? The facepalm emoji appeared again and again - which is the opposite of a dramatic or stormy emotional emoji. That “oh no,” which also covers the eyes from a reality one no longer wishes to see, mostly expresses exhaustion.
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How many people expressed pure rage? Emojis of a red face or a face twisted in anger? 😡 😈 Only five! Out of many hundreds.
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And with that I want to end. With the fact that most of us - in my audience at least - do not speak the language of war at all. But we do respond from the body: heart, hands, face, even laughter - and there was also the strange emoji of a hug.
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And with the fact that Telegram changed a flag and made a political statement, but we still spoke this week in human beings - faces and hands. And that some of us even managed to write. In one of the hardest, most exhausting, most threatening weeks. And in the end I received this quote from Shir from Winnicott, which was a perfect summary of this week: “The ongoing human task is to keep inner and outer reality separate, yet interrelated.”
How accurate for these days. Not that I know how to do it. But it seems to me that the people of Israel I encountered this week did exactly that. And perhaps that is also what stands behind their being alive. A living people, hungry for life.
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May we all have Shabbat Shalom and peace,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*