*How To Change Reality | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | October 23, 2026*
This week, an ad came across my feed inviting me to buy jewelry made from missile fragments. I rubbed my eyes. Are people really going to start wearing pieces of missiles now? Giving them to one another as gifts? For a moment, it seemed like a hymn to war. Still, I was curious, so I clicked. I discovered that the missile fragments, or at least this is what the website claimed, had been turned into delicate pendants, Stars of David, and other Jewish and patriotic symbols. And the more I scrolled through the site, the more my own thinking shifted: someone had taken a missile meant to kill and harm and turned it into comfort and beauty.
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And because I had clicked on that ad, Facebook started targeting me with more and more ads like it. Usually, that annoys me. But somehow, in this context, it made me stop for a moment and smile each time. I don’t know whether there is just one company or several that turn fragments of missiles and interceptor missiles into jewelry. But I became curious and started looking for other creative forms of reuse involving objects from the war - other ways people had taken destruction and devastation and turned them into something healing and beautiful.
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That’s how I came across two people - a wood artist named Tzviaz Kalkheim and Rachel Friker, the gabbai of Kibbutz Be’eri’s synagogue - who took trees that had been burned or damaged in the Gaza border communities during the war and turned them into mezuzahs to be hung at the entrances to the homes of Be’eri residents. Once again, the destruction and loss of a home became a renewed connection to roots, to protection at the threshold, and to hope for the future.
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Then I started asking around about other acts of alchemy like these that had taken place around us, and that’s how I heard about a sound artist who created musical instruments from missile fragments and even performed with them at the Israel Festival, transforming the paralyzing whistle of a missile into sounds and music filled with beauty. And this thought - about how you create beauty out of things whose original purpose was to cause harm - also reminded me of two necklaces I once bought, which I wrote about here in one of my columns, made from repurposed elephant snares. Again, a terrible purpose transformed into something beautiful.
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In my mind, all of this immediately connected to the verse “they shall beat their swords into plowshares” - the verse given to us in Isaiah’s vision of peace, and which also appears in the Book of Micah, followed by the words, “but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” This vision of peace, which to this day we all know by heart, imagines a peace so complete that human beings will reshape the metal of their swords into agricultural tools. What was meant to wound will become a tool for working the earth and growing food.
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Except that the necklaces and musical instruments made from missiles, and the mezuzahs made from burned trees, are being created today, before that complete peace has arrived. Or in other words, these people among us are bringing the vision into being instead of waiting for it to happen.
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And speaking of beating swords into plowshares, it turns out there is a project in Mexico that is almost a literal embodiment of that verse. A Mexican artist named Pedro Reyes invited residents of his state to hand over their firearms in exchange for vouchers for household appliances. He then collected 1,527 weapons, melted them down, and turned them into 1,527 shovels, which were used to plant trees. Once again, the same metal that was meant to shoot became a tool that made planting possible. And all of this, too, within a reality of crime and violence - a vision arriving before peace.
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Anyway, I wanted to tell you that this week I met Jenny and Tsofit, two lovely musicians who live here on this Canadian island, making music and building their lives right here. When they came, they gave me a bag full of surprises: hazelnuts from a farmers’ market in the north of the island. Local honey blended with chai spices. And two books of poetry. But not just any books of poetry. These are two collections that began as an exchange of poems between a mother, Shira Yavetz, and her soldier son, Yiftach, sent whenever Yiftach stayed on base for Shabbat. She made the first volume for him when he completed officers’ training. The second, for his discharge from the army, which never came. Captain Yiftach Yavetz was killed on October 7.
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These two books, which were also given a musical adaptation by Tsofit Dori, are lying on the table in my living room now. They are interspersed with photographs of Yiftach the smiling child, Yiftach the soldier, Yiftach the traveler. And an entire inner world shared by a mother and her son, a tattoo they got together, ideas they exchanged. What do you do with a deep, lifelong dialogue like this when it is taken from you? How do you allow that love to keep reaching people, even after the dialogue has been cut short? Through two beautiful books like these. Just like that.
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So this week I found myself surrounded by the alchemy of war. Alchemy is an ancient tradition that combined the study of matter with a philosophy of the spirit, and sought, among other things, to turn base metals into gold and to find an elixir of eternal life. But not only that. I personally have always been fascinated by the alchemy of ancient India, where people tried again and again to break through the boundaries of the body, to succeed in becoming something else - an animal, a tree, or a god. Classical India is full of stories about those who succeeded.
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But this week I was thinking about the alchemy of voting. How you take one existing reality and turn it into another. How you take your time and your power, and in the case of Israelis like us who are coming from abroad, your money and investment too, and hope to change one reality into another. And if you have lived through elections that brought far-reaching change, you probably remember the immediate feeling such elections bring, whether or not the change was the one you wanted.
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I wish for all of us to wake up to that next week. To that feeling of far-reaching change. May days of grace and togetherness come upon us. May those who divide us find their way out. And may those who bring us together step in. “Easy roads don’t lead to extraordinary places,” said the late Captain Yiftach Yavetz, and those words remain here, on the yellow magnet I was given.
May we be not only extraordinary, as we are, but united too. May we beat our swords into plowshares and our missiles into jewelry, and bring our vision into being - a vision of peace and of living in peace, whose feeling we have almost forgotten.
Shabbat Shalom to all of us,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*
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