PHOTO: Ofri Reiner addresses a large crowd at Congregation Neveh Shalom's main sanctuary Wednesday, Sept. 11. “After this tragic event," she said, "I felt like I knew nothing about myself. I couldn’t answer the simple questions of ‘Who am I? What do I love? What characterizes me?’" (Rockne Roll/The Jewish Review)

By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review 
Ofri Reiner had a plan all worked out. As a girl who struggled with self-esteem, she felt miserable in her present, but looked toward the future. 
“I knew exactly which degree I was going to be in, how many kids I was going to have, what my house is going to look like,” she told a large audience at Congregation Neveh Shalom Wednesday, Sept. 11. “I was so sure that I didn’t even look left or right.”
All that changed on Oct. 7. Now she looks at life differently – a view filled with hope and inspiration.
As a participant in Seeds for Peace as a young woman, she had always hoped for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Her commitment to these ideals didn’t end when she became an infantry squad leader in the Israeli Defense Force – even when a Palestinian woman pulled a knife on her at a West Bank checkpoint.
“The weirdest thing is that while everything was happening, I still didn’t have any resentment or anything towards her. I just felt sorry for her,” Reiner recalled of the incident “I just felt sorry for the position that she had to be in, that she would risk her life and my life too.”
Shortly after the end of her active-duty army service, she was invited by a group of friends to the Nova Festival in Southern Israel. They set out late on Oct. 6 and when they got there after midnight, the party was still rolling. 
“We looked similarly to the hippies of the 1970s, just in 2024; all smiling, all very happy,” Reiner said of the festival. “Three thousand people dancing to the same rhythm. It’s something that is really spectacular.”
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“It was the best orange I’ve ever tasted. It was sour and sweet, in just the right amount,” she said. “To me, oranges became a symbol for hope.”
Eventually she made it home around 6 pm and learned that her brother, Shalev, a member of the IDF’s Golani Brigade, was missing. Three days later, she learned he had been killed on Oct. 7 battling Hamas terrorists less than seven miles from the Nova Festival site. 
“When I looked at the map for the first time, it struck me that Shalev saved my life,” she said. 
But what happened was not the focus of Reiner’s story – it’s what came after. 
“I see you looking at me, thinking to yourself, ‘How could I be in pain in front of the woman that just got through the Nova Festival and her brother died? How does my pain even matter?’” Reiner began. “I want you to take this comparison between pain and pain and put it outside of this synagogue. Outside of this congregation. There is no room for comparison and there is no room for guilt. Everything exists in its own private perspective.”
She described the psychological experience of trauma in a metaphor – the brain is a closet and clothes in the closet are memories. Traumatic events introduce a host to new clothes to the closet – messy, unkempt, and all over the place. When the closet doors are forced closed and held that way, symptoms start to appear. 
“My body was reliving the same event again and again after every siren, even the quietest sound in the room  freaked me out,” Reiner said. “The moment you start to deal with trauma is the moment you can no longer hold the doors of the closet closed, and all the clothes are falling on your face.”
Once the processing starts, there are a few paths – natural recovery, post-traumatic stress disorder, or post-traumatic growth. Reiner chose option three. 
“After this tragic event, I felt like I knew nothing about myself,” she recalled. “I couldn’t answer the simple questions of ‘Who am I? What do I love? What characterizes me?’”
She participated in programs for Nova survivors. She started to draw. Through each of these small steps, and many others, Reiner processed the memories of her experience, gave them meaning, and built a new way of looking at herself and her world. 
Coming back to the metaphor of the closet, Reiner explained, “Post traumatic growth is the part where you take the clothes, one by one, and fold them and put them back into your wardrobe,” she said.
Since then, Rainer has continued to make art which has appeared in exhibitions in Tel Aviv and been sold. She also began speaking about her experience after being invited to do so at a high school in Los Angeles and seeing the effect it had on her audience. 
“My teeth were knocking so hard, my knees collapsed onto each other while I was speaking and it was extremely hard to tell this for the first time, especially in English,” she said. “But after that, so many young girls approached me and hugged me and told me how much hope I brought them.”
Reiner pointed to three things that helped her move through her post traumatic growth. The first was actively choosing to care for herself. 
“I started to draw, but it could have been anything else. It could have been baking, meditating, running,” she said. “I was actively choosing to help myself; I was telling my brain I’m not helpless in front of my feelings.”
The second was to step outside her own experience; to see both the experience of others and how she was affecting it. The third is recognition of her own value. 
“I’m very proud of myself standing here, even though you’ve seen how hard it was for me to speak about this challenge,” she said. “I kept doing it because I knew that to finish with this ending would help you.”
A standing ovation, and a question-and-answer session that was light on questions and heavy on expressions of gratitude for her message, proved Reiner’s last point spot-on. 
Follow Reiner on Instagram at @ofri.reiner.