You Can Hear the Music. And the Silence.

A Brief Dispatch.

This week in Israel, I’m chronicling the talented Yeshiva University basketball team, during its goodwill tour throughout the country, sponsored by an American charity, Athletes for Israel.

All week the players have been giving clinics, playing games, visiting hospitals — spending time with recovering hostages, and wounded civilians and soldiers — and visiting centers for children with disabilities, all as part of their USO-styled tour to bring some American joy here, to the home front.

(I’m working on a feature piece about them. Spoiler alert: They’re one of the most extraordinary group of athletes I’ve spent time around in my more than 45 years of frequently covering sports.)

Today the team visited multiple October 7 sites, where unspeakable, uncivilized, and grotesquely inhumane atrocities occurred — acts far beyond the boundaries of anything even remotely called civilization. The experience was powerful, and emotional. Especially the testimony of the survivors — including one held hostage for 54 days, a friend of one of the college players — who spent more than two hours walking our group around what had once been their world. A world they’re committed to rebuilding.

As we stood in the scorched rubble of what had once been the home of a family who was slaughtered, and worse, someone said, “You can still smell the death.”

The site of the Nova Music Festival massacre provided a clear contrast in this war between a culture of life and a culture of death, because it had once been the scene of so much life, youth, love, and music. Until it suddenly wasn’t.

Close to 400 civilians at the music festival were massacred that morning by Hamas, many more were wounded, and over 40 were taken hostage, abducted into Gaza.

This short, three-minute video captures a fraction of what it feels like to walk through the profound memorial that has been planted on the site of the music festival turned massacre.

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