Plenty of people will mark the third anniversary of October 7 today with their own reflections. I have words too, but I’ve always understood my feelings best through music. So instead of an essay, I want to share three songs.
Music lets us travel in time. A song can put you right back at a funeral, a breakup, a first date. Some songs from these years work that way for me. Eden Golan’s “Hurricane” takes me back to hearing it for the first time, and then watching her sing it at Eurovision. Eyal Golan’s “Am Yisrael Chai” puts me at the first Yom Haatzmaut barbecue after October 7, when nobody was sure we should be celebrating at all. How could we celebrate at a time like this? And how could we not, for a country so many had given their lives for?
Each of the songs below holds a different feeling from these three years. One for sadness, one for anger, and one for hope.
"Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity." - Oliver Sacks
The first song, connected to sadness, comes from Benaia Barabi, my personal favorite singer. This choice was not biased though, it just happens to be the best song for the point I’m trying to make. The song is זה בסדר (zeh b’seh-dare), or “it’s okay” and it’s message is that it’s okay to not want to go out and see anyone and it’s also okay to go to a birthday party and socialize. It was written along with survivors of Nova, and it explores the guilt that some felt with doing any happy things or getting dressed up, putting on makeup, etc. It offers comfort in it being okay to not be okay and also that it’s okay to be okay. A very complex idea, but one that some may need to hear.
My wife and I went to a Benaia Barabi concert when concerts started back up months after October 7. He brought up the survivors of Nova whom he wrote the song with, they put the words up on a big screen, and the whole venue sang along. There was most certainly not a dry eye in the room.
Next is "Harbu Darbu" by Ness and Stilla, the anthem of the war and the purest expression of anger I know. It was everywhere, and it ended up as Song of the Year in 2024. Cars blasted it, radio stations played it on repeat, and people shouted the lyrics together. The song has its critics, and some lines are hard to hear from outside Israel. But I understand why it hit the way it did. In moments when I felt sad or hopeless, it gave me a jolt of energy. Not anger in a destructive sense. Anger that had been sitting there with nowhere to go, and the song gave it somewhere. When you didn't have the words, it handed them to you. For a country that was hurting, that was its own kind of unity.
And now for one of hope.
HaTikva 6 (literally The Hope 6), a band who I have come to love over the last years with several big hits, gifted us with a song on November 19, 2025 that is bursting with hope. I have watched the music video dozens of times and it always transports me back to that first time I listened to it and it made me feel like hope was a realistic position and that there could be light and love and even joy in the future. All of the beats are fun and poppy, but the words offer a bright future:
How much darkness can be seen on all of us?
Here comes a new beginning for us
Here they come more beautiful days
New smiles are flying
Spreading out hope for thousands
No writings on the wall nor light rain
Popcorn and rum in pitchers
Trumpets in the sound of organs
embraces, praise for heroes
Let There Be Light
This wasn’t the first lighter song that came out, but I found it to be the most uplifting.
One of my favorite ideas in Judaism is that grief gets a structure. When someone passes away, there’s shiva, seven days of mourning. Then shloshim, thirty days where some things are still off limits. Then the first year, with its own boundaries. None of that means that grief ends after a year. But it gives mourning a shape, and it leaves room for joy to come back.
Israeli music since October 7 has moved in a similar way. The first songs were raw grief. Over time, more of them made room for something else, even songs people could dance to again. We’re three years out now. We won’t forget, and the music doesn’t let us. But it’s also been showing Israelis how to carry the memory and keep living.