For two and a half continuous days, beginning January 27 , 2026, 7:00am Palestine/Israel time, we will read the names of 18454 children from more than 22,000 children have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
This ceremony spans approximately 50 hours, with 370 volunteers from around the world joining together to read name after name, honoring each young soul.
The ritual was organised and held by Dina Awwad-Srour, Emma Sham-Ba Ayalon and Adi Argov.
Music: Marwa Abu Juila, Meera Eilabouni, Teresa Pfefferkorn, Leonore Lorek, Diane Kaplan, Dana Keren.
Video editing: Danny Rotshtein
What Is Different This Year
Last year, we honored the children killed across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Israel, holding space for pain and loss across all communities. That act of witnessing together was sacred work.
This year, we are making a different choice. We will read only the names of children killed in Gaza since October 2023.
This decision comes from deep reflection about how to honor the dead most meaningfully. The scale of loss in Gaza requires our full attention and presence.
This is not about forgetting or diminishing loss elsewhere. Rather, it is about recognizing that some moments call us to concentrate our collective witness.
Join Us
We invite you to take part in the event, to light a candle, to watch, to breathe, to cry, to write a letter to a dead child, to bear witness.
This is the least each and every one of us can do.
The souls of the children ask: Stay with us. Remember us.
The videos will be screened live in this page and in Etty Hillesum Cards Youtube Channel
The 32nd Rule of Love
By Shams of Tabriz
Nothing should stand between yourself and God. Not imams, priests, rabbis, or any other custodians of moral or religious leadership. Not spiritual masters, not even your faith. Believe in your values and your rules, but never lord them over others. If you keep breaking other people’s hearts, whatever religious duty you perform is no good. Stay away from all sorts of idolatry, for they will blur your vision. Let God and only God be your guide. Learn the Truth, my friend, but be careful not to make a fetish out of your truths.
Through hell's crucible, he was refined and tried,
And emerged, a poet, tempered, strong, and wise.
His words, a testament to the human spirit's might,
Inspire and uplift, a beacon in the darkest night.
-Jason Christopher
True Alchemy in Despair
The Power of Perspective: Viktor Frankl
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl provides the most famous historical example in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. While enduring the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, he found beauty in:
Small Moments: Celebrating a single potato peel in a bowl of thin soup.
Nature: Finding awe in sunlight reflecting off a piece of glass or the beauty of a sunset seen through barbed wire.
Internal Freedom: Maintaining that while everything can be taken from a person, the "last of the human freedoms"—the ability to choose one's attitude—cannot.
Intense Despair into a True Alchemy of Spiritual Strength and Love
Click Highlighted
The 31st Rule of Love
By Shams of Tabriz
If you want to strengthen your faith, you will need to soften inside. For your faith to be rock solid, your heart needs to be as soft as a feather. Through an illness, accident, loss, or fright, one way or another, we all are faced with incidents that teach us how to become less selfish and judgmental, and more compassionate and generous. Yet some of us learn the lesson and manage to become milder, while some others end up becoming even harsher than before. The only way to get closer to Truth is to expand your heart so that it will encompass all humanity and still have room for more Love
Suffering is A La Carte at the Pleasure or Insistence of The Ego
Rainer Maria Rilkeviewed soul suffering not as a malfunction, but as a crucial, transformative process necessary for deep personal growth and artistic maturity. He advised embracing sorrow, loneliness, and heavy emotions in solitude, arguing that these moments allow the future to take shape within us. Rilke urged individuals to welcome "difficulties" as "strangers" entering the soul, rather than fleeing from them.
Key Insights on Rilke's perspective:
Transformation through Sorrow: Pain is seen as a moment of tension that changes a person for the better. He believed that "no feeling is final," encouraging endurance through difficult times.
Solitude as a Tool: Suffering should be processed in solitude, which allows the soul to mature.
"Live the Questions": Instead of searching for immediate answers to suffering, Rilke believed in living the questions themselves to eventually "live along into the answer".
Meaningful Growth: He described sadness as a "deep and lonely" time when the future enters the person.
Embracing Heaviness: Rilke encouraged taking the "heaviness" of life and returning it to the "earth's own weight," implying that suffering is a natural, grounded experience.
In his Letters to a Young Poet and other works, he emphasized that those who suffer with patience and openness allow new experiences to become part of their being.
The 29th Rule of Love (By Shams of Tabriz)
Destiny doesn’t mean that your life has been strictly predetermined. Therefore, to leave everything to fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe is a sign of sheer ignorance. The music of the universe is all-pervading, and it is composed on forty different levels. Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is entirely in your hands
Moving Beyond the Ego’s Transmutation of Universal Pain into
A Personal Hell of Unmanageability & Suffering
(The 28th Rule of Love
Below)
Etty Hillesum's Life as a Perspective on The Depth, Breath & Manifestation of Universal Love ~ In the face of, Seemingly,
Unimaginable Horror.
Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz in 1943 learned this "secret" in the midst of great suffering.
Surrender as Ego-Dissolution: Admitting powerlessness is the first step in dismantling the ego's transmutation process.
Acceptance: By accepting that one cannot control everything, the "personal" drama ceases, allowing the individual to experience "universal" pain without becoming addicted to the suffering.
As Etty recounted, I now realize, God, how much You have given me. So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful."For the most painful suffering is the suffering we reject and what really hurts is not so much suffering itself as the fear of suffering.
As the Jewish situation in Amsterdam worsened, Etty developed a more intimate, loving relationship with God. We witness in her journals a transition from her speaking of God in the third person to an I-Thou encounter: “You have made me so rich, Oh God, please let me share out Your beauty with open hands. My life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with You.”
I had a liberating thought that surfaced in me like a hesitant, tender young blade of grass thrusting its way through a wilderness of weeds: if there were only one decent German, then he should be cherished despite that whole barbaric gang, and because of that one decent German it is wrong to pour hatred over an entire people.
Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.
Richard Rohr's Meditation on Suffering
“By trying to handle all suffering through willpower denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious:
We do not handle suffering; suffering handles us–in deep and mysterious ways that become the very matrix of life and especially new life.
Only suffering and certain kinds of awe lead us into genuinely new experiences.all the rest is merely the confirmation of old experience.”
The 28th Rule of Love
By Shams of Tabriz
The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment
Unmanageability is a Gift, that Requires My Courage to Investigate, My Willingness to Learn It's Shadow Language, and ultimately to Integrate
My Shadow with the Sunlight of the Spirit
The 27th Rule of Love
Below
Rainer Maria Rilke
viewed the unmanageable, tumultuous,
and unknown aspects of life not as obstacles to be overcome, but as
essential, sacred experiences to be embraced. In his philosophy,
particularly highlighted in Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke argues that by
embracing what we cannot control—our "unmanageable" feelings, fears,
and uncertainties—we transform them into creative, transformative,
and life-affirming gifts.
Key aspects of Rilke’s view on unmanageability as a gift include:
1. Living the Questions
Rilke famously urged patience with everything that remains "unsolved"
in the heart. He advised against seeking immediate answers or, as he
called them, "formulae," because one cannot live them.The Gift: By "loving the questions themselves," one lives into
the answers over time without even noticing, allowing for deeper
personal growth.The Philosophy:
"Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final".
2. Embracing the Unmanageable Dark
Rilke saw creativity as a process of gestation that happens "in the dark,
in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's intelligence".
The Gift: Allowing experiences to remain in this unmanageable state
until they reach completion allows for a "new clarity" to be born.
The Approach: He encouraged embracing the "strange" and
"incomprehensible" aspects of life, as they are often indicative of a
truly original, personal, and independent existence.
3. Transforming Doubt into a Creator
Instead of trying to banish doubt and fear, Rilke encouraged
making them "workers" in one’s life.
The Gift: By training doubt to become "knowing" and "critical"—
asking it why it wants to spoil something—doubt can transform
from a "destroyer" into one of the "cleverest" builders of one’s life.
4. Love as an Unmanageable Force
Rilke defined love not as something safe and easy, but as a
"difficult" and "unspeakable" power that requires giving oneself entirely.
The Gift: True love is an "urgent and blessed appeal" that cannot be
easily contained or seized; it is meant to be passed onward.
Solitude: The highest form of love is to be the
"protector of another person's solitude".
5. Embracing Grief as a Reflection of Love
Rilke maintained that deep grief is not something to be "gotten over"
but a reflection of a profound love.
The Gift: The ability to endure these deep, intense emotions
Is a testament to the capacity for love and the fullness of life.
In summary, for Rilke, trying to "manage" life, emotions, or
art is a form of closing oneself off. By embracing the unmanageable—
the terror, the chaos, and the questions—one allows the soul to mature,
leading to a richer, more profound existence.
Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a ...
Jun 1, 2012 —
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because
you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
The 27th Rule of Love
By Shams of Tabriz
This world is like a snowy mountain that echoes your voice. Whatever you speak, good or evil, will somehow come back to you. Therefore, if there is someone who harbors ill thoughts about you, saying similarly bad things about him will only make matters worse. You will be locked in a vicious circle of malevolent energy. Instead for forty days and nights say and think nice things about that person. Everything will be different at the end of forty days because you will be different inside.
CG Jung
viewed "unmanageability" as a form of tough love involves confronting the unconscious, allowing life to become challenging to break down the ego's false control, and forcing an individual toward authentic self-awareness and wholeness. This process, often seen in the shadow's emergence or in relationships, acts as an unconscious "tough love" mechanism, tearing down facades to promote growth.
Key Aspects of "Unmanageability" as Tough Love:
The Shadow’s Purpose: Unmanageable life situations bring the "shadow" (hidden, denied, or suppressed aspects) to the surface, which is necessary for healing and integrating, even though the process is terrifying.
Confronting Projections: When life becomes unmanageable, it forces an individual to stop projecting their issues onto others and instead take accountability for their own internal state.
Breaking the Ego: The ego prefers comfort, but the "tough love" of the unconscious disrupts this, forcing a, often painful, "individuation" process to occur, leading toward greater wholeness.
Awakening Consciousness: As Jung noted, "until the unconscious is made conscious, it will govern your life and you will call it fate". The "unmanageable" aspects are the unconscious screaming to be recognized.
Withdrawal as Power: Choosing to stop trying to manage everything and allowing things to fall apart can act as a catalyst, forcing oneself and others to face reality rather than maintaining a false, comfortable illusion.
Ultimately, this "tough love" is not cruel, but a necessary, often harsh, process that forces a shift from a life dictated by unconscious, "unmanageable" forces to one directed by conscious, authentic being.
Hermann Hesse
viewed the experience of life's "unmanageability"—the inability to control one's own impulses, emotions, and the chaotic nature of reality—as a central existential and spiritual dilemma between chaos and order.
Key Aspects of Hesse's View on Chaos vs. Order:
The Illusion of Unity (Order): Hesse argued that people create a false sense of order or a "unitary" ego to manage the chaos within, but this is a delusion. True existence, he posited, is a "chaos of forms, of states and stages".
The Spiritual Path as Integration: Hesse's, influenced by Carl Jung, suggested that life's problems are not to be "solved" by choosing one side, but by embracing the tension between these opposites. The goal is to move beyond the narrow ego and accept the "manifold" reality, transforming chaos into a higher spiritual understanding.
Suffering as Catalyst: For Hesse, this existential, unmanageable pain is not to be avoided but treated with curiosity and respect, as it is the "living destiny" that forces the self to grow and break free from old, restrictive shells.
The Necessity of Chaos: Hesse believed that chaos must be fully experienced and acknowledged before it can be transformed into a new, meaningful order.
Balancing Opposites: His works, particularly Narcissus and Goldmund, explore the conflict between the "spirit pole" (intellect, order, asceticism) and the "nature pole" (instinct, chaos, life experience).
The Tragic Task: He described the study of history as submitting to chaos while simultaneously holding onto faith in order and meaning.
The Divided Self: Hesse argued that the ego is not a unified entity but a "chaos of forms," and humans must strive to create a sense of unity out of this internal multiplicity.
Ultimately, Hesse's philosophy suggests that a productive life involves navigating the tension between the need for structured, rational order and the necessity of experiencing the raw, chaotic nature of existence.
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