Lino Hermesh lost his brother Omer, who was murdered in his home on October 7, 2023. He joins me again 3 years later to look at the aftermath: how tragedy amplified untreated traumas, mental state of survivors, returned hostages and Israelis, why Lino stopped believing elections change anything, and the beauty and oneness he found in the middle of grief. He shares why he is done fighting shadows and why, for him, love and art remain the answer. The episode closes with the beautiful song "Hope Still Flickers" interpreted by Nessi Gomes, Lino’s wife, carrying Lino's own words from those first days after Oct 7.
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Nessi Gomes - Hope Still Flickers 🎵
Lino’s first episode on You’re The Voice here and below
AI-Generated Takeaways:
“Never again” can mutate into its mirror image when a wound goes unhealed. Lino sees the trauma of October 7th being reenacted through aggression, a vow born from victimhood turning into a mandate to push others off the land.
Being right is sometimes the least useful thing to bring to a grave. Lino arrived at Omer’s reburial carrying years of fury, looked at the exhausted survivors of Kfar Aza, and found the only words worth saying were “enough, enough”, spoken toward the ruins of Gaza.
The quietest damage of a tragedy may be how fast the unbelievable becomes believable. Three years after October 7th, events that once left people speechless can be recited in a flat, almost intellectual tone, and that numbness carries its own cost.
A state reveals its real priorities once the cameras leave. Returned hostages had their moment of flags and tears, yet in Lino’s words a piece of many of them is still in the tunnel, and from day one it was private people who fed and clothed the displaced.
A child can puncture denial faster than any therapist. When Lino’s four-year-old daughter asked him why he was so sad, she named what he had not yet admitted, and the daily demands of raising her became the thing that kept him from sinking.
Trauma left untreated rarely stays with the person who carries it. With PTSD spread across much of Israel and therapies like MDMA and ketamine reaching only a few, Lino sees the cost spilling into marriages, homes and a generation of struggling teenagers.
Catastrophe rarely invents new traits; it magnifies the ones already there. Lino watched couples with old cracks fall into full crisis while strong ones grew stronger, as if life had switched overnight from a black and white TV to super HD.
Radical ideas can travel from punchline to power within a decade. Efrat recalls when Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were mocked as a fringe joke, and how, after October 7th left minds open to radicalization, they came to hold the finance and security portfolios.
The deepest beauty Lino has ever witnessed arrived inside the worst week of his life. During the shiva for Omer, humor, unconditional giving and a oneness he had never known filled the room, alongside the knowledge that eight graves could easily have stood where there was one.
Art is the oldest technology humans have for digesting what cannot be swallowed. Laments, songs for the dead, dance and painting have always escorted grief, and “Hope Still Flickers”, built around Lino’s own WhatsApp message from the first days, is his attempt to turn poison into honey.
No problem gets solved from the energy that created it. After Covid and October 7th, Lino chose to stop counterattacking shadowy forces and pour himself into giving, music and the people beside him, a path he sums up the way he always has: love is the answer.
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