Amnesia is memory loss, often the mind’s way of erasing painful recollections. For the heroine of Beyond the Light – staged by Gesher Theater – amnesia is postwar trauma. At the show’s start, the heroine knows nothing of herself; we meet her in a bunker with an AI memory-therapist-psychologist.
She is human like us, yet alien from a distant galaxy; her ancestors left Earth to build a violence-free civilization. As her memory unfolds, scenes of childhood, love, and motherhood give way to a shattering truth: her son was lost in a war her own mother, a strategist of her planet, ignited. The dream of a world without violence collapses into total war.
An extraordinary duet—Kseniya Rappoport, the lauded Russian Israeli actress as the alien, and Henry David, the acclaimed Israeli actor as the AI—retell this Greek tragedy. Rappoport’s text, body, and voice flow in harmony, whether she contemplates, curses, cries, laughs, or dances. Her mesmerizing transformations are a delight to watch. David shines no less brightly beside her.
As the AI learns compassion, she confronts her loss through reflection. The choreography of text, set, music, dance, and video art is seamless. They perform in grey, suspended between life and death, and for the final milonga change to white—leaving devastation behind, celebrating hope, as if echoing Dostoevsky’s “beauty will save the world.”
Why It Will Endure as a Classic
Beyond the Light is a post-apocalyptic dystopia, blending an Abrahamic Last Judgement with a self-fulfilling prophecy: a peace-loving planet descends into war over the resource that sustains peace.
Performance sweeps us into tragedy, confronting with humanity’s great paradox—war, a curse of destruction yet a force of survival and progress. Two major wars—the Israeli and the Russian-Ukrainian—permeate Beyond the Light, offering a tragically apt moment to reflect on this dialectic.
Israeli society is torn between those who see the fighting as a Great Patriotic War demanding total victory, and those who regard it as futile, inhumane, and an indelible stain. The audience is likely just as divided on the Russian-Ukrainian war, though expressing such views is treated as heresy.
Drawing on their emotional-social ties to both wars, the actors convey the zeitgeist and confusion. For the authors, too, it is personal drama: Avdotya (Dunya) Smirnova—one of Russia’s foremost screenwriters and directors—wove into performance the war that forced her exile in 2022 and the war she has endured in Israel. Marina Stepnova, an acclaimed novelist and poet, remains in Russia.
Audience reactions, in the theater and on social media, swing from outrage at an unpatriotic affront to applause for a manifesto of humanism. The show is not about testing the limits of moral-philosophical permissibility. Rather it creates an intellectual-emotional space where supporters and opponents of both wars can confront and question their core beliefs.
Reflecting contemporary conflicts as a mirror of humanity’s original sin—war—the show compels us to ask whether this dark thread of civilization can ever vanish. History says no, and the play exposes our confusion before this truth. From Genesis to today, war has been intrinsic to human survival and progress. Timeless in resonance, Beyond the Light could follow any war; its universal message marks it as a classic in the making.
Postwar Disorders and Growth
When the wars in Israel, Russia, and Ukraine end, hundreds of thousands of veterans, and those in the rear, will face the challenge of a new normal. Wars imprint mental health, the national psyche, collective memory, and strategic culture; healing takes generations. For Israel, Russia, and Ukraine, it will be the greatest recovery since WWII. For Gazans, the adjustment may dwarf all past experiences.
Postwar societies show both negative and positive effects, embodied in two interdependent phenomena: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and posttraumatic growth (PTG). PTSD encompasses the harmful imprints of combat-related distress, while PTG captures the positive transformations that follow adversity—fostering mental toughness and resilience, deeper appreciation of life, stronger relationships, redefined values and goals, and spiritual growth through faith, philosophy, or service. PTG comes when PTSD trauma is faced, worked through therapy and meaning making, and turned into strength.
The post-war balance of PTSD and PTG is shaped not only by battlefield experience but by how state and society manage psychological outcomes. Recovery varies across cultures, with individual, social, and structural factors determining whether communities succumb to distress or achieve adaptive growth. The balance of national mental health is fluid. If PTSD dominates, it breeds societal fragmentation, political extremism, and generational trauma; if PTG prevails, it catalyzes social-economic renewal.
One common expression of PTG is the artistic energy. The creativity of the “lost generation”—veterans marked by disillusionment and disorientation—was frequent response to the horrors of war. The art and literature of the lost generation rises naturally yet carries a therapeutic effect. By placing war in a broader historical and metaphysical context, fostering reflection and stoicism, these works help societies process loss and grow emotionally and morally. The sooner such reflection begins, the greater the chance of tipping the balance toward PTG. The show offers this remedy—first aid for intellectual and emotional healing—making it a singular work of art.
Beyond the Light echoes Israeli and international masterpieces - Hameiri’s The Great Madness, Levin’s Queen of the Bathtub, Grossman’s To the End of the Land, Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Artistic responses extend beyond literature: the Hundred Years’ War inspired Rodin’s Burghers of Calais; the siege of Leningrad moved Shostakovich to Seventh Symphony. As Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls corresponded with Picasso’s Guernica, performance aligns with Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi’s October 7 Series and works on the Russia-Ukraine war.
The authors, actors, and theater deserve acclaim for artistic triumph and for giving Israeli society a moral-psychological cure against becoming a new lost generation. This autumn Gesher takes this masterwork across the Atlantic. Its success is likely to resound the acclaim performance won at home.
The writer, a professor, heads the Honors Track in Strategic Studies at the School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University.