I will say something that may make many of my Diaspora friends uncomfortable: there is a fault line running between us that most of us never speak about. It is not Netanyahu. It is not the war. It is the siren that will sound here on Tuesday morning \u2014 and the fact that, for them, it will not.\n<\/p>\n
For me, growing up in London, Yom HaAtzmaut meant a short tekes (ceremony) and dancing organized by Bnei Akiva and Mizrachi. Yom HaZikaron barely registered. When we made aliyah, I discovered that Yom HaZikaron is not simply a sad day. It is a holy day. Much like Yom Kippur, the entire country dresses in white, the streets shut down, and Israelis stream to the batei kvarot, the cemeteries. There they say El Maleh Rachamim and Kaddish and ask for forgiveness from those who paid with their lives so that we might live. That gap \u2014 between how Diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews experience this day \u2014 is, I think, the deepest divide between us.\n<\/p>\n
Weeks before October 7th, Israelis had gathered at Kikar Hamedina on the day before Yom Kippur and torn each other apart. Right and left, religious and secular, hurling accusations during the holiest prayers of the year. If the ancient rabbis were writing our history, they might say October 7th began there \u2014 with the hatred of Jew for Jew on the Day of Atonement. I am wary of that kind of metaphysics. But the scene told an important story: in Israeli society, before October 7th, there was no longer consensus on what counted as sacred ground.\n<\/p>\n
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues that every culture rests on five moral foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Of these, sanctity is the one that binds a people together more than any other. Modern liberal morality often treats sanctity as archaic. But Haidt shows that even the most secular societies preserve some sacred ground \u2014 the untouchable thing, the thing you do not mock. A society is defined by what it deems sacred.\n<\/p>\n
Two years after the strife at Kikar Hamedina, just meters from that same spot, at Hostages Square, thousands gathered again for the Neilah prayer at the end of Yom Kippur. Secular and religious, left and right, crying out in unity, \u201cHashem Hu HaElokim.\u201d My daughter Noa was there as part of a delegation of religious youth. The organizers had asked them to stand inside the crowd. Beside her stood a secular woman. When the final shofar blew, the woman turned to Noa and asked, quietly, whether Yom Kippur was over \u2014 she didn\u2019t want to take out her phone if it wasn\u2019t. Such a small exchange, but it symbolized the shift of the fault line over the previous two years. Where two years earlier, the dignity of the other had been degraded, now it was honored, protected, made holy. Noa came home and said, \u201cIf God didn\u2019t hear that prayer \u2014 if He didn\u2019t see those Jews screaming together, religious and non-religious as one \u2014 then I don\u2019t know what to say.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Ten days later, the last living hostages came home.\n<\/p>\n
There is a danger in assigning meaning to events still so close to us. Meaning needs distance and perspective. But this much seems clear: something about our sacred center had shifted. The hostages reminded us that we are on the same side \u2014 the side of life, the side of Israel. We disagreed, bitterly and loudly, about how to get there. But there was no quarrel about the destination itself.\n<\/p>\n
I think often of the young girl pulled from the car in Sderot on October 7th, her mother shot dead beside her in the passenger seat. When the Israeli soldiers finally reached her, she looked up at them, her small face searching theirs, and asked only one thing: \u201cAtem b\u2019tzad shel Yisrael?\u201d Are you on Israel\u2019s side? She did not ask if they were religious or secular, right or left. She asked whether they stood with her people.\n<\/p>\n
But even after October 7th, Yom Kippur, does not command full consensus. Yom HaZikaron does.\n<\/p>\n
We are the only country in the world that places its day of mourning directly against its day of independence. It has to be that way. These days come during the Jewish calendar\u2019s counting of the Omer, the long road from the exodus to Sinai \u2014 from negative liberty to positive, from freedom from to freedom for. It is no accident that the days between Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and Yom Ha\u2019atzmaut (Independence Day), known in Israel colloquially as Aseret Yemei HaTekuma \u2014 the Ten Days of Revival, fall precisely within this counting. Implicit in the timing is the argument: without zikaron there can be no atzma\u2019ut; without memory there can be no freedom; without sacrifice there can be no liberty.\n<\/p>\n
The liberal mind imagines only the short road to freedom \u2014 negative liberty, freedom from constraint. But in Israel, we don\u2019t need convincing that liberty is won on the long road, on the 40 years in the desert, in the Book of Leviticus, with its sacrifices placed at the structural heart of the journey to the land. We wake each morning to \u201chutar le-pirsum\u201d \u2014 cleared for publication \u2014 the terrible words that mean another family\u2019s life has been shattered overnight. The words that carry within them the very sacrifice on which our freedom rests.\n<\/p>\n
The bereaved need no siren. For them, every day is Yom HaZikaron; the memory is etched into them. But we, the people, need this day. We need the sacred space in time and place where the whole country stops. We need to weep together and stand in the graveyards together \u2014 left and right, religious and secular, civilian and soldier. We need to feel what Naomi Shemer named in Al Kol Eileh <\/a>\u2014 al ha\u2019dvash v\u2019al ha\u2019oketz, the honey and the sting; what Hanan Ben Ari, in Moledet, <\/a>calls Gan Eden be-Gehinom, paradise inside hell \u2014 that impossible synthesis of despair and hope, grief and joy, life and death, held together in a single breath.\n<\/p>\n And then we need to move through the near-impossible liminal passage from Yom HaZikaron into Yom HaAtzmaut \u2014 a passage that asks us to carry the sting into the honey without letting go of either. To touch that bittersweet cadence at the heart of modern Israeli life, the inescapable oscillation between the tragedy of existence and its wonder and awe. We watch the masu\u2019ot \u2014 the torches \u2014 lit on Mount Herzl, and we see the heroes of the hour raise them as if to say: Lights have gone out, but we will rekindle them, because that is the task of our people \u2014 to bring light into a broken and darkening world.\n<\/p>\n Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once asked why the Torah dedicates a book and a half to the building of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle \u2014 a temporary structure. His answer: Moses\u2019s task was to turn a nation of self-centered slaves into a cohesive people, and he did it by commanding them to build something sacred at the center of the camp, together. The state of a society can be read from its sacred center. The sociologist Peter Berger called it the sacred canopy \u2013 the overarching framework of meaning that societies and nations construct to provide a shared sense of reality, especially in the face of existential uncertainty.\n<\/p>\n In Israel, there is rarely consensus. But on one day, at one moment in the year, the country stops. People bow their heads. They stand in cemeteries together. They say Kaddish \u2014 the prayer that returns into the world the sanctity that was taken when a life was lost.\n<\/p>\n This is our modern-day Tabernacle. This is our Book of Leviticus. It begins here \u2014 with the siren and the silence, the eulogies and the flag on the masts. This is what Haidt called the sanctity foundation, what Berger called the sacred canopy. But make no mistake: this is not our goal, nor our endpoint. It is the default position we have been forced into. And we need the day to make plain what we are and what we are not \u2014 to the world, and to ourselves.\n<\/p>\n Yom HaZikaron is not the glorification of martyrdom. We do not worship death. Rather, we are connected in the collective response that chooses life. In the fate decreed upon us, we find that, despite all our differences, we are bound to our brothers and sisters at that impossible point of tension where the sting and the honey meet. From there we must build. We must ask not only how we die together, but how we live together.\n<\/p>\n This is the season we begin saying Morid ha-tal, the prayer for dew ,which falls quietly, faithfully, day after day, a life force we barely notice. It is not like the rain that demands our attention \u2013 much like the loud voices of politicians or journalists. It is instead like the quiet sacrifice of those who make our lives possible.\n<\/p>\n Susan Cain, in Bittersweet, recounts a poem by the Buddhist poet Issa, who lost his young daughter to smallpox. In Buddhist teachings, the way to transcend pain and grief is, like the dew, rising above our impermanence to accept what is. But Issa\u2019s poem refuses. You don\u2019t have to accept it, Cain writes. It is enough to feel its sting.\n<\/p>\n \u201cIt is true\n<\/p>\n That this world of dew\n<\/p>\n Is a world of dew.\n<\/p>\n But even so\u2026\u201d\n<\/p>\n The heart of the poem, Cain writes, is those three words. But even so.\n<\/p>\n \u201cBut even so, Issa says, I will long for her forever\u2026. Do you hear me whispering that I do not accept the brutal terms of life and death on this beautiful planet\u2026\u201d\n<\/p>\n Yom HaZikaron is not Buddhist acceptance. It is not Islamic martyrdom. It is a world of impermanence, uncertainty, contingency \u2014 a world of dew. And it is also a world of even so.\n<\/p>\n It is the soldier on his seventh round of miluim, reserve duty. Even so. It is the exhausted mother holding the house alone. Even so. It is the parents who will never see their child again. Even so.\n<\/p>\n Even so, we wipe our tears and sing Hatikvah \u2014 words of hope on our lips. Even so, we stand at graves weeping, and then go home and turn on the barbecue, ready to celebrate our independence. Even so, we board the plane and leave everything behind to begin a new life in Israel. Even so, we run to the bomb shelters and sing together, Am Yisrael chai.\n<\/p>\n The even so is the sacredness of Yom HaZikaron. It is the one ground we still share here in Israel.\n<\/p>\n And if the Jewish people are to build anything together \u2014 Israeli and Diaspora, religious and secular \u2014 it begins here. I do not say this to rebuke our brothers and sisters across the ocean, nor the sectors of Israeli society that do not hold this day as sacred. I say it because the bond between us is too precious to leave unspoken. Watch the ceremonies. Better still, come. Stand with the people in the graveyards. Listen for the siren. Feel the silence. Enter the liminal space between Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut. Because this is the sacred center of the camp, and if we pitch our tents around it, together, then the sacred canopy of life and hope will transcend what divides us \u2013 whether oceans or ideologies.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I will say something that may make many of my Diaspora friends uncomfortable: there is a fault line…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[37,24289,2508,5790,26850,26831],"class_list":["post-76154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-israel","tag-israel-independence-day","tag-israel-diaspora-ties","tag-israeli-society","tag-memorial-day-for-fallen-soldiers","tag-religious-secular-divide"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116442350455568854","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}