This evening, Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, (whose full official name is Yom Hazikaron Lehalelei Ma’arkhot Yisrael Ul’nifge’ei Pe’ulot Haeivah/Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of the Wars of Israel and Victims of Actions of Terrorism) begins. It is followed immediately tomorrow night with the beginning of Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, this year celebrating a remarkable 75 years of Israel’s existence.
While some of us have intimate connections to Memorial Day in the United States, perhaps with loved ones of our own who died while serving in the US armed forces, for a large majority of the country, Memorial Day seems to have, by distance and default, served more as a marker of the start of summer; the chance for an extra day off and a barbecue to mark a change in the seasons, without necessarily an overt connection to the spirit of the holiday. In a country of 332 million people this is a sad if understandable development; many of these millions do not know anyone who served in the military at all, let alone someone who died while serving.
In Israel, things are different. In a country with 9.5 million people, less than 3% of the US population, and nearly universal compulsory military service, the military is part of the fabric of society in its entirety, and Yom Hazikaron holds a special place. Many Israelis are familiar with the approximate number of fallen soldiers and terror victims they commemorate each year, which this year is 28,468 (a number that begins counting from the year 1860, counted as the founding year of the Yishuv, the pre-State of Israel body of Jewish residents in the Land of Israel in what, at the time, was part of the Ottoman Empire).
As such the day holds a somber feel, which includes two one-minute to two-minute sirens, during which everyone stops what they are doing—work, play, even driving; cars pull over to the side of the road—along with closures of entertainment venues all across the country. I still remember the siren’s call as a six-year-old attending gan (kindergarten) in Israel, struck by the dramatic effect of the ritual.
We recognize the human, and Jewish, bonds we share with the people of Israel, and the solemn commemoration of this chapter of our people’s story and its terror victims and fallen soldiers.
Yom Ha’atzmaut – Independence Day
As we know, the word Israel—Yisrael—is traced to the moment of our ancestor’s Jacob’s wrestling: wrestling with an agent of the Divine (see Genesis 32) as he prepared to blaze the trail of his future.
The celebration of the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence comes at a complex time in Israel’s story. After yearning for millennia for a return to the land and to the right to collective self-determination for the Jewish people, especially in the wake of the Holocaust, there can be no disputing the remarkable nature of the development of independence in the land of Israel for the Jewish.
Of course, that development was not without fallout. In addition to a series of wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors over the issue of Israel’s existence and sovereignty in the region, there has been no resolution for the Palestinians and their claims to independence. Peace has not been achieved. Israelis do not live without fear of rocket and terrorist attacks; Palestinians do not control their own destiny.
Nor is Israeli civil society settled. Recent explosions of protest over the prospect of judicial reforms that would seem to upend the nature of checks and balances in the country, undermining the rights of the minority and upsetting the precarious balance between secular and religious-minded Israelis, reveal a fabric that, much like the United States, is rent.
Still, there is much for Israelis, and all of us, to be proud of. 75 years ago, if you had told newly enshrined Israelis that their country would be this established, this secure, this developed, have this much of a foothold in the world, they might have been shocked.
I recognize that in this community there are a range of perspectives on the latest developments in Israel. Thoughtful, dedicated, heartfelt congregants can be found across the political spectrum. I look forward to years of dialogue together informed by a spirit of klal yisrael, the notion of a broader community of the Jewish people, across geographic boundaries, across religious denominations, across perspectives. While it won’t be easy, it is important.
This year, we celebrate 75 years of the state of Israel, recognizing that’s who we are: Yisrael. We wrestle, we struggle, we strive, as a pathway to holiness. Yom Ha’atzmaut sameach—may you experience a sense of joy in this sacred struggle, for independence and beyond.
Yom Hashoah – Holocaust Memorial Day
Last week, we commemorated Yom Hashoah (Holocaust remembrance day).
What follows are the remarks I delivered last Monday night, April 17, to open our service, which featured remarks from SHS congregants and descendants of Holocaust survivors, Becky Rohtbart and Rachel Howe:
“In distress (or: from the narrow place) I called on the LORD;
the Lord answered me and brought me relief (or: to a place of expansiveness).”
— Psalm 118:5
There have been times in human, and in Jewish, history where מִֽן־הַ֭מֵּצַר קָרָ֣אתִי יָּ֑הּ where from a place of distress, from the narrow straits of pain and suffering, we have called out to Lord. And where, despite the words of the Psalmist, to the extent God has answered, it did not reach us, not on this plane of existence.
Still we cry out. We cry out because the soul yearns to cry out. We cry out, because despite, or better yet in honor of, the six million Jews who were murdered, we believe in the fundamental goodness of the world and its creator, and the chasm between what it can be and what it is is too much to bear.
As one of those six million put it, “That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.”
It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals,” this author continued. “Because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out.”
“Yet,” the author writes, “I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.
“I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too. I can feel the sufferings of millions—and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will come out all right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
“In the meantime, the author concluded, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.”
Anne Frank, aged 15, Amsterdam 1944.
She died in Bergen Belsen in 1945.
Our hearts cry out because for them to be numb, to be indifferent, to resort to despair, would not do justice to the lives of the six million, or to the lives of our children, our grandchildren, the generations that will come after us.
Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi suggests the that the opposite of remembering is not forgetting. It is injustice. We have to remember.
The Torah commands us to remember. זָכ֛וֹר֩ אֶת־י֥֨וֹם הַשַּׁבָּ֖֜ת לְקַדְּשֽׁ֗וֹ
—”remember Shabbat and keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). וְזָכַרְתָּ֗ כִּ֣י עֶ֤בֶד הָיִ֙יתָ֙ בְּאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם—”Remember that you were slaves in Egypt” (Deuteronomy 15:15). זְכֹר֙ יְמ֣וֹת עוֹלָ֔ם בִּ֖ינוּ שְׁנ֣וֹת דֹּר־וָדֹ֑ר—“Remember the days of old, Consider the years of ages past” (Deuteronomy 32:7.)
Remember the Shoah. Remember the Holocaust.
And if it leads you to cry out—min hametzar karati yah, from the narrow place I cried out to the Lord—that’s good. That shows you still yearn to discern an answer. That shows you still yearn to be an answer. That shows the heart still has hope, still believes, still yearns to connect to what is good and holy and true.
