Between Memory and Hope: Reflections on Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut

Rabbi Amitai Fraiman, Founding Director of the Z3 Project

There is a heaviness to Yom Hazikaron that is difficult to capture in words. The density of the experience—the emotional toll, the cultural and sociological significance—is compounded by the very real familiarity with loss. It is not a conceptual day on which we honor those who paid the ultimate price in wars long ago. There are real names, recent memories and fresh wounds still painfully raw.

The heaviness is palpable. In Israel, it is impossible to escape the day. The sirens bring the country to a halt, giving people, regardless of their location, an opportunity to connect with a collective consciousness and tap into a frequency of grief and national sorrow. The heavily choreographed ceremonies, mirroring religious devotion, formalize and ritualize memory and loss. They cut across communities and settings.

One of my earliest memories from grade school was a reenactment the 7th graders performed of a famous war ballad sung by Yehoram Gaon, titled The Ballad for the Medic. I was in 5th grade—just ten years old—and these kids, only slightly older, were acting out the song in all its heartbreaking detail. Even as a child, the power of the moment was crushing. I remember silently crying, tears rolling down my cheeks as I watched them. To this day, I tear up whenever I hear that song.

This ballad is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, in a genre of music that accompanies the echoing memories of those we’ve lost. These songs serve as a gateway into the realm of collective mourning.

What compounds the weight of the day is that, despite its collective rhythm, Yom Hazikaron is deeply personal—everyone has lost someone they care about. For me, it’s two close friends killed in the Second Lebanon War: Yaniv Temerson and Alex Bonimovitch, of blessed memory. The tragedy of familiarity with loss is perplexing. The guilt of living on is ever-present. The distance is humbling. And still, the density of the day has texture.

It is with this burden—one with historic reverberations—that we transition immediately into Yom Ha’atzmaut, the day we celebrate Israeli independence. The metaphor of ripping off a band-aid to describe the abruptness of this shift is, in fact, not a metaphor. With wounds still open and loss still fresh, we are asked to move into a heightened mode of celebration.

There is the speed of light, the speed of sound, and then there is the speed of the Israeli emotional rollercoaster.

For some, it’s too much. In Israel and here, some understandably choose not to celebrate Independence Day this year. There are 59 hostages, and we cannot truly celebrate freedom without them. I understand them.

And yet, even without forgetting for a second the enormity of the moment—or the urgency of bringing them all home—I believe we must celebrate our independence.

We have been celebrating since the very first year of statehood, through wars, financial crises and political upheavals. With all the heartbreak, with all the pain, with all the confounding failures of leadership—that is not what defines us.

The story of sovereignty is the story of agency. It is our story. We, all of us, are its authors and its protagonists.

One of the recurring sentiments of Yom Hazikaron is that those who paid the ultimate sacrifice have commanded us to live. That is part of the meaning infused into the proximity and resonance of these two days. This year is no different. It creates an equation we accept, but do not welcome: that our agency, our freedom, our future is worth fighting for, worth paying a heavy price for and worth doing everything we can to preserve.

The juxtaposition of mourning and celebration forces us to live with the ugliness of war, death and destruction, so that we do not become callous to it. It reminds us of what we have lost, so that we can better see what we have gained.

I don’t know who is reading this.

You may or may not be Israeli.

You may or may not feel the gravitational pull of these two days.

You may be mourning.

You may be celebrating.

Or you may be doing both, all at once.

Wherever you are, whatever you are feeling, know that memory and hope are not opposites. They are two sides of the same story. Our story.

This blog post was originally published on the OFJCC blog. Read it here.