Yom HaZikaron, Day of Memory for Israel's Fallen Soldiers
Last night the siren rang out at 8 to begin Yom HaZikaron. Yuval and I were at a local ceremony at the neighborhood school here in French Hill. It was very moving: the whole ceremony was done by the students. It begam with the lowering of the flag, the lighting of a memorial, the laying of wreaths, the reading of the names of the dead from these schools, and then poems and music. The most moving part of the evening were stories by the mother of Ari who died in Lebanon in 1994 and the sister of Danny who died in a terrorist attack in 2001.
Today I will be going to Gymnasia Evrit, a high school in Rehavia for another ceremony.
This morning I received a moving piece in my email from my friend David Kozak who is here studying to be a rabbi. I proudly share it with you--I am honored to call David and his wife Laura good friends:
Today is Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Memory. Today, Israel as a nation recalls its fallen heroes who fought so that this little state could exist. So many have been slain here because our right to our ancestral homeland has been called into question again and again. I was nearly one of those. Nine months ago, I was in a pigua, a terrorist attack, at the Frank Sinatra Café on the Hebrew University campus in Jerusalem. Over ninety people were injured, and nine lost their lives in the bomb blast. For me, therefore, this Yom HaZikaron has been an opportunity to reflect on the past year, and on my ongoing processing of the trauma I suffered.
As to this continual movement and its ongoing ripples—in some ways it is hard to say, because not only will I never be the same, but I am already a different person. The person who writes these words is not the person who sat down to lunch nine months ago. A great modern nature writer, Annie Dillard, wrote that she spent three hours one day looking at every leaf on a tree to discover that almost all were blemished and imperfect in some way. To be whole is actually the abnormal--to be touched and affected, to be a struggling being, this is the essence of life. More and more I become convinced that Buddhism erred when it tried to develop ways to avoid suffering by detachment. While needless suffering is undesirable, detachment is a withdrawal from the world, and our responsibilities to it.
Because I now am someone different, and because the shape of my soul has changed somewhat, how I fit into the world and experience it has also changed. The war against Iraq opened me wide again. Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remeberance Day, was accessible to me in new ways this year, and listening to R’ David Golinkin's uncle, a survivor, tell his story, I understood a little better, and also perceived the impossibility to truly grasp what these people went through unless one has also been abused continually and constantly over a period of years. The best the rest of us--who have been blessed with a greater measure of peace--can do is to develop an ever-more compassionate heart.
I also find myself more bold and brazen--sometimes to the point of taking actions which are not in my best political interests, but which are in my best spiritual interests. I think this makes me a better servant of Hashem (literally The Name, an epithet for God). Thus when a person with power over my life lies, is arrogant, and incapable of apologizing, I "hasten to chasten". If it is someone with whom I have followed a gentle and diplomatic approach to no avail, and yet one with whom I must maintain ties, I sharpen my tone. Their defensiveness and denial may express itself as anger at me, but if I think it may effect a subtle but slow and healthy change, I am willing to place myself in the line of fire. This is not something I would have done before. Life is short, and the psalmist warns us not to place our trust in human kings.
The world is a place of fury, but it is also full of love and splendor. More often than not, these midot , these qualities, are fused in an opaque admixture. Walking home today, I was deeply moved by the transcendent beauty of Neve Granot, the public garden that abuts the Israel Museum. There are more wildflowers and grasses than this country has seen in a decade. The tumult of color and texture shook me. It is indeed a miracle to see the small seeds of wild grasses shimmer in the breeze. A strong gust sends them hovering airborne till they crest and spin earthwards again. Caught in this interplay of forces, I slowed myself enough to see every thorn and thistle, the sharp edge of a leaf, battling to express their beauty amid hostility. Peering closer still, I realized this battle was occurring even underground, where every root and fiber wrestled and twined for a little more of the rapidly disappearing moisture. It is this also I have learned from the pigua.
I once was quite drawn to the notion that life is not a zero sum game, and that there are enough material goods to go around for every living creature. It was a comfortable idea for a liberal middle-class American. Even Maimonides says this in chapter 12 of his Guide to the Perplexed. It was comfortable to believe that if we only gained the wisdom to distribute the food a little better then there would be enough to go around for all. In some important ways this is still true, and from a Jewish perspective, we are still compelled to try. The tamchui, the communal food kitchen, calls out to us our responsibility to those who have less than us. But some plants demand far more than others. That they blossom means others will not. Their roots choke others. What is a weed but a success story that encroaches on the possibilities of others? Every liberation movement occurs at the expense of another.
On the human plain, what will we make of this gleaning? It is to me a terribly uncomfortable insight. Life indeed is not fair. That I survived the horrific blast and others did not is not fair. At moments, I am panged by survivor’s guilt. It is a normal enough reaction to the sort of trauma I underwent. From where I currently stand, I do not even know if it is a bad reaction. A part of me thinks it is one of the truest and clearest and noblest of sentiments—for it is surely an other-centered emotion that springs from humility. I contrast it to the reactions of a friend of mine who was also in the pigua. She believes in hasgacha pratit, in personal providence, and believes that God saved her out of a great love for her. I grant you, she is in an enviable place. For her, the tragedy is over. For her, that suicide bombing was an act of grace given to her by a loving Creator. Understand me, I am neutral on the notion of personal providence. My relationship with HaMakom (The Place, another Jewish name for God), and my experience of God’s presence is such that I no longer rule this out. But many acts of mercy imply an injustice elsewhere. Chen vchesed v’rachamim (grace) implies that justice has been suspended in a localized event. It implies that life is not fair. How deeply Jonah was bothered by this!
That I still pray is an astounding accomplishment. That God is actively involved in my day-to-day activities is something of a miracle. That my love for God endures and in some ways prospers startles me. It is only in the aftermath of such trials that one discovers whether he is truly religious. Whatever my doubts once were, they have been erased.
But that I can stand where I do today, on Yom HaZikaron, and remain an active and committed Jew, one who learns and gives and cares, comes with a terrible price tag. I know that sometimes God permits evil. God and God’s creatures sometimes commit horrific acts. Noah could not endure the trauma of this tormenting realization. In a rending display of mida cneged mida (“measure for measure”) he tried to drown his memory of the diabolic waves with barley water and blood sex. Abraham understood that The Judge of all Creation does indeed act unjustly, and sold his “sister” for a king’s gold. Moshe hurt deeply from his anguishing proximity to a Divine Wrath that would destroy all; in turn, he swallowed this blind rage, smashing a revelation that pointed a way out of the labyrinth. And Job had the zcut, the “meritorious honor,” to learn with his own flesh this deepest and most disturbing of truths. Yet he, unlike these others, never yielded to their fatal repetition compulsion. It seems to me that he resisted where greater men failed because he would not yield his sense of justice to easier understandings. It is because of Job’s heroism that I persist. But it is because of Job’s heroism that I must again demand of us all—What will we make of this gleaning? Not all the flowers in the garden can grow.
I can only guess how others hear this, how you will read this. It is a difficult truth, one I myself want to disavow. I want to shout out that life is not a zero sum game. But we are material creatures. One of the persisting truths that feminism taught us is that those of privilege must yield it for the greater good. Underlying that very claim is the notion that in some arenas, life is a zero sum game. Yet I am also aware that this very feminist reading comes from a privileged posture, from a place of great education. That is my discomfort. To realize that we must cede part of our bounty requires that we have already received more than most. Education, particularly education aimed at developing the person, and not a vocation, is one of the greatest and most expensive of luxuries.
Today is Yom HaZikaron. Today we commemorate those who fell so that we could stand. We are the privileged ones. We are also partners in creation with the Ribono shel Olam, the Master of the Universe. Today we realize that it is both our duty and our privilege to remember. Today we must feel the uncomfortable pain of an uncomfortable existence. Today we must realize that while God is sometimes evil, God is more often, indeed most often, a loving God. Today we recall Rabbi Tarfon’s injunction that it is not our duty to complete the task, but neither may we refrain from taking action. Yet we must read it in a new light. We must know now that the task itself has no completion point, because not all the flowers can grow. We must acknowledge the unbearable truth that our own knowledge comes at the expense of others. And the only thing that makes this “ok” is that we are willing to suffer from the knowledge, that we pledge to remember in a world of forgetting. Memory is pain; but it is also redemption.
David Kosak
This article is copyrighted. It may only be quoted in its entirety, with attribution given. Davidkosak@hotmail.com
