Today is Yom HaZikaron, the “Day of Remembrance.”

Each year in Israel, on the eve of Yom HaAtzmaut—the celebration of Israeli independence—the country enters into mourning. Before celebrating the anniversary of a political sovereignty recovered after two thousand years of exile, Israel takes time to grieve all those who have fallen since 1948: at combat and during wars, soldiers and victims of terrorist attacks.

Today in Paris where I woke up it is springtime, the sky is blue, and this day does not exist.

So I light a candle. I listen to the memorial prayer El Maleh Rachamim—“The (God) full of compassion”—and I write.

In Israel, the radio would speak only of this, the television would show only this; cars would be adorned with small white flags bearing a blue Star of David, marked with two horizontal blue lines, one for the sky, one for the earth. 

The evening before, as the entire country would enter this solemn day, a siren would sound at 8 p.m. All the shops would already be closed. The restaurants too. There would be only silence—the silence of the night in streets suddenly emptied, an eloquent silence, made heavier still by the quiet of those walking in small groups: families, close together, each secluded in their thoughts, on their way to memorial ceremonies.

The next morning, they would stream toward the cemeteries.

The living and the dead

For some, it is the flesh of their flesh that lies rotting right there under the earth: their loved ones, their family, their friends, whom they come to cry again today. For some it will be the first time. Their death is still so fresh.

There is also the one we almost knew.

The husband of the girlfriend of my neighbor, killed after October 7, leaving her stunned and alone with four young children. The best friend of my friends’ son—a gentle young philosopher whose smile will remain forever young. “He so had nothing of the image we have of a ‘soldier’” said Michael about him. All he wanted was to study. And he was so.. ‘adin’, Gentle… he liked to listen. He wanted to really be there for you.

There are those who have become national heroes, and those whose names we will never hear of. But it doesn’t matter. On that day, we all grieve in our flesh. Because, whether we want to or not, it is in the fiber of our very being that we feel we belong.

The great collective body of Israel forms a vast fabric of souls—one that inspired Chava Alberstein to sing:

When you die,
something of you in me,
will die with you, 

When, in a cover of this song at a Yom HaZikaron ceremony by Orthodox singer Yonatan Razel and chiloni (secular) singer Avraham Tal sing the refrain together, it feels to me that they heal the living as much as the dead. 

Healing Unity

The very fact of them singing together brings a balms to the fracture we are mourning in this period of the counting of the Omer: Sinat Chinam (gratuitous hatred) among Jews.

While so many of us are still busy judging and hating other Jews who dress different and think different- Jews we often don’t know, all the while accusing them, the other, of lacking unity (achdut), those we mourn today have died because of being one of us, or because they were sent to fight to protect us, no matter what we look like and speak for. 

Meanwhile the religious and the secular singer remind us with one soft voice:

For we are all, yes all of us,
all of us are one living human fabric.

At the cemetery, as we came to mourn those we loved—or strangers who have become brothers in fate—we stand together: religious and anti-religious, charedim and arsim (the Israeli equivalent of a “redneck”).
Above ground, living flesh, beneath it, decaying flesh. Breathing beings above ground, none under. 

And through the dark soil and cold stone slabs, on these hills so fiercely contested by all types of human cultures over millennia, the vertical force of memory fills the cypress-lined paths with sighs and tears, with silence and love.

Ori, the Beautiful six, and the million other unique neshamot

I have attended only one military funeral in my life. It was that of Ori Danino.

Ori had managed to escape the site of the Nova massacre on October 7—and then returned to save others.
He remained in captivity for nearly a year underground, with Hersh, Eden, Almog, Carmel, and Alexander. Those whom Hersh’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, called “the beautiful six” were found executed—skeletal and silent—in a narrow tunnel where one could not even stand, right before they could be saved.

Ori, whose identity as a soldier the Israeli press had managed to conceal until the end, so he would not be tortured further.

For Ori, and for the millions of others who have ascended too soon on the wings of the Shekhinah since 1948—whether in the War of Independence, on a terrible Yom Kippur, during the brief days of 1968, in a pizzeria or a nightclub, at a university or in a bus; whether by a car, a bomb, or a knife; at home or in the street; in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, or Hebron—we, the living, take one day to mourn this incomprehensible reality:
Humans killing humans.

It sometimes feels exhausting to be mourning so many deaths, so many relentless attacks, as if Israel throughout history, from one destruction to one expulsion, from one pogrom to one war, could never, ever 

Rest.

And Israel does not rest. Israel continues—to fight to keep existing, to fight against despair, and even, to fight against those within it who betray its own values by doing to others what they would not want done to themselves.

And yet, on that day, everything stops.
We stop fighting and we just allow ourselves to cry, because we know our soul’s survival depends on it.

The sky is so full today

At 11 a.m., the siren will sound again. 

And once more, everyone will stop. Everyone will stand still. Silent.
The world stops for us—for one minute, the eternity of a piercing sound that splits the body in two—just long enough to open, together, the wound of memory.

We stand there, bodies cut open by the sound of mourning.

We, the living, slightly guilty to be here, cry for those who are gone, while we are still here.

Today, after October 7, Yom HaZikaron feels even heavier.

The sky feels more crowded than ever—so much so that one wonders how it holds.

I think of the refrigerated containers hastily set up after October 7, to hold thousands of bodies suddenly appearing on the surface of the earth—bodies that had to be stored before the process of identification which goes against the Jewish imperative of immediate burial and took so long for some of the tortured bodies, some shot right in the face, bodies mutilated, head cuts and missing limbs.

Today I also think of those hangars described by the writer Han Kang, where Korean students, after the 1980 uprising, had to store the bodies of their murdered friends in vast spaces under metal domes that suddenly could not contain the unexpected influx of the dead.

Oh, how full is the sky today.

Almost too full, since October 7 suddenly multiplied the number of grieving families. Grief feels like a newly open wound, and one constantly renewed, with new tenants of the sky freshly arrived from southern Lebanon every other day these days.
I must remember to not venture in the “why” of despair, for God will reply to me, like God did to Moshe ‘Shtok’. “Shut up.”
There is no “why” in the Logic of the sky.
There is just the infinite welcoming us home when it is time, because we humans have free will and this is what we’ve done to each other.

So I must remember: the sky is so full, but it is vast enough for all this grief.

Sky, tears, life.

The sky is infinite.

“God” is a code name for Ein Sof—“the Endless,” one of the names used in Judaism for Life Source which we call “the Name”, Hashem, because how could we name the infinite.

If our trials sometimes feel endless, if the pain of mourning feels without end, there is something greater than that; something infinit that can contain all suffering, all broken hearts.

Just as the ocean welcomes every drop of water home, all our tears today can return to their source.

The Rabbi of Piaseczno calls tears the “mikveh of the soul”: a living, natural source of water that purifies-that is, that reconnects us to Life (the meaning of purity in a Jewish perspective) . 

To cry is to let the waters of our pain flow, so they can cleanse the soul. 

In Judaism, memory is active. It moves toward life.

As we weep for those taken from us, the very water of tears brings us, the living, closer to life.

When we remember our dead on Yom HaZikaron, when we take time to cry, it also helps us to draw closer to Life—the Life that transcends our individual existences and unites us all, beyond bodies and time.

If tears purify, it means they are meant for more than comfort—they are meant to be fertile.

Their memory is also a reminder of our duty, we who are alive: entrusted as we are with the responsibility of carrying their memory, it is up to us now, today, everyday, in everything we do, to honor Life.