Yom Hazikaron. Israel’s Memorial Day, Israel’s Day of Remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. A deeply emotional day symbolized by the poppy red flower. Crimson soil soaked blood of the soldiers and human lives lost, somehow transposed into fields ablaze with scarlet red flowers.
It harkens back to WW I, to the famous poem “In Flanders Field,” whose narrator is a dead soldier hauntingly speaking in the name of his dead comrades, from his grave. He seals his poem with the imagery of a field in Flanders, in Belgium, that is strewn with the crosses that mark the buried dead, now ablaze with delicate red poppy flowers waving in the wind.
It’s the day in Israel when radio songs blare searing songs, so evocative, they induce tears.
It’s the day the cemeteries become crowded, filled with families, scarred families, despite the black hole now somehow rebuilt, who have had to learn to recover from the seismic shudder that changed their lives forever, to live with the lasting laceration of their unbearable loss and longing for their loved one — oftentimes young soldiers, kids really, just poised at the onset of their young adult lives, cut short.
Heroically, tragically, cut short.
It’s the day that in connection with Holocaust Memorial from the week before, and Israel Independence Day into which Yom Hazikaron flows, have, in the spirit of autumn’s Days of Awe on the spiritual calendar, come to be known in Israel as the second set of Days of Awe.
It’s the day a sanctity settles on the land, a sanctity settles in the graveyards, in the cemeteries.
It’s the day when, just like the previous week, the entire country pauses in silence together, remembers all who have fallen, together.
It’s the day that collective silence speaks volumes about all those who have fallen, and in their premature and heroic deaths, were silenced; their lives forever silenced.
It’s the day of a modern sort of Isaac’s binding, “akeida,” as so many parents have had to bury their child, sacrifice their child for the collective safety and existence of all of Israel, an akeida where no angel ever came whispering to the rescue in the last moment, averting the sacrifice.
It’s a day where one can only imagine the celestial scene, where the angels perhaps sit, flanking G-d, tears flowing, as one by one the story, the image, the sacrifice, the heroism, of each lost person, passes before them.
It’s the day the country, made up of clusters of family upon family, yet again make the choice, despite the great void, to cling to life, to look around at all that has, since their tragedy, against all odds and through ineffable suffering, been rebuilt.
It’s the day, depending on how close or distant any given family might be from the moment the loss altered their lives forever might be finding a solace of sorts in the collective grieving of their personal grieving for their loved one, or perhaps the pain is still so raw.
It’s the day each person hopes never to understand the true meaning and pain and connection to this day, and yet know in their bones it’s purely in the merit of those lost that Israel stands.
It’s the day when stories or resolutions of battles as old as half-a-century from a Yom Kippur War or even earlier, are still being unpacked, with surprise layers seeping into surviving families lives, as a senior officer suddenly appears at the headstone of a family’s loved one, speaking for the first time about the battle he led that left him emotionally damaged and unable to speak about his lost soldiers — only to decide, it’s time to face the families. Lock eyes. Speak. Connect with them. Today.
It’s the day multitudes gather at the cemeteries, pay respects, to those fallen casualties who so bravely fought, and left no one behind. Too young ever to have married. Or, Holocaust survivors who had nothing and no one left in the world, knowingly fighting and ultimately sacrificing their own final flesh and blood in their family lines, so as to ensure a safe homeland for their people, so no Holocaust could ever rise again.
It’s the day, so many IDF soldiers remind us, the privilege they feel, after centuries of Jewish persecution, in having the ability to fight back and protect Am Yisrael in their ancient yet modern land.
It’s the day this year, neighbors in an apartment building on Aba Shaul St. #2, collaborated to use the balconies of their building to memorialize the recent murder of multiple civilian sibling pairs by adorning the translucent glass with visages of the sibling victims side by side with the Israeli flag. And a sign: “We are brothers” — “Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people lives.”
It’s the day it hurt so much to see those balconies, and understand that there were enough pairs to have filled out all the balconies of the entire building.
It’s the day this year, tensions were recently brewing and running high, for fear of this day’s sanctity being used politically, cynically. Where it felt like something was frighteningly fraying in the fabric of Israeli society. Yet . . . ultimately, it was the day that restored the faith in Israelis, even if cracks appear, yet still hopefully One People. Even as many question marks still hover in the air, even as this Yom Hazikaron was heartbreakingly marred in the Beersheba cemetery, overall, indeed, Israelis paused, not just for the moments the piercing siren brings the country to a halt for a collective moment of remembering, but for the most part brought a halt to the previous months of conflict, to remember the heroes, together.
It’s the day Israel’s famous kalaniyot, red poppy flowers, still bloom and wave in the wind, if in Flanders Field, in fields across Israel too.
It’s the day you pray and hope it’s the last time there will ever be such a day, that there will come a time of peace, when there will be no more need for a Yom Hazikaron, and instead a day to pause and remember that there once was an era of defensive wars, a bygone time, a day, that marked Yom Hazikaron. It’s the day . . . no more.
Copyright © 2023 by the Intermountain Jewish News
