YOM HAZIKARON 2025-5785
I am writing this column as Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, approaches.
A sacred day in the modern Israeli calendar.
Yom HaZikaron. “The Day of Remembering.
We remember those fallen heroes, those soldiers, who sacrificed their lives to protect ours. Who often seemed like babes in the woods, so young, who sacrificed their budding lives.
Of course, the fallen and the heroes come in all ages and stages of life.
But those young sons, young spouses, young fathers — their children, parents and partners left to grieve the gaping loss, forever.
To approach this day amidst 18 months of war, though, feels different. Yom HaZikaron is a day dedicated to grieving, to remembering, so many soldiers and profiles in courage who have become a pained part of daily life. It is no longer a formal annual day of remembering from wars past, but daily reminders of loss and death notices now. The daily unforgettable.
Maybe, amidst this continuous pain of 18 months of justified, horrible war, the day should be reversed and become a day to pause, to forget it all for a moment.
These last few months, ads from an organization called Chasdei Eran have constantly been in my feed.
Reading about the paralyzing trauma of soldiers who have survived is reading the testimonies of haunted lives, of mental anguish lived with moment to moment.
Perhaps they should be granted a compassionate day, a day to forget.
The Hebrew word for a fallen war hero is “ chalal .” The world also connotes emptiness. A vacuum. A void. Outside the military context it can also mean violate , and so many other things.
The layers of this three-lettered word are is profoundly and emotionally triggering.
In some sense, all of the connotations seem enfolded in this single three-lettered Hebrew word. Chalal . The Hebrew letter chet , followed by the doubled Hebrew letter lamed . Essentially, a word composed of just two letters, chet and lamed .
Melancholy, a sculpture by Albert Gyorgy, depicts this “ chalal ,” this emptiness, which living in grief after losing a loved one, entails. The slumped sculpture made of copper that sits on a bench is empty at its core. The void of loss, the center of the sculpture — emptiness.
The personal grief of the bereaved families, which is at the heart of this empty space of loss and grief; is at the heart of this sacred day of Yom HaZikaron.
On the national level, too, many in Israel are walking around with that hole, with that void, in the center of their existence. Especially on Yom HaZikaron.
These days, the reminders and the remembering are everywhere, all the time.
As we walk these winding paths of memory, be it on a morning stroll, at a synagogue service or perhaps in encountering a fading and frayed death notice on a street wall, embodying a name we have come to feel a bond with, as we learned of their heroic story. Or, darkly, checking the daily death toll on the IDF website, under those terrible words: “chalalei hamilchama sheshmotehem hutru lepirsum — the war’s fallen whose names have been released for publication.”
The irony of this kind of remembering, of those we had not never known, is unforgettable. An overwhelming sense of what could have been and what might have been, had these beautiful souls lived, is inescapable.
Then there are those soldiers who survived the war, the un-fallen, those tormented souls who might feel they don’t know how to employ the mental tool of forgetting — who feel stalked by flashbacks, choked by relentless memory of the battlefield, where they had no choice but to pull the trigger on another human being, or where they survived while their close comrades in arms did not.
They and the hopes of healing their hurting souls — this, too, is a part of remembering at this sacred time too this year. Remembering those who can’t forget.
We also can’t forget the remaining hostages who are still in shackles, for whom these heroic soldiers fell.
We ask ourselves, how did it come to this? How are we deeply mourning so many freshly fallen heroes? How come we are still at war?
Then we remember. Oh, right. We had no choice. Oct. 7. We were massacred. We were brutalized. For a day, we lived a Holocaust.
And we are told by Hamas that its goal is to have the horror of Oct. 7 repeated. Time and again.
So we then remember what we had fleetingly forgotten.
And yet. It was never forgotten. Not for a second. It’s just that the emotional juggling of so much pain sometimes rearranges our mind, our emotions, between forgetting and remembering.
Then this sacred day comes along. Yom HaZikaron. So much of that memory and forgetting is distilled. We remember. We never forget.
We re-double our intention. We pause and remember our heroes, who are physically gone, yet whose lives and stories of heroism live on into eternity, the eternity of Am Yisrael .
And then, we pray for healing, for those scarred by war, who remember too much, who need to learn to forget the agony of the battlefield.
More than anything we pray for an end to this war. That the sands of time shift so as to change the reality of the necessity of war for the survival for Israel. We pray there be no more fallen heroes.
We pray that whoever needs to remember — to remember. And whoever needs to need to forget — to forget.
Yet, we don’t want to forget. Ultimately, we cannot forget. Memory is all we have. This memory of our heroes gives meaning to their loss.
We reach deep to reflect upon living in a way to make the dedication and sacrifice of these fallen heroes lives worth it. We reflect upon the comparatively minor sacrifices we might need to make to create a better society, in their name.
It’s up to each of us. To make meaning out of remembering. To carry their stories and legacies with us forever.
To be present in the chalal , the void, of their absence.
This Yom HaZikaron, we long for people we never knew in real life, but encountered only in their death. As we trembled and learned of their loss in real time, they became so alive and real to us. We see their smiles, read their last wills and testaments, learn of the good lives they lived until the war came.
We pray for the war to wane, yet instead we are painfully left with no tangible terminal point to the war.
Along with the memory of the fallen heroes from past wars, from past “ chalalei ma’archot Yisrael ,” this year we remember in our generation, in the midst of this war, the great sacrifice of those soldiers, those chayalim , whose lives were intertwined with ours, in our time.
Whose absence leaves a gaping void.
The chalal of the fallen chayalim .
© IJN 2025
