In Israel, Memorial Day gives way to Independence Day within a single night: from mourning the deceased to celebrating the state. The passage has always been abrupt — a kind of national whiplash. This year, it feels almost unreal.
The line between collective grief and celebration has become so thin that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.
On Independence Day, Israelis gather for the family barbecue, the mangal, as much a national ritual as the Passover seder or the fast of Yom Kippur. The observance is grimly foreshadowed just twenty-four hours earlier in cemeteries across the country. There, families gather not around a grill, but a grave. Memorial services appear everywhere — schools, offices, public squares.
Circles of Remembrance
At the National Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the scene is one of organized heartbreak: high school girls hand out bottles of water and bundles of flowers, piled in great mounds at the entrance; soldiers offer cards with psalms and the mourner’s kaddish; older women, with a terrible gentleness, guide families to the graves of children and spouses, brothers and sisters.
By mid-morning, families are already gathered in every tier of the cemetery. A man in his late sixties, in full uniform, sits with children and grandchildren arranged around him. At the center of the circle — again and again — not the mangal, but a gravestone. In the absence of families, soldiers stand watch over the dead just as they do the living.
The impression is of a nation that has been grieving for a very long time.
The Impossible Alloy
Today, during what is being called a ceasefire (what we might otherwise call “peacetime”), we experience this almost impossible alloy of emotions. We have returned to our land, and yet we are not fully at home. The fact of return stands alongside the recognition that, though we yearn for the end of the story, we have not yet arrived. Our journey towards safety and resolution isn’t finished.
Exile and redemption are not two stories, but one. Yet many insist on one without the other: some, shaped by exile, remain outside the story, wary of the responsibility that comes from being inside it; and their opposite — those so overtaken by the idea of full redemption, that they mistake the middle of the journey for its end.
The grief and the celebration together, mekatzeh lekatzeh (from extreme to extreme), are not a paradox to be resolved.
It is our lived condition.
It requires us to stay inside the story without believing it is complete, and to act within it without mistaking the present for its end.
We have not yet arrived; we remain in the middle.
The joy is real, but it is not the joy of completion, of arrival. It is the joy of possibility — and the fearful responsibility that humility demands.