Reentering History: The Days of Rising
Yesterday we gathered in learning and in testimony for Yom HaShoah veHagevruah, the Day of Holocaust and Heroism. But that day does not stand alone. Time, in our tradition, is never isolated. It flows.
We now find ourselves in the quiet current between Yom HaShoah and what awaits us next week, Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’Atzmaut (Independence Day). This stretch of days asks something of us. It is not empty time. It is sacred transition.
We are used to thinking of sacred arcs in the calendar. From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Repentance carry us along a path of introspection and return. So too, I believe, these days form their own sacred arc. A modern cycle of holiness. Beginning in the depths of memory and loss, and moving, not abruptly but deliberately, toward remembrance, sacrifice, and ultimately, renewal.
What shall we call these days in between? They are not Days of Repentance, “Yemei Teshuvah.” They are something else. Perhaps they are “Yemei Tekumah,” Days of Rising, Days of standing again.
For what is the journey we are tracing, if not the movement of a people from devastation to dignity, from powerlessness to the fragile, necessary assertion of self-determination. From the Shoah, through the memory of those who fought and fell, toward the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral home. This is not a simple progression. It is a trembling ascent. And we are still within it.
This week’s Torah portions, Tazria and Metzora, meet us in this space with their own unsettling language. They speak of bodies out of balance, of conditions that disrupt, that isolate, that render a person uncertain of their place within the community. There is a deep discomfort here. Not only with the physical realities described, but with what they represent. A loss of control. A vulnerability we cannot easily master.
And yet, the Torah does not leave a person there. It creates a process. When something is unclear, when the body or the self feels out of order, there is a path of discernment, of separation, and ultimately, of return. A way back into community. A way back into time.
We know that feeling. Not only in our bodies, but in our history. The long experience of exile carried with it a profound sense of dislocation, of insecurity, of not being at home in the world. Zionism, in one of its deepest readings, is a response to that condition. Not a denial of vulnerability, but a refusal to remain defined by it. A commitment to stand again.
Still, not everything comes under our control. Not then, not now. There are forces within and beyond us that unsettle, that confuse, that frighten. And unlike the biblical world, we do not have a single figure who can definitively tell us what is happening or what comes next. But we do recognize the feeling. The uncertainty. The longing for clarity and for return.
That is why these days matter.
We cannot move directly from Yom HaShoah back into ordinary time. To do so would be to deny the weight of memory and the work of grief. Instead, we are invited into a process. A sacred interval in which we begin, slowly, to reenter.
Yom HaShoah opens the space of remembrance. It asks us to witness, to mourn, to refuse forgetting. But it does not ask us to remain there. It begins something. A movement, however tentative, toward standing again.
And so we walk these days with care. Not rushing. Not collapsing the distance between loss and renewal. Trusting that, like our ancestors who sought a path back into the community, we too are learning how to reenter history with strength, with memory, and with hope.
