What US Jews Should Remember Today, Celebrate Tomorrow

If we Jews wanted, we could have a reason to mourn everyday.  The great scholar Leopold Zunz was not wrong in describing ours as a “lachrymose history.”  And yet, we Jews don’t fast and don sackcloth and sprinkle ashes on our heads everyday, despite the historical and ongoing (571 days since October 7th today) occasions to do so.

What we do, however, and do exceptionally well, is remember.  Today is in fact such a day, Yom haZikaron, Israel’s Remembrance Day for those who died in the defense of Israel and those killed in terror attacks.  Unlike in the United States, their “Memorial Day” is truly somber, holy, meaningful.  In part, because even prior to October 7th, fallen defenders of Israel and victims of terror were real, immediate, pressing losses.  In part because the day of remembering leads directly into Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, which for us in the Diaspora, begins tonight.  The solemn mood of Yom HaZikaron gives way to joy and celebration.

Acknowleding sadness, remembering the sacrifices that have brought us to the present moment, feeling the proper sense of sorrow and grief is entirely healthy and holy.  Judaism, by putting the focus on zachor, remembering, doesn’t leave us solely to grieve.  It makes us see things in the great span of Jewish history.  And Jewish life.  Jewish living, today.  We do recognize the difficult nature of our past, the ongoing sufferings of today, but those feelings give way not to despair but to hope, and even joy.  Just as Jewish life should always.

American Jews have sadly had to come to reckon with levels of antisemitism and violence unknown before October 7th in this country.  It has been all to easy, for us living in an American milieu, to fall victim to feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and sorrow.  How can this be happening?

It is for all those reasons, that we, living here, need the lessons implicit in Yom HaZikaron and YomHaAtzmaut, of remembering our losses and then gratefully celebrating our blessings, precisely because of the losses we all share.

As a rabbi in the United States, it is a small measure of hope I feel to see more and more Jews here, in particular, those younger than me, who have come to embody this lesson.  Who have not let the events in Israel and the US scare them away from their Jewish heritage but instead embrace it, proudly and loudly!  I am inspired, just as I am by those refugees from Europe and others who brought Israel to be 77 years ago.  As I am inspired by the young Israelis risking their lives to defend her today.  The lessons of the past are being remembered and are being acted upon.

When we remember what has been lost and what has been endured, we are saddened.  But we also are inspired, to press on, to give thanks, and to live with joy for the moment that has been granted to us – for the opportunity we have to be one link in the great chain of Jewish life and forge it, beautiful and strong, for the generation to come.

As the Psalmist noted centuries ago, “I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  Hope in the Lord; be of good courage, and God shall strengthen your heart; hope, I say, in the Lord!”