Yom HaZikaron: What We Carry Forward
There is something about Yom HaZikaron I don’t think I will ever get used to.
Every year, when the siren cuts through the morning, I find myself in two places at once. Standing still with everyone else, and watching, trying to take in what it actually means for an entire country to stop breathing together. Not as a symbol. As a lived reality. Buses pulled to the shoulder. Drivers get out of their cars and stand on the highway. Children in classrooms. An entire nation, for two minutes, refusing to move.
In some of the work I do, and in the conversations I sit in every day, I don’t only see the moments everyone else sees. I see what comes after. I sit with people in the days following loss, and then in the weeks, and the months, when the world around them has begun to move again, and they are still exactly where they were.
What continues to move me about this country is how instinctively we show up for each other. When someone is murdered. When a soldier falls. When a family is shattered. There is no question of whether we will be there. People come, sometimes without knowing the person at all. They sit. They listen. They bring what they can. There is a shared, unspoken understanding that no one should be alone in that kind of pain.
And for a while, that holds.
There was someone I sat with soon after October 7th. In the beginning, their home was never empty. People flowing in and out. Food arriving faster than anyone could eat it. People visiting from the United States. Strangers crying in their living room. For a time, they were surrounded in a way that felt almost overwhelming, as if everyone needed to be there, as if everyone needed to show they cared.
And then, gradually, it quieted.
Not because anyone stopped caring. Because life pulled people back to their own routines, their own distance, their own realities.
I saw them last night. They felt completely alone.
At one point, they said, very simply: Everyone was here, and then they weren’t.
What stayed with me wasn’t only the loneliness. It was the shift. From being held so visibly, almost at the center of everyone’s attention, to feeling completely out of sight. For them, nothing had changed. The loss was just as present. Only the world around them had moved on.
Grief does not move on a national schedule. It doesn’t follow headlines or ceremonies. It stays, often quietly, long after the rest of us have returned to our lives.
And this is where something harder to talk about begins to show itself.
Over time, even with the best of intentions, people who were once at the center of our attention begin to fade from our daily awareness. Their names become less familiar. Their stories less present. They risk becoming part of a larger number, when for their families, nothing about them has ever been anything but specific, personal, and irreplaceable.
Sitting with people who carry that kind of loss, you start to understand how much it matters that they are not reduced to a number. Not in our language. Not in our memory.
We can’t hold everyone equally. I don’t think anyone expects us to. But I’ve come to believe that each of us can carry someone. One person. Maybe two. To know their name. To remember something about who they were. To keep them present in some small but real way, beyond this day.
That kind of remembering is different. Quieter. But more lasting.
After October 7th, I saw something powerful from Jewish communities around the world. People showed up. They filled streets and squares. They held pictures of hostages until their arms ached. They made it clear that Israel was not alone. It mattered. It was felt here.
But I want to say something honestly, because I think it needs to be said.
That connection, for many of us here, has weakened. In some places, it has gone quiet altogether.
Not because people stopped caring. Not because anyone intended for that to happen. But because life elsewhere moved forward, and here, it did not, not in the same way. The funerals have not stopped. The empty chairs at Shabbat tables remain unfilled. The families I sit with are still living inside the day it happened.
When you are with people whose reality has not shifted, who are still carrying loss, uncertainty, sons and daughters still not home, that gap is felt. In a very real way.
It is not usually said with anger. It’s quieter than that. More like something missing. A question that doesn’t always get asked out loud:
Where did everyone go?
Yom HaZikaron is one of the few moments when everything aligns again. When memory is shared, it is visible and unmistakable. But the real question, at least for me, is what happens after the siren ends.
What do we carry with us when we go back to our lives?
If there is one thing I have learned from sitting with people in their grief, it is this: being remembered matters more than almost anything else. Not in a general sense. In a specific one. To be known. To be spoken about. To not disappear.
So maybe this year, instead of trying to hold everything, we choose something smaller and more real. A name. A story. A family. And we stay with it.
Not just today. After.
Find one name. Learn who they were before, what they loved, who they left behind, and what their laugh was like. Say that name out loud sometime this year, to someone who has never heard it. Send a message to a family months from now, when everyone else has gone quiet. Especially then.
Because memory is not only about how we come together in a single moment. It is about what we are willing to keep carrying when that moment has passed.
