[memory] Yom ha-Zikaron ba-Aretz

[magid]

Today is Yom ha-Zikaron, Israeli Memorial Day.

My first year in Israel, I was in Machaneh Yehudah when the 11 A.M. siren went off. All over the country, for two minutes, everything stopped. Cars stopped in the streets, people stood, the only sound being the siren. In a country where everyone is within a degree, or perhaps two, of someone who has died in combat or as a victim of terror, everyone was thinking of the fallen, and the intensity was palpable. And two minutes is a long time.*

It was difficult for me to hear that siren with the Gulf War so recently ended, when the siren would signal yet another night-time gathering in our sealed room, gas masks on, hoping that no one would be hurt. Even now, I have to pause when I hear that kind of siren start, taking a second to make sure it isn't that kind of alert.

The second year I was in Israel, I walked through the military cemetery near Bayit v'Gan on Yom ha-Zikaron, which swarmed with people, grandparents, parents, children; young adults in uniform, old men in black hats, young women in tichels. Families were visiting the ones they'd lost, and there was barely room to walk. I felt an outsider, a Jew without family there, either living or dead, a strange feeling after so long experiencing the easiness of life where the general society has similar rhythms as my own. (I miss that being in the majority, even when there are times that being in the minority is comfortable in other ways.)

Well before dusk, the cemetery emptied, as people went home to prepare for that evening's Yom ha-Atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) celebrations, having paid tribute to the people who have paid to keep that freedom.


*Every time I hear about the President calling for a minute of silence, I think of Israelis united in memory, the country acting as one, and wonder how he could imagine that his suggestion will bring our country even minimally more together.

Comments

[zahzeh.livejournal.com]

I was in elementary school the first time I heard that horn on Yom ha-Zikaron. I was riding a bike, and I was all the way at the other end of the village from where my grandparents' house was (back then it was still a village, now it's a trendy little town). Anyway, I'll never forget it. Everything got so quiet, despite the horn. A car that was driving by on a dirt road stopped and just sat there. I felt so alone, and yet part of something huge. What a strange sensation.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Knowing that hushed, momentous pause spreads out over the country is amazing, even as I stay stuck inside my head.

[rethought.livejournal.com]

I lived for 13 years in Adventist communities, and there is that same cycle surrounding Sabbath. I miss it as well.
There is a certain feeling being the minority, you're right, so I'm not sure which I prefer.

[magid.livejournal.com]

There's the time cycles (Shabbat, having the right holidays off), plus food: when I was in Jerusalem last month it was incredibly freeing to realize I could buy anything in the supermarket, and there were hundreds of restaurants to choose from.

Being in the minority makes me more conscious of my choices, always being a salmon heading upstream, as it were. There's a Them to encourage unity in the Us, rather than the splintering that can happen without outside forces. (Not that the USian Jewish community is so monolithic, really, but I think some of the religious-secular schisms rife in Israel aren't as bad here. Though some of that is because it's not country-wide politics about halacha.)

And sometimes I also feel like I can distance myself from the mainstream society's choices, even though they affect me.