Israel's national week between Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day is a gauntlet that is meant to contain the full range of the nation's gut feelings: from "in every generation they rise up against us to destroy us" to "the eternity of Israel will not lie," from "no miracle happened to us" to "Roaring Lion." The ability to shift emotional gears is an Israeli patent. Israeli society does not need "processing days"; it has the period from the 27th of Nisan to the 5th of Iyar.
The eternity of the Jewish people entered a particle accelerator over the past 100 years. We know how to rise from the ashes, shake off our rags and stand upright, like human skeletons, and become a technological and economic power, all in what is almost the blink of an eye. In recent history, over the span of 80 years, we faced a tangible threat of annihilation, yet established a state; we went through at least three existential wars, and still grew exponentially into a fertile, productive and creative population. Who among us does not wait for that day each year when our demographic figures are published? By 2029, we will probably number 11 million. May it be so.
Still, it is a little sad to admit that in recent years our national days have become our oppositional days. Not because the sanctity of Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day has been diminished, and not because the uniqueness of Independence Day on the Hebrew calendar is no longer valid, but because an enormous gap has opened between the intensity of those days and our national routine during the rest of the year.
That gap is not only emotional, it is a gap in conduct. For one week, we know exactly who we are: a people with a shared memory, one fate and sufficient reason to rally around it. There is no right and left during the siren. There is no coalition and opposition beside a fresh grave.
And then comes the 6th of Iyar.
Nothing "breaks" the day after, but we go back to being what we also know how to be: a quarrelsome, suspicious society. Disagreement is an inseparable part of a living, creative, democratic society. The problem begins when disagreement becomes the only default. When the argument no longer serves clarification, but defines identity. When we are not only divided over the path forward, but have trouble agreeing that there is any shared path at all.
And when that happens, even the national days take on a different hue. They are sharpened against the backdrop of daily life. They become almost lip service; they remind us not only where we came from, but also how far we have drifted from the simple, basic ability to agree.
That is how an almost paradoxical feeling is made: we have not lost the ability to unite, we just activate it for very short periods of time. Remember the first days after October 7? We know how to be together, but struggle to remain that way. As though unity is an event, not an infrastructure. And suddenly the beautiful words of our national days become lip service. Like the hollow talk about baseless hatred on the eve of Tisha B'Av, which shatters against reality with the meal that breaks the fast.
We must not give up the argument, but we must leave room for the home in which it takes place. Now is the time to carry a little of the sanctity of the past week into the ordinary weekday of the 6th of Iyar. Our very soul depends on it.
