Those who dwell among us have faces. They have names, families and friends.
These people dreamed dreams. They loved, they were angry. Some went out to fight for this land. Some died because they lived in this land.
They are men. They are women. They are somebody's children. They lived among us, and now they are gone. May their memory be a blessing, on stickers and on gravestones. But there are those who still carry them among us. One look at the smile of a bereaved father, the dimmed gaze of a mother, the longing in a child's eyes, is enough to see that they are still here. The first to recognize them are those from whom they were taken a year ago or many years ago. They are the ones who know what the words "cleared for publication" feel like.
Our lives are memory, and Memorial Day is for you. Ordinary people. The people who need one day a year to understand the price of freedom and the cost of national rebirth, just before celebrating Israeli Independence Day. "I don't need this day," says my sister-in-law Einat, the mother of Israeli hero Yair Avitan, of blessed memory.
Lily Deri, the mother of Saadia, the fighter and Torah scholar, of blessed memory, does not want this day either. "Maybe we'll take the children somewhere." That is how it is for those who carry the memory every day, every hour and every minute. The hours of Memorial Day are unbearable. This is the moment when personal absence becomes national absence. "This is the price a people pays for living in its own land," people will say to them, and we will say it too. It is true.
But this is not some abstract price. It is Lt. Shilo Cohen, 24, who set out to save his brothers in Be'eri on October 7 and was killed. It is 17-year-old Ella Abukasis, who was killed by a Qassam rocket while returning from youth activities at her Bnei Akiva branch in Sderot, saving her brother. It is 2nd Lt. Nave Lax, 21, who killed terrorists during the Black Sabbath in Be'eri until he fell. It is Staff Sgt. Saadia Deri, 27, who fell in battle in the Gaza Strip.
And it is Yair.
Our Yair, not yet 21, but already with a gravestone. Instead of finishing his service and cutting up his military ID card, instead of getting married and taking out a mortgage, instead of meeting up on holidays, he is now memory, and hopes that will never be fulfilled. But because of him, because of his willingness to enter the hell that is Gaza and fight for us, because of his friends, because of all our soldiers, may they all be blessed with long life, we are here.
So when you say "price," remember them. The heroes who were. The dreams they dreamed, and the dreams we dreamed for them. Let it not be easy in your eyes to die for our land.
This land, the freedom our grandfathers and grandmothers dreamed of, independence, the rebirth of a people in its own land, the Western Wall, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Beersheba, the land of our forefathers, has a founding generation of the battles of the 1948 War of Independence. And it has a generation of heroes from these years. Each one of them built here not his own home, but our national home.
There is no prayer for comfort in these days between memory and independence in a time of war. There is only a prayer that this be the last price. As Sima, Ella Abukasis' mother, says to me in tears on the eve of this terrible day: May there be no more like us.
