Yom HaShoah 5786 — A Reflection from Wartime Israel

There is a question that keeps surfacing in me, beneath the sirens, beneath the news, beneath the fatigue of a war with no visible end. It is not a sophisticated question. It is almost embarrassingly simple. Why do they want to kill us?

I am the daughter of Shoah survivors. I grew up in the long shadow of that question. And now, eight decades after the worst answer in history, I live in a country where missiles rain from the sky, where the stated aim of our enemies is our annihilation, and I find myself asking it again. Not with philosophical distance. With bewilderment. With something that feels almost like grief at the poverty of human imagination, that this is still, still, what some part of the world reaches for.

I cannot answer that question logically. I have stopped trying. Some hatreds are not logical. They are inherited, cultivated, weaponized. They answer a need in those who hold them. Understanding them does not dissolve them.

What I can do, what we can do, is refuse to let that question be the center of our story.

Because here is what I know: to tell only a story of victimhood, without any opening toward Hope and Life, is unbearable. It is also untrue to who we are. The intention of Israel is written into its very hymn. Hatikvah. The Hope. Not as sentiment, not as consolation, but as a founding declaration, the animating force of a people who refused, across two thousand years of exile and catastrophe, to stop desiring life.

That word contains everything.

During the Shoah, my parents’ generation had no state, no army, no flag that any nation was bound to respect. They had only their bodies and their names, and one by one, both were taken. The world watched. Some looked away. Most did nothing.

Today, when the sirens sound, we run to shelters, but the shelters exist. The Iron Dome is imperfect, but it is real. Men and women in uniform are fighting on our behalf. The state is imperfect too, deeply imperfect, contested from within and battered from without. But it stands. We stand.

That is the lesson of this generation, the one we carry forward from the ashes of the last: that Jewish life is worth defending, that we have the right and the obligation to defend it, and that we will.

This is not triumphalism. I am not celebrating war. War is a catastrophe in all directions. I know this. I feel it every day.

But there is a moral difference between standing and being swept away. There is a difference between choosing to fight for your life and having your life taken from you. That difference was purchased at an unimaginable price by those who came before us, and it is not ours to surrender.

And yet, and here is where it gets harder, how do we find meaning when the heroism fades into routine? When the inspiring story we told ourselves in the early months gives way to the grinding, disorienting weight of a war that stretches and stretches? When the extraordinary becomes, almost unbearably, ordinary?

Daily heroism is real. I see it everywhere, in the reservist who leaves again and again, in the mother whose children cannot go to school because the schools are closed, and who manages, somehow, to smile. In the stranger who brings food to the family of a fallen soldier she did not know. These acts are not small. They are the architecture of a functioning people.

But meaning is not only found in the heroic. Sometimes, and this is what I have been learning, slowly, through this long year and more, meaning is found in the decision to keep living fully. To tend the garden. To light candles on Friday night. To notice the light over the rooftops when it is beautiful. To love the people you love loudly enough that they know it.

Viktor Frankl wrote from within the inferno that humans can endure almost anything if they have a why. But what happens when the why is too large, too old, too tangled with history and theology and geopolitics to hold in one hand? What then?

Then, perhaps, we find smaller whys. Immediate ones. The child. The meal. The conversation that lasted too long and was entirely worth it. The morning you were present for, fully, instead of half-absent in dread.

This is not escapism. It is, I believe, a form of resistance. The refusal to let fear colonize the present is a political act. The decision to find joy, real, embodied joy, in the middle of danger is a declaration: we are here, we are alive, we intend to remain so.

From the darkest chapter comes the clearest teaching: that life must be chosen, not merely survived.

Our grandparents did not survive so that we could endure. They survived so that we could live, with fullness, with dignity, with the stubborn, luminous refusal to be reduced.

On this Yom HaShoah, I think of them. I think of what they carried and what it cost them. I think of the world they could not save themselves in, and the world they helped us build.

And then I think of us, here, today, under skies that are sometimes peaceful and sometimes not, in a country that is sometimes a miracle and sometimes an exhausting argument, and I think: we are the answer they could not give themselves.

We are the story they didn’t get to finish.

And we are still writing it.

May their memory be a blessing. May our lives be worthy of it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)