Last week, we went to Har Herzl, Israel’s national military cemetery, to pay our respect to those who have fallen so that we may live here. Each year, there is an official ceremony there on the morning of Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day), and the location is overrun with thousands upon thousands of people. We discovered last year, however, that in the evening, there is a very different atmosphere of quiet preparation, longing, reminiscence.

We’ve made a practice of going in the evening, to walk among the graves, to look at the faces and the flags. While the cemetery used to have very strict requirements about the uniformity of the graves, in recent years parents and spouses won the right to decorate the graves with more freedom. In these sections, where the most recent fighters are buried, the plots are draped with military unit flags, notes, wedding invitations, pictures, children’s drawings and more. Each grave is overflowing with love, with........

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