Do you hear the people sing?

I’ve already written extensively on Israel’s Memorial Days, both for the Holocaust and members of its military.  Obviously, Israelis have raised memory to an art form.  After all, what other country gets the vast majority of its citizens to completely stop in unison at a given moment?  But with so much mourning you might wonder if people in this country have anything to celebrate.  Well, a person can only wallow in self-pity for so long before he simply tears off the shroud and throws a party.

And that is precisely what Israelis do.

The day immediately following Yom Hazikaron is Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day.  In a single day the tone of the country changes completely, moving from sadness to utter joy with the swiftness and seeming effortlessness of replacing the Tragedy mask with that of Comedy.  Melancholy songs and stillness are replaced with concerts, fireworks, and barbecues (not unlike our own Independence Day), and the country suddenly overflows with celebration.  Our own kibbutz ceremony was filled with song and dance of a more cheerful tone, and sanguine laughter and applause erupted after every performance.

For as talented as Israelis are at remembering, they are equally talented – if not moreso – at living in the moment and celebrating it for all it’s worth.

It is worth pointing out the curious timing of all of this.  Independence Day is when it is because it is the anniversary of the date when David Ben-Gurion announced the Proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948.  But Yom Hazikaron could be any day of the year.  It could just as easily be in January as August, so why should this solemn, even depressing day directly precede the most joyous political holiday in Israel?

Jews have long understood the concepts of sorrow and joy and the intricate relationship between the two.  As a people we have experienced destruction and expulsion time and again throughout our long history.  In some instances – namely the destruction of the temples – we are taught that we brought the tragedies upon ourselves because of our own failures.  However, there is one hardship in our history that, as a young teenager in Hebrew school, made me wonder.  In discussing the various punishments the Jewish people have endured, I asked the rabbi “But what about the slavery in Egypt?  We hadn’t gotten the Torah yet and weren’t technically Jews.  So what did we do to deserve that?”

At the time he didn’t give me an answer, but as I grew up I divined that it wasn’t a punishment; rather, the generations spent as slaves in Egypt served to teach us and prepare us for freedom, for who can truly appreciate freedom unless they have experienced captivity?  And how can a people have compassion for those who are not free unless they themselves have suffered the same injustice?

Thus the concept of suffering begetting joy is born into us, both individually as Jews and collectively as a nation, and Israel’s decision to celebrate their independence only after remembering what it took – and continues to take – to earn it seems to reflect that.  The timing is, in and of itself, a metaphor for Israeli existence and survival: that sorrow and ecstasy are both present in life, that neither should be forgotten or ignored, and that often, one leads to the other.

If you will, permit me one last metaphor:  The timing of Israel’s Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’Azmaut appears to have a Biblical connotation as well.  In the first chapter of Bereshit (Genesis), each day of Creation is marked by the phrase “It was evening, it was morning, the [first, second, etc.] day.”  Again, darkness precedes the light, and we continue that tradition when celebrating all Jewish holidays, starting at sundown one day and concluding after sundown the next.  With that order in mind, we should never take the light, the joy, for granted, and though we should not dwell on the negative, we should recall the night that preceded the day to make it that much more worthy of celebration.  In so doing, let us hold onto that memory of darkness to remind us of what not to allow in this world in order that we might reach an era of everlasting light, endless joy, and universal peace for all.