There is a new trend in Israel of criticizing the way we mourn the more than 23,000 men and women who fell fighting our nation's wars. These critics comprise honest people who genuinely study the issue, as well as malicious people who wish to paint Israel's defense of its national sovereignty in a bad light.
In addition, there are those whose pain and loss are so profound that they (naturally) gravitate toward the notion that perhaps things could have been done differently. What these people have in common is that they all call into question the Israeli tradition of communing with those who did not return from the battlefield or fell at the hands of murderers and terrorists.
It is safe to assume that the leaders who established this country did not have a long-term plan for national mourning. Things unfolded organically. What do we know of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's decision to commemorate the poems, prose and diary entries of soldiers who fell in the War of Independence in the "Parchment of Fire" books? What do we know of the (extremely wise) symbolic initiative to hold the main memorial service at the Western Wall Plaza, despite the criticism? After all, things would look very different had the 1967 Six-Day War failed to fulfill King David's song "Our feet are standing within thy gates, O Jerusalem" (Psalms 122:2).
The latest trend is to argue that Israel is playing the victim; that the story of the Binding of Isaac is guiding the bereaved parents' attitude toward their loss. That is nonsense: I have met a long list of bereaved families who lost loved ones -- fathers, husbands, sons -- who fought to liberate Jerusalem both in 1948 and in 1967, and none of them even come close to falling into that description. However, there were many families who, biting their lips in great pain, admitted that they knew there was no other way. Almost all of them.
Tonight, for an entire day, Israel will lower its head and mourn its finest children, Jewish and non-Jewish, who paid with their lives. This mourning is unique to Israel. There is no such mourning anywhere else in the world. Individuals commune with and commemorate their personal loved ones while Israelis outside their families look on with genuine pain, feeling as though they are, in fact, a part of the family.
True, there are those who wish to change, shift, add or subtract from this process, but there is nothing more real, more painful, or that tugs harder at the heart than the primal pain. It is like Haim Gouri's poem:
Friendship, as all of your youths / Again in your name we will smile and go forward / Because friends that have fallen on their sword / Left your life as a monument / And we'll remember them all.
טעינו? נתקן! אם מצאתם טעות בכתבה, נשמח שתשתפו אותנו