On the Cusp

This week brought us both Yom Hazikkaron (the Israeli version of Memorial Day on which the almost 25,000 soldiers, sailors, and peace officers of various kinds who have fallen in the defense of their nation are remembered and mourned) on Wednesday and Yom Ha-atzama·ut (the 74^th anniversary of the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948) on Thursday.

Originally, these two were actually the same day: in 1949 and 1950, memorial services for those who fell in the War of Independence were held on Independence Day itself. I suppose that must have seemed only fitting at the time. The strange mix of emotions stirred up by the challenge both to mourn and to celebrate on the same day ended up stirring a confusing set of contradictory emotions, however, and so in 1951 the government of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion decreed that these observances would henceforth take place on two adjacent days in the Hebrew month of Iyar. And that is where things stand even today.

The hinge between the two days is particularly fraught. The only time I’ve been in Israel for either was in 1984, when I was getting towards the end of a year-long post-doctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University. It was a fabulous year and not only for my studies: our oldest child was born in Jerusalem that year. And his b’rit milah was held precisely on the cusp between Yom Hazikkaron and Yom Ha-atzma·ut.

After we got married but before we had children, Joan and I discussed the possibility of celebrating our children’s Hebrew birthdays each year rather than their secular ones. We didn’t (and don’t) do that with respect to our own birthdays, but it somehow appealed to us both to imagine bucking the system in that specific way. We left the idea in abeyance—we didn’t yet have any children to try it out on anyway—and then Max was born on Yom Hashoah and that was the end of that.

At the time, we were—like all first-time parents—a little overwhelmed by the complex, multifaceted impact becoming parents was going to have on our lives. My lovely mother-in-law arrived the next day—I went to the airport myself to retrieve her and bring her directly to Joan’s side—which calmed things down a bit. Also, we had a lot of friends in Jerusalem, most of whom were already parents, and their presence and their counsel calmed us down as well. Within a few days, things seemed dramatically less overwhelming. We had somehow turned into a family of three. The future beckoned. Israel itself was in the throes of hyper-inflation, but we ourselves were secure (my stipend was pegged to the U.S. dollar and so, unlike the salaries of so many others, was specifically not in freefall) and so we turned our attention to our major short-term obligation and set ourselves to figuring out how to make a b’rit milah in Israel.

Finding a mohel was the easy part. The date, however, was an issue: Jewish boys are circumcised on the eighth days of their lives, which meant that Max’s bris was going to fall on Yom Hazikkaron, the saddest of all days in Israeli culture.

It’s a small country. There weren’t then and aren’t now many families that haven’t been touched by war—and the loss war inevitably entails—one way or the other. Perhaps, speaking in the broadest terms, there aren’t any. If you add the more than four thousand Israelis who have died at the hands of terrorists since 1948 to the number of fallen servicemen and women, the total is close to 30,000. For a nation of under ten million citizens, that is a staggering number. And so, unlike in our strange land where Memorial Day mostly features picnics, beach outings, and big sales in stores, Yom Hazikkaron is taken dead seriously by Israelis. It is a day devoted solely to remembering, to honoring the sacrifice of those who paid the ultimate price for the privilege of defending their country. The mood is somber and serious. When the siren rings out at 11 AM, everything stops—including traffic. All stand at attention for two full minutes. No one  has anyplace else to be: it is as though the national resolve to endure despite loss and to persevere in a hostile world is somehow simmered down to those few minutes of national silence. It’s easy to describe, but it’s also the kind of thing you have actually to experience personally to understand fully.

So that was going to be Max’s eighth day, the day of his b’rit milah. We ourselves were living in a small apartment on Haportzim Street, but I had a colleague, an older friend, who had a very beautiful and much larger home just a few blocks away, and he and his wife graciously offered it to us for our simchah. We were very pleased and gratefully accepted. And it really was a beautiful home with a large balcony overlooking the whole neighborhood. (We couldn’t have known it at the time, but in the distance was the hill on which we would acquire our own apartment in Jerusalem two decades later.)

To try to play down the somber feel of the day, we scheduled the b’rit for later afternoon. Usually, it’s customary to schedule b’ritot for early morning—but this seemed like a good day to deviate from that custom. It turned out to be an inspired idea. (It was Joan’s, obviously.) The mohel was friendly and talented. Joan’s father’s family showed up from all over Israel to be with us, including two of Max’s great-great-uncles, featured below, men old enough to have emigrated from Poland not to Israel or to British Palestine, but to Turkish Palestine. Lots of our friends from Canada and the States showed up. (Rabbi David Golinkin, who will be our scholar-in-residence next February at Shelter Rock was there too.) Our Lamaze class came too, as did our teacher.

At the time, I thought we were being clever by scheduling our simchah on the cusp of Yom Ha-atzama·ut so as to make the atmosphere less dour than it would have been earlier in the day. But later on it seemed like an inspired choice for a different reason. The circumcision took place, as it had to, before sundown, i.e., on the eighth day of Max’s life. But shortly after that the sunset and fireworks, easily visible from our friends’ balcony, lit up the eastern sky. As the nation turned from grief to celebration, I felt myself—and I say this not poetically or metaphorically, but simply and really—I felt myself stepping into the ever-flowing river of time that connects the past with the future, and history with destiny. I was intimately familiar with the history of Jewish suffering. I had read countless—truly, countless—books about the Shoah. I had read chronicles detailing the savagery of the Crusaders and the even more bestial behavior of the Cossacks in Khmelnitsky’s day. I’ve written about that side of my education many times in this space, but, as I stood on our friends’ balcony and watched the fireworks, I was suddenly possessed of the sense that I had responded to it all with a single series of gestures. I had gotten married. We had produced a child…and not just any child, but a tzabar, a Yerushalmi, a child who was ushered into the covenant as the nation all around acknowledged unimaginable loss and then went on to see a bright future for itself and for subsequent generations of Israelis.

It was, to say the very least, a fabulous moment. It was the first moment, I think, that I was able to think of myself as a player and not just as a student of other players, as someone who was on the stage and not in the audience, as someone who had finally contributed something meaningful to the history of the House of Israel. Joan and I were on exactly the same page, too: both of us slightly overwhelmed by the whole experience of hosting a b’rit milah on the cusp between regret and resolve…and between inexpressible sadness and irrepressible hope.

The psalmist famously declared that those who sow in tears will yet reap in joy. That evening between Yom Hazikkaron and Yom Ha-atzma·ut all those years ago was the embodiment for me personally, and for Joan too (of course), of that mysterious sentiment. And that is what the juxtaposition of those two days means to me.