ELUL, MEMORIAL DAY AND YOM HA ZIKARON

Elul arrives at a hectic time in our personal calendars. We’re busy making the most of the last days of vacation, we’re preoccupied with the resumption of work, school and daily life and thus we do not readily submit to the discipline of reflection, remembrance and self-examination demanded of us during Elul. This Elul is different for me, and not just because it marks the end of a year of mourning. Beyond the memories of departed parents, there is another kind of remembrance that is much on my mind these days. Curiously, it has more to do with a holiday at the beginning of summer than at its end.

That holiday used to fall on May 30 and was called Decoration Day, a day when family and a grateful public would decorate the graves of Civil War dead. But as the generations passed, fewer people had any personal connection to the Civil War and Decoration Day was renamed Memorial Day, a day to honor all American war dead. Today there are still ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery and elsewhere, and yes, there are parades. For most of us, however, Memorial Day is a day marked not by the solemn blowing of the bugle but by the sizzle of hamburgers and the pop of beer cans, the inaugural sounds of an American summer.

On Memorial Day this year, I had just come back from a country that treats the memory of its fallen solders reverently. In late April I spent Yom Ha Zikaron, the day of remembrance in Israel, with cousins in a moshav called Tzofit, not far from Tel Aviv. The holiday actually begins on sundown the night before, and as the night descended around us we joined a standing room-only crowd in the assembly hall. Precisely at eight, everyone rose and a siren began to sound in Tzofit, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and every town and village in Israel. When the siren stopped, the tekes (ceremony) began, with residents lighting memorial torches and reading poems and tributes to soldiers who died in battle.

Next morning at 11 came another siren and another tekes, this one at the school of my cousins’ children. In the bittersweet words of letters home and in pictures of young men, boys really, in the full of life, the pupils themselves told the stories of two fallen soldiers.

The remembrances, including a final national ceremony at Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem, make it clear that this is not a day for outdoor frolicking, barbecues and sporting events. And yet all of those take place the very next day, Yom Ha Atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day. This jarring juxtaposition, one day filled with memories and grief, the other with dancing, singing, parties and barbecues, are the two faces of Israel today: preoccupation with the past, because it always repeats itself, and an intense desire to live for the day.

To experience Yom Ha Zikaron is to feel how war and terror have touched everyone in Israel, cutting short the lives of brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, grandchildren, childhood friends and comrades in arms. The wars, eight of them in 60 years, have now taken the lives of 23,800 Israelis. (A comparable figure in the U.S., which has 44 times as many people, would be 1,037,000 dead—or nearly twice as many Americans as have died in combat in all of our wars combined, from 1776 to Iraq.)

With the experience in Israel so fresh in my mind, Memorial Day this year left me doubly grieving—both for Americans who gave their lives in battle and for the rest of us, who seem to have lost the meaning of the day. As Yom Ha Zikaron shows, a day of national remembrance can be a rare occasion to reflect, to honor fallen heroes and in so doing to mend and renew the fabric of civil and communal life. It’s a particularly appropriate Jewish lesson that I’ll try to keep in mind during this month of Elul.

-Efrem Sigel

Efrem Sigel is a writer and publisher, and long-time member of the Pelham Jewish Center.