Yom HaZikaron

To my Australian readers, I don’t know today why this should interest you but at the time it seemed important. The day before yesterday was Remembrance Day in Israel. I guess it’s roughly comparable to ANZAC Day, which if I’m not mistaken was initiated by Sir John Monash, the great Jewish Australian general.
If years ago in my youth, the idea of all those RSL members parading down the main streets of our various cities seemed like the personification of everything reactionary and unworthy in my unbespectacled eyes, these days with a couple of my own kids looking down the barrel at the certainty of draft notices I’ve got a rather different persecutive on the matter. As Dylan sang somewhere along the line, “ I was so much older then I’m younger than that now.”
A couple of days ago as work in the office ground down to a crunching crawl ahead of our back-to-back Remembrance Day and Yom HaAtzmaut, with a half day and a long weekend dipping on the horizon; and as afternoon melted into evening, I felt an eerie urge to drag my agnostic weary ol’ bod down to our local synagogue. And we’re not talking Kol Nidrei and not even your Friday night Erev Sabbat sing along. Call me superstitious; call me weak, call me mystical, but walking home I was feeling an ongoing accumulating build-up of some undefined depressing emotion boding me on. It was definitely weird. I banged the front door of our apartment shut and the walls shook and I wanted to call out “ Wilma! I’m home!”
Guided by that gut feeling, I announced my program for the evening to the assembled and confused sundry characters in my family sitcom, and told them that I was going to shule, and I was ready to go whether they were coming or not. I could make excuses to my conscience, like some sort of spiritual insurance policy and hedging my cosmic bets, but I was feeling something more immediate and uneasy, enigmatically deeply personal and yet aching to be shared.
I turned up promptly at 19:30 and found the place uncharacteristically full for the opening act. All the siddurim were already taken. The rabbi rolled into arivit, the decorum being proper and correct. Rather than follow the service in a siddur I looked around, observing the crowd; who’d turned up and who hadn’t, who were new faces and who were they with. I couldn’t find it in myself to open my mouth and join in, as something miserable was sitting on my sternum. Only here and there did I hum along. Anyway I’d forgotten my glasses.
After the prayers the youngsters took over, reading poems and singing sad yearning songs evoking memories of Israel’s all too many wars and fallen. After a while a tallish kind of geeky kid with unruly mousy hair started reading. The lines were short and seemed cadenced as if in free verse. But nearing a climactic pitch his voice cracked setting off a series of internal seismic alarms that maybe equanimity was under threat and that this wasn’t just another ode. In another couple of lines his composure deteriorated further and his words became punctuated with weeping and sniffling. That wretchedness sitting in my chest gathered, as if forming into a front, rising like humidity. He mentioned the fallen boys name, Cornfeld, a strange sounding name in modern Hebrew and everything irreverent was serious now.I didn’t know the kid but remembered his death notice being sent out through the community mailing list. Mysticism seemed real enough to slice, prayer as tangible as driftwood to a drowning man. I grimaced trying to quell the trembling in my shoulders with every breath and to hold back the welling tears, certain that I was the worst in the crowd at hiding my emotions.
When its over I leave silently, numb and weary, noticing many a red and bleary eye but not being able to exchange more than a squeeze of an outreached hand. Almost all this community is made up of immigrants; and I doubt many of us served more than a few months in the army and almost certainly not on the front line. Most are what you’d call liberals, and its against our better instincts and world worn experience after decades of existence in the Middle East, that our kids march off to serve the in the army. Twenty-five years ago and half a world away I had scoffed at my parents’ fears of my living in a war zone. It was my life and I was fatalistic about it. But now I know about the politicians and the kids they call officers whose hands my kids’ lives will be held in, now its my turn to feel the helplessness, scared shitless of who just might be sacrificed on the alter of my idealism.

That’s what Remembrance Day meant to me. And the feeling went on well into the next day.