Memorial Day, 2010
By Naomi Ragen
http://www.NaomiRagen.com
I have just sat down after the fading notes of the siren have finally
disappeared. It is another Memorial Day for Israel's Fallen. We have lost
22, 684 sons and daughters. For a little country like Israel, that is an
enormous and incalculable loss. Over the years, I have told all those ready
to listen Israel's well-kept secret: there is no Israeli army. There is
only my son and your daughter, and the neighbor's kids. Every loss is the
loss of not only an individual, but of generations: the children who will
never be born, the grandchildren that will never snuggle in the laps of
grandparents. It is the destruction of not only young lives full of
promise, but of their families: mothers and fathers whose lives are forever
shattered, grandparents who must bear the unthinkable, young girls who lost
their boyfriends, wives who lost their husbands, children who lost their
fathers. Young women who died before they could experience anything of
life's promises.
After the words and ceremonies and sad music and films of remembrance, one
comes to the conclusion that Israel itself is bereaved, and does not know
how to comfort itself. The ongoing and seemingly neverending price for our
freedom in the land God promised us is inhumanly high.
Only yesterday Achmadinijad spoke clearly of destroying Israel, uprooting us
like a "cancer." The King of Jordan proclaimed there would be another war
in July. And Syria is boldly transferring long range scud missiles once
again to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Only a week ago, we went through Holocaust Remembrance Day. I remember
walking from my home to the Kotel. And on the way back, I stepped inside
the newly rebuilt Hurva Synagogue, destroyed by the Arab Legion in 1948. As
I stepped into the women's section, I looked with wonder at how the once
empty, destroyed shell, was filled anew with praying, chanting Jews. It
reminded me of Ezekiel's vision of dry bones rising from the dead full of
life once more. They destroy, and we rebuild. So it has been for every
generation of Jews.
That Europeans, who killed and tortured our families with unprecedented
barbarism, destroying one-third of the Jewish people, do not rejoice at what
we have done with our little country, but instead do all they can to see us
die again, shows me all their tears over our dead are fake, all their
Holocaust memorials empty shells. That Americans, who did nothing to stop
the trains to Auschwitz or to destroy the gas chambers, should ask us to
prove our desire for peace by appeasing our enemies, leading to more of our
beautiful sons and daughters being killed, shows me that America too has not
learned its history lessons.
There exists no comfort for the loss of our children as soldiers fighting
just wars. But there is even less comfort for the loss of our children at
the hands of slaughterers, terrorists, and evil regimes. Our young soldiers
have given their lives to save us from that. May God bless their memories,
and comfort their families. We owe them everything that makes our lives in
this world as Jews possible. Let's remember that more than one day a year.
