The Blink of an Eye: Thoughts on Yom haZikaron and Yom haAtzmaut

The Blink of an Eye: Thoughts on Yom haZikaron and Yom haAtzmaut


I remember an Israeli friend of a friend who couldn’t celebrate Yom haAtzmaut - Israeli Indenpedence day. She wasn’t expressing political dissent; rather, the transition between Yom haZikaron and Yom haAtzmaut was too difficult - her boyfriend had been killed while serving in the IDF. Being that the end of the Day of Remembrance, when the emphasis is on children, parents, family, friends, lovers who died serving Israel, is also the beginning of the Day of Independence, which is essentially a large party, this isn’t too hard to understand. How does one leave grief behind so quickly?

The Talmud has a feel for the difficulty of fleeting transitions. In a discussion about the nature of passing time, the following statement gets made:

Said Rabbi Yosi: The time between day and evening (called bein hashamashot) is like the blink of an eye. One enters, the other leaves, and it is impossible to stand in the midst of it.*
Talmud Bavli, Masekhet Brakhot 2b

Impossible to stand in the midst of it. Could it be expressed better? It seems unfair to me that God so often asks of us, that we ask of ourselves, to stand in the breach between agony and joy. Celebrations are never simple for the Jews: they are always commemorations as well, asking us to mix the joy of what is happening now with drops from the too often bitter past. There are so many holy days, not the least of which the one we just celebrated, that require us to stand at the point between darkness and light. The Israeli Hakhrazat haAtzmaut -- Declaration of Independence -- mentions the strength of the Haluztim and the Nazis in successive paragraphs. Many of us are caught between pride and pain, for a bewildering array of reasons, when thinking about Israel’s place in the world and history.

The problem with chucking it all and not caring is that this moment, the shift between one day and another, is the moment when holiness is born. Shabta kava nafsha**, the Talmud teaches us -- Bein haShamashot is the time when Shabbat “fixes” itself, brings itself into the world.

This means that Bein haShamashot is precisely the time when the potential for something new is created. The time when the world can slip out of the groove of repetitive history, and take a path not previously known. And we have an urgent need for something unexpected.

My blessing is that we have both joy in the existence of our State and comfort in the memory of our loss, but mostly that we reach for the point in between, and be blessed to see the unexpected.

Rabbi Scott Perlo

*“Stand in the midst of it” is a literal translation of the text, which also means something like, “it is impossible to accurately fix the time.“ Rabbi Yosi’s opinion is a minority opinion - the other opinions give a larger margin for time between when day ends and night begins.
** Bavli Pesahim 105a