A Nation that Stood Today

Even knowing it would happen, it startled me. Even knowing what it means, I thought it meant something else. Even knowing, my heart began to race and I grabbed my phone and checked. My ears listened to the siren and waited for the bomb. My mind thought...why wasn't there an early warning? Is that Jerusalem's siren or is it ours?

And at the same time as my muscles clenched, my mind remembered and my heart slowed. Today is Yom HaShoah, literally the Day of the Holocaust and more informally, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day.

And at 10:00, for two minutes, the wail of an air raid siren sounds. The country stops. Buses and cars pull to the side and people get out and stand. The siren cuts into your soul. It is the sound of six million people screaming in pain and horror and we stand and listen and whisper, we remember you. You aren't forgotten. You will NEVER be forgotten. We will never let it happen again...

And then we stumble. It happened again. On a beautiful Saturday morning, one of the happiest holidays of the year, Simchat Torah. October 7. Monsters came, as they did in 1939 and 1940 and every year until May 8, 1945. They went door to door, town to town. Their target was the Jews but they didn't waste time finding out who they were killing.

But today is not October 7; we push through that agony to touch the agonies of those horrible years when the Nazis came and systematically murdered more than 6 million people.

That is what we stood to remember today. And in those two minutes, we allowed ourselves to be what we have become in the last few years and most especially, the last month and a half. We were a shattered, traumatized nation, sad, devastated, weary, broken.

And as the siren's last wail faded away, the very mountains around us shook off the grief and the weariness. We shook it all off and we stepped back. Never to forget. We are a people blessed and cursed with an eternal memory.

But after the siren stopped, the trauma was tucked back inside, back to a place we know we will have to deal with later. We focus on the glorious, cloudless sky above, on the news that one of the last hostages released by Hamas on October 13 last year, happily announced exactly six months later, his wife is expecting their next child.

That is what my people are about. Life. Bringing new children into the world and giving them the gift of a Jewish soul and the capacity to remember.

We are here now because a few generations ago, our grandparents and great grandparents came out of Europe, out of the Arab countries, out of the cold of Siberia and the heat of northern Africa and came to this land. And we are here because generations and centuries ago, our people fought against the Roman Empire, the Babylonians, the Greeks. We escaped the Persians, overcame the Amalekites, the Amorites, the Philistines, the Assyrians and more.

And we overcame the Germans simply by surviving when their regime fell, as we will survive Iran, when theirs falls soon. So we can admit to ourselves that even knowing the siren startled us, we pulled ourselves together and stood.

We are a nation that has stood through thousands of years...like the beautiful mountain outside my window. And we stood today.

You will not break us. You will not defeat us. You will never take us from our land no matter how many UN resolutions you pass, no matter how many armies you send to defeat us. Your terrorists will not win, your missiles will not destroy us.

Our hearts have settled, our muscles unclenched. We stood. We stand. We will stand. For our people. For our land. For our right to defend ourselves.

We are the people of Israel. You can hate us. You can plot against us. You can build weapons stronger than ours. Missiles bigger than ours. And still, you will not win.

We are eternal. Yes, you can hurt us to the depth of our souls and that pain will stay with us always. But we will do what we did today. We will shake it off, push it back into the collective memory we will hand down to our children and we will stand. Here. Forever.

Not because we are better or stronger...we aren't. The secret you fail to accept is the reason why we are here and why we will stay. You can believe that statues are gods and you can worship the sun and the moon and the stars.

Once we shared our God with you, told you there was but the One. For thousands of years, we have stood for Him and He has given us His land, placed His Home here on a mountain just over the next hill from my home.

He has called Himself the God of Israel. And it is God, no, really. It is our God that has declared this land to us. Whether you believe in the Christian Bible of the Muslim Koran...it is written not only in OUR Torah, but in your holy books.

You may not honor what is written in your holy books, but we honor what is in ours. We are home and this mourning, though it was hard to hear the siren, a traumatized nation insisted that it must sound for two minutes and we must stand and give our respect to the six million who didn't come home. The six million whose ashes and bones remain and still surface in the rain sometimes.

Never again...but really. Am Yisrael Chai.