Welcome to Israel- Thoughts on Holocaust Remembrance Day
I live in an amazing place.
Israel is a whole to do. But when it comes down to it, it’s just an amazing place.
I imagine that over the course of the year, as they watch us stumble and bumble along, six million souls can’t help but look down at us here in Israel and ask each other sheepishly, “Is this is the best we can do?”
And like our ancestors in heaven, many of us six million souls still living and residing in Israel can’t help but ask, “Is this the best we can do?”
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This past week we observed Holocaust Remembrance Day.
I’d like to share two features of the day’s observance in Israel:
1- Handfuls of cable TV channels shut down. They stop broadcasting and post the message, “Due to Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are ceasing programming until tomorrow at eight PM.”
There are Holocaust movies and documentaries on other stations throughout the day- Shindler’s List must play over twenty times- but a good five or six stations, mostly movie channels or shopping networks, just don’t run.
Featuring Holocaust movies makes sense. Like most of the country, cable companies work on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and they shape their televised content to be appropriate for the spirit of the day.
Shutting down certain channels, though, astounds me. By definition, cable TV is not centralized and is not mandated to limit any type of content in the name of nationalism. Like elsewhere in the world, our cable companies exist to make money. But on Holocaust Remembrance Day, they just left a lot of TV space, dead.
Providing less content means less money, and the Israeli cable companies provided less content anyway. Imagine a supermarket taking all the fun foods off the shelf on memorial day? Well, that’s what happened on Israeli Cable TV.
2- The Siren.
Many of you have experienced this siren: it sounds everywhere in the entire country for a full two minutes.
The moment the siren starts the country comes to a halt. Cars stop. Pedestrians stand still. Everyone listens. I stood outside on our porch and looked down to the open market where everyone stood frozen. When the siren ended, life defrosted again and people kept going, on with their day.
It’s hard to appreciate the depth of Israel without experiencing this siren. That moment, when the siren ends and everyone keeps on going- this is one of those “Israel Moments” that captures Israel in a blink. Juggling history and groceries.
It’s just intense here. We’re a small country, a big family that decided after two thousand years to finally go home and make things work. I have never been in a place where people try so hard to do things right, and take living so seriously.
Everything that happens here bleeds family: The sensitivity, the insensitivity, the fact that everyone argues about everything, the fact that if you fall off your bike, hundreds of strangers will come and pounce on you to make sure you’re okay. We’re a reality where companies and capitalist market rules bend in the face of sensitivity to a sad day, and an entire country will stand completely still, all at the same time, at the sound of a siren.
I feel very fortunate- honored- to be present for my nation’s experiment called Israel.
During two minutes every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and for the entire day in which service providers choose to earn less and respect more, as well as for the next week that includes both Veterans and Independence Days, I believe very strongly that six million souls look down on us, look across at each other, and with the pride of parents watching their children walking and falling down and learning by living, whisper knowingly to one another, “Yeah- this is the best we can do.”
I hope that for the coming week, six million of us living souls in Israel can look at our country and think the same thing.
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May 4th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Hi Yannai-this is Alex, Liron’s friend. She just told me about your blog and I wanted to tell you that this post was quite moving and I appreciated it (I also didn’t know that all this happened on Yom Hashoah too, I thought it was just for Yom Hazikaron). Thanks for writing something inspiring!
-Alex