This Passover involved alot of firsts for me, including being in a completely new environment for Seder. For the first time I was not with my family (or adopted family), and I had never been to such a small Seder before. But it allowed me to share new thoughts, hear new thoughts, and experience Yitziat Mizrayim (the Exodus from Egypt) in a whole new way. The Rabbi on my base also told me something this year that allowed me to look at Passover and Yom Ha'Shoah in a whole new way. We were talking about faith in the truth of the events that are described in the Torah, and he told me the following:
Despite the photographs, the physical evidence, and the recorded testimonies, there are still those that deny that the Holocaust ever happened. There are still survivors of that atrocity alive and yet there are those that say there is no proof that it really happened. What will it be like 50 years from now? 100? Imagine, if each Yom Ha'Shoah, all the Jews in each community gathered in one room, ate some sort of symbolic food like what they had in the camps, and told the story of the Holocaust. They read testimonies from during and after. They told their children the story of the Holocaust and acted out parts of the story using certain foods or symbols to accentuate their points. If we did this every year, the Holocaust would never be forgotten- but would our children ever reach a point where they thought it was just a weird tradition about a fictional story? When Bnei Yisrael left Egypt there were no photographs, no videos, no paperwork, and the survivors died out long ago. All we have is stories, written testimonies and the tradition to sit and retell our history to our children every year. This is our proof. Believing that Hashem took us out of Egypt does not need to be an act of faith.
As I stood in silence with the rest of Israel as the sirens went off around the country and we remembered all those who have fallen in the fight for a Jewish homeland, I knew we would never forget what it cost us to be here. And as I wandered the streets of Jerusalem that night, surrounded by Israelis from age 4 to 90, all out celebrating the creation of a Jewish state, I knew that we would never stop appreciating what Hashem has given us. Last month we relived the exodus from Egypt, we remembered what it was to become a free people. Our journey to become a nation was not a simple one. Over a hundred years of slavery followed by a hurried chase to the Red Sea and a spiritually and physically challenging trek to Har Sinai where we recieved the Torah and officially became the Jewish people. But even than, our journey was not over and we had to wander through the desert for 40 more years before we were prepared to start fighting for our country. The Torah describes the generations of trials and difficulties we went through to become a nation. It tells us of the spiritual cleansing we had to go through to earn the Torah, and the battles we had to fight, amongst ourselves as well as with our enemies, before we earned the Land of Israel. It took hundreds of years to become a nation of Israel with the Torah of Israel, in the Land of Israel.
And then our kingdom faltered, our country was conquered, our Temple destroyed, and our nation dispersed. For two thousand years we fought to hold on to our Torah, we fought to hold on to our nation. We survived the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and even the Holocaust. We have lost parts of our nation, and parts of our Torah, but we had lost all of our land. We fought to maintain a presence there, in Jerusalem, and Tzfat, and Hevron. Herzl and the Zionist Congress fought to keep the idea of Jewish homeland alive. And then, 62 years ago, the Jewish people once again had a country.
I cannot imagine how it felt to celebrate our first Yom Ha'Atzmeut, to commemorate our first Yom Ha'Zikaron. But I do know what it feels like, as a Jew, as an Israeli, and as a soldier in Tzahal, to celebrate our 62nd. And being a part of this nation, being a part of this country, we are never going to forget how we got here and what it means to be a free nation in our land– להיות עם חופשי בארצינו
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