Between Despair and Hope

This past Tuesday we observed Yom HaShoah (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day) during which we memorialized the victims of the Holocaust. We commemorated, as well, the abiding spirit of heroism and courage which infused many of those victims to the very last moment when, without forsaking the core of their humanity, they died in the gas chambers.

This coming Wednesday, just eight days after Yom HaShoah, we celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. The calendric proximity of these two observances is poignant. With the victims of the Holocaust still in mind, we celebrate the life-giving urge of our forebears who survived the Holocaust and, rather than set their sights on revenge, built the State of Israel, a new country of which the national anthem became Ha-Tikvah, Hope!

Our forebears did what we should all do. The survivors of the Holocaust and their children commemorated the past. They gathered to say the mourners’ Kaddish for the murdered victims of the Holocaust and then they arose from their muffled tears and broken hearts, and fashioned a new reality. They never relinquished their belief that there can be a better world, and that world is always within our reach.

I was in Israel on July 4, 1976, America’s bicentennial, when news of the courageous rescue of 100 hostages, captured on a flight from Tel Aviv and held in Entebbe by Palestinian terrorists, came over the airwaves. It was a miraculous mission led by the 30-year-old unit commander, Lt. Col Yonatan Netanyahu, who was the only Israeli commando killed during the rescue. Yonatan was the older brother of Bibi, Israel’s present Prime Minister.

Soon after I found a book of Yonatan’s personal letters which abounded with his passion and wisdom. On May 23, 1963, while just a teenager, Yoni wrote:

Man does not live forever. He should put the days of his life to the best possible use. How to do this I can’t tell you. I only know that I don’t want to reach a certain age, look around me and suddenly discover that I’ve created nothing. I must feel certain that, not only at the moment of my death shall I be able to account for the time I have lived, I ought to be ready at every moment of my life to confront myself and say — this is what I’ve done.

What a poignant message and wisdom left by a 30-year-old hero for all of us! This fallen soldier gives us a roadmap for our present adversity. I hope that we would carry aloft the banners of brighter days as he would if he still walked among us. Let us affirm and reaffirm the undying mandate planted within us by our faith: that we will be tireless in making this world better than we found it. Or in Yoni’s words, may each of us always be proud of what we’ve done.