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Yom Hazikaron
Yom Hazikaron
Yom Hazikaron
another year and do the army. It wasn’t some sort of opening tactical gambit
that would ultimately allow me to continue learning in yeshiva. It was a well
thought out position from an ideological eighteen year old who felt that his
shared commitment and obligation to Israel shouldn’t allow him to return to a
life of parties and socializing in Leeds while his friends were hunkering down
in the mud of South Lebanon, to be downing Tequilas as they were downing
Hezbollah…
Partly due to my parents wishes (how can an only child give his mother a year
of sleepless nights?) and partly to do with my own fears (If even my Israeli
friends are telling me I am crazy, do I really need to be chasing danger?) I
returned to England 9 months later. Most of the time I try not to think that
August ’99 to Aug 2000 was the safest year to be in the IDF or how an extra
year in Israel at that age would have changed me. I like to feel like I did some
sort of service – that I was active on campus, taught youth about Zionism,
worked for the Israeli Embassy, that I made my own sacrifices for things I
believe are right.
But as all roads in life not taken, the shadow of the decision sometimes weighs
on me.
I don’t want to be the person who always stands beside the window and sees
evil among thorns. Yet for one day a year, when Israelis unite to remember the
fallen – like the kid from high school caught up in the café bombing or the
inspirational madrich heroically killed saving others or the friend’s older
brother killed from friendly fire or the neighbor’s first husband shot in the
early hours of the Yom Kippur War – people who went out of their houses
whole yet never returned, or saw the horrors of war and came back like small
change…I remember too – but my memory is not that of someone in the inner
circle.
And what does one do when the country you have tied your destiny in with
turns into one big room, and you find yourself looking in from the outside?