Every year on Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, my old friend in Israel goes to the same cemetery where he meets with his cemetery friends. He mourns his brother-in-law, a brilliant young Torah scholar who I believe was the only pilot shot down in the first Lebanon war. Every year, he notices that his friends have gotten older while his memory of his brother-in-law hasn’t changed.

This year, in her eulogy for her son Hersch, Rachel Goldberg-Polin evoked a similar sentiment: “But now you will be forever our beautiful boy. You will stay energetic, kind, patient, curious, funny, irreverent, pensive. Forever handsome. Forever young. Forever my sweet boy.”

I prefer not to say that our loved ones “pass away.” Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses were “gathered unto their people.”  What does it mean to gather our loved ones unto their people?  We can’t necessarily control when they leave us. But we can control how we remember them. As a people, we come together to remember them at sacred times like shiva, saying kaddish, yahrzeit, or Yom Hazikaron. 

  

Why do we come together on Yom Hazikaron to remember our Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror?  First, we remember them using the talmudic term priat chov—we are repaying a debt.  Israel’s celebrated poet, Natan Alterman, wrote in his iconic poem, “The Silver Platter,” about those young soldiers who he knew would fight in 1948 in the war of Independence. I include some excerpts below:

 

And the land grows still, the red eye of the sky slowly dimming over smoking frontiers
When across from it will step out a youth and a lass and slowly march toward the nation
Dressed in battle gear, dirty, Shoes heavy with grime, they ascend the path quietly
Then a nation in tears and amazement
will ask: "Who are you?"

And they will answer quietly, "We are the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given."

We remember partly to pay a debt by expressing gratitude for the gifts that they have given us…for what their sacrifices have made possible. 

We also remember because we want to weave ourselves with them more tightly into the bonds of areivut, of shared history, shared responsibility and shared dreams. Because part of our future, our purpose, the meaning of our lives depends on absorbing their virtues. We remember them because they refine and stretch our souls. They remind us through their courage and their devotion what our rabbis teach us— “It is not our job to finish the work, nor are we free to desist from it.”

Finally, How do we gather them? I once asked my learned father-in-law, why at an unveiling do we place pebbles on the gravestone? He reminded me that the unveiling in Hebrew is called hakamat hamatzeva–which means raising a monument. When we place the pebbles upon the gravestone, we make a commitment to build, in our own ways, the monument of our loved ones’ values, virtues, and aspirations.  

Today, on Yom HaZikaron, may we honor our Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror by paying our debt, absorbing their virtues, and building monuments of goodness which honor their values and aspirations.