The bells, or sirens, of Memorial Day are already ringing loudly in our ears, hurting the collective heart of every Jew who lives here in the public space of the State of Israel.
Everyone unites with the memory of the fallen. Bereaved parents visit the graves of their loved ones, chief rabbis and heads of state appear in a sad and pain-filled ceremony and try to unite with the deceased, and various radio, television and Internet programs are enveloped in a mournful sadness, which in a circular motion feeds on the true grief that exists in the people and affects them in a similar way.
But in the face of all the unimaginable sadness, which is expanding and filling every Israeli space, there is one group that is seemingly completely indifferent to everything that is happening, as if it does not live here in the State of Israel, and it does not correspond with its not-so-distant history.
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I'm talking about the ultra-Orthodox group.
Not all Haredim, of course. Some. A large portion. They do not desecrate the memory of the fallen, They don't despise Memorial Day, they are indifferent to it. Indifference. Complete disregard. The fallen don't exist at all in their chronology of events. They make no slight mention of the fact that today an entire country commemorates the deaths of tens of thousands of people, Jews, who gave their lives so that we could live here.
The ultra-Orthodox cities of Kiryat Sefer, Betar, and Bnei Brak look exactly the same today as they did yesterday. The electricity in the air, the tension on people's faces, the gloomy cloud that rests on the roofs of houses in days of national mourning and soul-searching, has leapt beyond the boundaries of these moshavim. The cities of Modi'in Illit and Modi'in, for example, are separated by a few kilometers, but the distance between them on this night seems like a gap between two civilizations from two continents that will never migrate.
My scholarly colleague, publicist Menachem Mann, published here in 'Haredim10'' A militant and sharp column about national memorial days. In his remarks, Mann writes regarding Memorial Day that ""Just like in the Holocaust, here too, the memory of a family member who fell in the battle of Bint Jabal will not be honored, a secular man with a bare head and an earring standing on a main road with his head bowed."".
What does Mann offer?
""Their memory, at least as far as I'm concerned, will be honored by tens and thousands of yeshiva students who will be busy at that exact moment in the middle of Seder A, studying and delving into the Torah of Moses.".
That is, we Haredim also have our own unique means of remembering, and they are not necessarily your means. We seek to remember the fallen through study, a chapter of Psalms, prayer. Through a spiritual motif, not through gentile standing with a siren.
Sound familiar? Pronounced well? Apparently so. These statements are part of the Haredi narrative, an integral component of the structured education of every Haidar boy and girl from Beit Yaakov – we remember differently.
But this is nothing less than a narrative illusion.
There is no Haredi, Jewish, or spiritual mention of the fallen. There is no large yeshiva to stop the first seder or announce at the beginning that today we are studying in memory of the people who defended us. The administrators of the institutions, for boys and girls, do not open the school day with an announcement about the young people who were killed, and there must be a prayer in their memory, a chapter of Psalms, a moral lesson, a point of strengthening, drawing closer to God, something Jewish, even the lightest, for the benefit of the Israeli dead.
The Torah scholars – the Haidars – will not instruct their students to study Mishnayot or receive a good, Jewish kabbalah for the fallen. Not Tehillim, not Mishnayot, nothing. These institutions are not interested in what is happening beyond the government budget of the State of Israel that has or has not reached them. The fact that 23,169 people died for them does not spur them to offer even one prayer or any other Jewish symbol in their memory.
Not on this day, and not every day of the year.
