Sad and feel-good; blue and white; dark and light.

Yom Hashoah’s (Holocaust remembrance day) siren is something I look forward to: it heralds a portent of accord in a turbulent sea. I stand on Dizengoff street at 11 am as the nation-wide siren is sounded and watch a girl dismount her bicycle and stand next to it, a seated man get up off of the bench he’d been sitting on, drivers halt to a stop and get out of their vehicles, standing still next to their car doors. In the midst of chaos, insanity, balagan – the nation comes to a standstill and a sense of unity, togetherness, composure, sweeps the air. I take in the emotional gravity as my mind revisits an intensely emotional improvised scene set in the concentration camps from an acting class of the night before and brackish tears well up in my eyes.

The siren; and the sad songs on the radio… These are the days of sad quiet songs on the radio, the songs I love. The songs that everyone knows, that everyone sings along to. The songs that reflect the sadness and the achiness that we find ourselves embracing, relishing even; the songs that expose the slow lulling gloom that provides a welcome relief from the day-to-day motion and commotion. The songs that I look forward to savoring once again the following week, on Yom Hazikaron (Remembrance day for Israel’s fallen soldiers)…

Yom Hazikaron comes a week after Yom Hashoah, and on the heels of Yom Hazikaron (the very next day) rises Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Israel’s Independence Day). One sunny morning in the week between Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron, Sebastian exclaims proudly, as I drop him off, “Ima, look at our new gan!” I look around me and observe a yizkor (memorial) candle placed in the middle of the room and Israel flags adorning the four walls.

Yom Hazikaron gets two sirens. The second, at 8 pm, comes as we are gathered with thousands of Tel Avivians in Rabin Square to participate in the Yom Hazikaron “Song Ceremony”. The siren sounds as I stand there and watch both my children standing still – no itching, no questioning, no fidgeting. We’re talking Liliana! Standing still. No questions. No answers. I watch her, the child I dub “Israel” because she exhibits the noise, the chaos, the craziness, the chutzpah, that bold inner confidence. 

She stands: Quietly. Respectfully. In unison with the motionless nation. What does she understand? Since when does she halt her activities and go with the flow? Is there no learning curve at the toddler/preschool age? Or is the weight of the collective so thick that it sticks to us, immobilizes us? The power of the unity, in these moments, it seems, is equal in its immensity to that of the chaos.

I watch with tears as the smiling faces of the nineteen, twenty-year old soldiers who are with us but are no longer grace the screen, as the bereaved faces of the parents tell their stories of loss, of breakdown, of resignation, and of resolve. And I listen with tears to the poems that these parents need to write in order to process their unfathomable pain, their immeasurable loss.

Poetry? In today’s world? Where is it still relevant? Here, in this small, hardened and vulnerable place, poetry is written, recited, read, and heard. There is something, I suppose, in poetry’s compact, pithy, and direct nature, in its open-endedness -- that is well suited to the painful and difficult experiences that make up life in a nation under siege.

This was a late night for the kids. The usual draining mess of a bedtime ritual had been aborted. No bath, splashes, giggles, pajamas, running, chasing, teeth brushing, a book, another, another, a song, a hug, water, a kiss, another kiss, GOOD NIGHT. Still, because of the late hour, I could feel myself pulling towards the door in an anticipated hasty escape as I was tucking Sebastian in. Layla tov chamudi (good night sweetie), I whispered, turning to the door. And at that moment: “Ima, what is Yom Hazikaron?” I relinquished my efforts to get to the dishes, the computer, the tv, and sat down. It’s when we remember people, Lance offers. “Why do we remember people?” We remember people who died, who are no longer with us. “Why do we stand in order to remember them?” We stop what we’re doing and stand in order to honor them. “Who was that bad man who wanted to kill everyone?” Hitler or Bin Laden? “Why was he bad?”  It’s like we sometimes have quarrels or arguments but we don’t make up, it’s always good to make up and reconcile, I rattled on, trying to turn a negative into a positive lesson, to find the teachable moment etcetera etcetera. Suddenly, Sebastian promptly and assuredly concluded: “I will not die. Even when I’ll be 100 years old, I won’t die.” I smiled a sad smile, said good night again, gave him another kiss, and left the room.

The transition from Yom Hazikaron to Yom Ha’atzmaut is stark. It moves from darkness to light: there is no gray. The following night was Yom Ha’atzma’ut and Sebastian went to sleep to the merry sounds of fireworks. Lance and I sang and danced wildly in the streets. With a few thousand of our fellow citizens.

On Acting and National Reverberations

The eve of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) fell on a Sunday this year. Sunday evenings I have my acting classes. They are my weekly staple, my feel-good constant. True to its nature, the class, like the show, must go on. But in this part of the world – it goes on, modifying and adjusting itself, week after week, in light of the national hues that impart to it their color, their darkness and light. On Purim, appropriately, we worked with costumes and masks. But on this day, a few weeks back -- on the eve of Yom Hashoah – the atmosphere that was generated in service of the work at hand was especially poignant. A series of exercises designed to guide us through an “inner journey” focused on intimacy and parting and yielded powerful emotional responses. The last hour of the class is always dedicated to improvised scenes.  I paired up with my friend Romina and when I turned to my partner with my usual “so what are we gonna do? what’s our relationship? conflict? etc.” she offered, in her typically direct manner, “hey it’s yom hashoah, let’s go with it, all the way.” And so we did. Here is the story we created: We were two friends, together in the camps. The shared history that brought us together is that we were standing next to each other during the transport and watched our children ripped from us, get on the train together. My Sebastian and her Ariel were holding hands. They were laughing and singing. This was the last we saw them. We began the scene with Romina offering me a morsel of bread that she had saved for me, and announcing that she has been “selected” to go to work at the place wherefrom I knew, no one had ever returned. I could not let her go. “Maybe I’ll see them again,” she uttered longingly, as we inhabited our respective characters. “I can hear them singing…” And I rejoined, laughing, “Remember them, my Sebastian and your Ariel holding hands and singing and laughing as they got on board the transport car? Hineh ma tov u-ma-na’im, saba nafal la-mayim…” (here the classic song that begins with how sweet and pleasant it is, is rascally upended when to sit together in brotherhood  is replaced with the playful kid-version rhyme grandpa fell in the water) As I hummed, in character, this amusing roguish version of the song that I had heard my real-life Sebastian sing gleefully, an impish sparkle catching his eye, just the other day, laughter turned into sobs, and in that moment, where laughter and tears mingled, I felt exposed, pure, and entirely whole. The realness of this made-up scene was extraordinary. I realized: not only does the nation wield herself upon the individual, but the individual too, can impinge on the national. Not only did yom hashoah permeate the art of acting, the art of acting also gave shape to the experience of yom hashoah.

I rode my bicycle home that night thinking: only in Israel.  This deeply emotional experience could not have happened in an acting class anywhere else in the world. It is a function of being in a place where everyone shares a common sense of history and destiny. Our acting teacher encourages us to bring in stuff we’ve written to share with the group. On several occasions I have found myself engrossed by my classmates’ readings, processing the political sensibility of some of their very personal writings. National moments here are excavated through the individual lens. 

Racheli once read a piece she had written on the eve of her son’s induction to the army, a visceral response to driving by a memorial site with the name Uri on it, her son’s name, and wondering how the young man with the epitaph had died. Rosie read a piece about her personal and emotional response to the evacuation of the settlements in the West Bank. The inextricable link between the private and the collective in this blistering piece of land is potent. As the nerves and the tensions are pared through the individual lens, and shared, a sense of unity and accord, of intimacy and familiarity, sets in. In these moments, this country, where there are three opinions for every two people, seems to stop, and listen -- before rejoining in opposition. To me, the enthrallment is in the listening – and in the arguing. It lies in the vibrations of both behaviors, in what I believe, can be summed up in a word: אכפתיות echpatiut –– caring.