Tonight, as darkness falls, Israel enters Yom HaZikaron, the day set aside to mourn soldiers and victims of terror. Tomorrow night, that same darkness gives way to Yom HaAtzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, with its fireworks and dancing and collective exhale of gratitude. No other nation asks its people to pivot so sharply, so quickly, from grief to celebration. The emotional whiplash is not incidental; it is the point. The joy is real only because the sorrow is real. The independence is precious only because the cost is known.
This year, I find myself holding that tension differently. The losses since October 7th have been staggering: Israeli and Palestinian, military and civilian, immediate and ongoing. And beneath the grief is a harder question: what are we mourning for? What future are we imagining when we say am yisrael chai?
I want to share a document that has given me something I did not expect to find: genuine hope, rooted in honesty.
Standing Together (Omdim Bayadhad) is a grassroots movement of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Last November, at their tenth anniversary national convention in Haifa, they democratically adopted a Vision Statement. It is, by any measure, a remarkable document.
What strikes me most is its refusal of two familiar evasions. The first evasion is the pretense that things can simply go back to how they were before October 7th, as if the catastrophe were an interruption rather than a revelation. The document names this directly: the years of “managing” the occupation rather than resolving it, of willful blindness to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, led to disaster. There is no going back, nor should there be. What is needed is not restoration but repair; the Hebrew word tikkun hangs unspoken over every page.
The second evasion the document refuses is the kind of self-negating apologetics that sometimes afflicts Jewish participants in Jewish-Palestinian partnerships, a reflexive over-deference that, however well-intentioned, is ultimately patronizing. Standing Together’s vision is honest about Jewish identity, Jewish attachment to the land, and Jewish fear. It does not ask Jews to dissolve themselves in order to be allies. It insists instead that both peoples’ roots run deep here, that neither is going anywhere, and that real partnership (not based on force or supremacy) requires each side to be genuinely present. Palestinians, the document implicitly recognizes, do not need Jewish self-erasure. They need Jewish courage.
The framework for peace, the document proposes, draws on the vision of A Land for All: two independent democratic states, based on UN resolutions and negotiated agreement, with confederative shared institutions, an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of both, open borders, freedom of movement, and a just resolution for Palestinian refugees. Alongside this sits a vision of a new Israel, internally democratic and equal, in which Arab-Palestinian citizens are no longer citizens of a state at war with their own people. It is a vision that takes security seriously, that takes identity seriously, and that refuses to treat the two as incompatible.
Is it achievable? The document itself is clear-eyed: “It will not happen in one day.” The wounds are deep, the mistrust earned through decades of injustice on multiple sides, and the political obstacles enormous. But the document makes a point that is theologically as well as politically important: you have to be able to imagine it first. The Kahanist right has succeeded in part because it had a vision, a dark one, a vision of our nightmares, and pursued it with relentless consistency. Those who believe in a different future have too often organized only in opposition, only reactively, only against. Standing Together is insisting that we articulate what we are for.
On this Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzma’ut, I want to honor the fallen by taking seriously the question of what we are building. The mourning is not just for lives lost; it is for a future that has not yet been chosen. The celebration is not just for what was accomplished in 1948; it is for what remains possible.
The document ends with a declaration that reads, to my ears, almost like a prayer: “We love the people who live here. We are a part of them and we insist on fighting with and for them. Through joint solidarity and struggle, we will succeed.”
That is the kind of love that can hold grief and hope at the same time. That is, perhaps, the tradition we were given: not to resolve the tension between sorrow and joy, but to live faithfully inside it, and to keep building.
Hag HaAtzma’ut Sameach. May the memory of all who were lost be a blessing.
Rabbi Jodie
