Independence Day: Wrestling with the challenges of Israel after 68 miraculous years

Yom Ha-Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, has always been a complex day for me. As a child growing up in Jerusalem, would I be taken to join the live musical festivities or, because it was sefira, the period of semi-mourning between Pesach and Shavuot, would live music be avoided? I ended up at the live music. But when I got older and understood the nuances of the day, my appreciation for another way of acknowledging the day — reciting Hallel in morning prayers — was the custom I followed.

In elementary school, I was immersed in the teachings and the atmosphere of Noam, the girls division of the famed center for learning of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kuk, the first chief rabbi of Palestine. His passionate Zionist ideology was the guiding light and raison d’etre of the school.

The neighborhood I was raised in was mixed: religious Zionist, haredi, with a bit of secular. The high school I attended, Bais Yaakov, was anti (modern day) Zionist.

Only as I got older did I understand that there was a place where the progressive, secular, anti-Zionist community on the one hand, and the right-wing, religious, anti-Zionist community on the other, converged. While their motivations were different, bottom line anti-Zionism fueled each of their perspectives toward modern-day Israel.

I remember a peaceful evening in my late 20s, standing at the side of the gate leading to the Kotel, where archeological excavations were underway. It was a warm evening and I was just standing there, drinking in the holiness of the spot, experiencing the connection to the past. Suddenly I heard the voice of a woman at my side. Her head completely wrapped in a kerchief associating her with the very religious of Jerusalem, she said: “He (G-d) is hakol yachol, omnipotent. Just remember, he is hakol yachol.”

We stood there a few moments and shared the silence of the night, a sense of faith in the words she had just uttered; a practically tangible sense of connection to the history of our people through the millennia was laid before our eyes, staring back at us.