In the Shade of Trees Planted by Others

“A society grows great when men are willing to plant trees, in whose shade they might never sit.”

-Indian Proverb

One of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life was watching a woman who was six months pregnant eulogize her husband.

It was the summer of 2014, at the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, the day after the country had learned that 13 soldiers from the Golani Brigade had been killed. Her husband had been the deputy brigade commander of the unit that I had served in, the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion. He came up the ranks in the unit, fighting in the Second Lebanon War, the operations in Gaza in 2008 and 2012 and was killed in action that weekend of 2014.

The image of her standing there speaking to us about her husband with her belly protruding from under a uniform (she was also an officer) is seared into my memory in a way that I think few things ever will be. She spoke about how when he had come home from Operation Caste Lead (2008), he had told her triumphantly that he had brought all his soldiers home safely. It was the kind of leader he was, she said, the kind of leader that the IDF taught him to be. He didn’t care about how many of the enemy he or anyone else had killed, only that the mission had been accomplished everyone had come home.

Except not this time.

Her words carried the profound sense of sorrow and loss, not just for herself, but for their child. Another had made the ultimate sacrifice, another widow who would never see her husband again, another child who would only ever never even know its father as a gravestone.

On the way to the next funeral (the third of four we would attend that day) a rocket siren broke the silence in the car as if to remind us that the war wasn’t over and that would be our last funeral. We pulled over on the highway and got out just in time to watch an Iron Dome missile streak across the clear Tel Aviv sky and blossom into the white cloud of a successful interception. The weeks to come brought more casualties, more funerals, and more emptiness.

This had been my first real war in Israel, It was the first full-scale conflict since I had been released from the army, the first time I would wake up in the morning and not just read the casualty figures, but feel them too. I may never have met most of the people who were killed in action that summer, but I felt like I knew a part of them. There were the Lone Soldiers who had been killed (I had been a Lone Soldier) the engineering officer who had played water polo (just like I did in college), and the soldiers from my unit, serving in the exact same places that I did, The truth is that its part of being Israeli. We watched one of our friends grow 10 years older, because two of his soldiers were killed in action.

Since that day Israel has lost more soldiers and civilians to a relentless enemy. The book: “Im Yesh Gan Eden” (if there is a heaven) captured this sentiment in painful clarity with the first sentence of the first chapter: “A lot of people have lost a lot of people since we lost Yonatan”. It’s a book written about soldiers in southern Lebanon right before the Israeli withdrawal, but that sentence could have been describing any moment in the history of the State of Israel.

Grief is something that tends to fill the space that you give it; I think Yom Hazikaron is important because it gives us the space to grieve for the people we’ve lost, without letting it overwhelm us; and how easy it would be to let that happen. I think it may be the only way we aren’t either completely immobilized by the steady trickle of the names of people who will never go home again, or completely anesthetized by it. You can’t go to work, or the supermarket, or anywhere really without passing by some memorial for people killed in a terrorist attack, or a monument to the soldiers that fought and died defending one part of the country or another at one time or another.

As the years go by and more people lose more people, and the names pile up it would be easy to be crushed by them, or to let the country slowly become nothing more than a graveyard. While the feeling of loss will never completely go away, today we can give it its proper place and time so that after, we can continue forward and still enjoy the fruits of their sacrifice. They would not have wanted for anyone to be in perpetual mourning.

I’ve always thought how unlucky it must be to be an anti-Semite these days. They are the first in generations that have to suffer a Jewish State and a Jewish Army. There are still people alive who can remember what it’s like to not have a place to go, or people sworn to defend them, even if it cost them their lives. This assurance doesn’t come cheap, we commemorated Yom Hashoa last week to remind us and the world of the cost of not having a Jewish State and today we remind ourselves that the preservation of the Jewish State still comes at a price.

Today, just for one day, we give a space for loss of those who will never sit in the shade of the trees whose seeds they had planted.