Three years ago, on a spring morning during Passover, my family’s life was shattered. My wife, Lucy, and our daughters, Maia and Rina, were murdered in a terror attack that belongs, tragically, to a pattern Israelis know too well.
If you want to understand Israel, you could start with its politics or its wars. However, you would miss something essential: To understand Israel, and perhaps the Jewish story more broadly, you need to understand how we relate to time, memory, and loss. In Judaism, the past is never just behind us – it is something we are constantly choosing how to carry.
We have two words for this: Zikaron (Memory) and Hag (Festival). Zikaron means memory, but not the casual kind. It is the deliberate act of stopping, of stripping away distraction, and facing what was lost in its rawest form. Its root is the Hebrew word “Zah,” which describes the pure and highly filtered nature of the olive oil used in Temple service.
Zikaron represents a point in time, one that is almost frozen. A yahrzeit, the anniversary of a loved one’s death, is about Zikaron. Remembrance Day is about Zikaron. It is where we allow grief to speak in its clearest voice.
Then there is Hag. We usually translate it as festival, but its deeper meaning is closer to a circle, or more precisely, a spiral, because Jewish time is not about static repetition. Each year we return to the same moments – Passover, Sukkot, the High Holy Days, Independence Day – but we arrive as different people. We live the same story, at a higher level.
Grief and joy in Israel
This is not just theology. It is a survival strategy. If Zikaron is where we confront the pain, a Hag is where we decide what to do with it. Every year, these two ideas collide on the eve of Independence Day as Remembrance Day draws to a close.
Remembrance Day is the ultimate moment of confronting the pain of our past, and Independence Day is the day we consider how far we have come since our return home 78 years ago. The juxtaposition of pain and joy is bizarre, and yet it is one of Judaism’s most profound insights: that grief and joy are not opposites. They are partners.
In the language of modern psychology, I recently heard Harvard professor Dr. David Rosmarin describe a four-step model for dealing with anxiety: identify, share, embrace, and let go. Listening to him, I realized that he was describing not just therapy but a deeply Jewish process – one that mirrors the movement from Zikaron to Hag.
First, we identify. We stop and name the loss. For me, that is not abstract: it’s meeting Lucy’s students, whom she will never teach again. It’s hearing Rina’s laughter among her teenage friends. It is Maia’s future – the home she never built, the life she never lived. Zikaron is the courage to look directly at what is missing.
Second, we share. Judaism rarely allows grief to remain private. We sit shiva, the mourning period. On Remembrance Day, we say kaddish, tell stories, and sing songs. This is because pain that is shared is not halved – it is humanized. It becomes part of a collective memory.
Third, we embrace. This is the hardest stage – not to numb the pain, not to scroll past it, but to sit with it. We must allow it to shape us. In Israel today, this is not theoretical. It is happening in real time, in cemeteries and homes across the country, in a society that is simultaneously fighting a war and rebuilding itself.
And finally, we let go. Not of the people we lost, God forbid, but of the illusion that we were ever in control. Letting go is not defeat. It is an act of faith. It is the quiet recognition that we cannot rewrite the past, but we can choose how it writes us. Letting go is what can enable us to celebrate the lives of our lost loved ones, into the Hag of Independence Day.
Transitioning from memory to building our future
This, I believe, is where the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offered one of his most powerful insights: that Me-mory (Zikaron) is about “Me.” It is deeply personal. Adding to that insight, I would say that a Hag, translated into Latin as “Fest-us,” is about “Us.”
It represents how we can progress as a society based on our past shared experiences. That is the transition from Zikaron to Hag that we mark every year: from Memory to Festus, from “Me” to “Us,” and from a frozen moment of private pain to a living force that builds our future.
We see it in Israel everywhere today: in young soldiers who carry the memory of fallen friends into battle, and then channel that memory into the determination to build and defend our land.
We see it in communities that rebuild after terror, and in families who sit around the Shabbat table with empty chairs, yet stand together as a people, committed to renewing our nation and writing the next chapter of our story. And, yes, on the eve of Independence Day, as we turn from tears to dancing.
If we only live in Zikaron, in memory, we remain trapped in the private past. If we only live in Hag, we risk forgetting what gave our lives depth in the first place. But if we can move between them – if we can allow grief to become growth – then memory itself becomes an engine of renewal.
Lucy, Maia, and Rina are no longer physically with us, but their lives are not behind us. They are ahead of us – shaping the choices we make, the values we live by, and the future we are still building.
Perhaps that is what faith ultimately means. Not that we understand everything, but that we trust that even the deepest pain can be carried forward and, somehow, transformed into light.
The writer is the author of The Seven Facets of Healing, a book describing the positive steps that anyone can take following a crisis in their life. It is available to order on Amazon.com and in Israel from Bookpod.