In honor of Israel at 78: Yom Ha'Atzmaut 5786

In honor of Yom Ha’Atzmaut

Do not be afraid.

Walk through fear into an expansive, unfolding future.

There is a line we carry as Jews, whether we name it or not.

From The Silver Platter (Alterman):

“And the land will be quiet…

The youth will step forward and say:

We are the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given.”

A people does not come into being without fear.

A state is not born without trembling hands.

Jerusalem, 1975.

Jerusalem is where I learned about fear.

In Rabinovitch Park, at a busy intersection in Kiryat Hayovel, stands a creature that defined my childhood. A monumental play sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle. A vividly painted, two-story monster head with three tongue slides, known simply as “The Monster.”

Children climb an exterior stairway, enter a small, dark room inside its head, and then slide down through its gaping mouth.

This was my playground.

Originally called “The Golem,” the sculpture was almost rejected. Too frightening. Too strange. Too much. But Jerusalem’s mayor Teddy Kollek embraced it. There is a story that he was meant to inaugurate it by sliding down one of the tongues, but he could not even reach the ladder through the crush of children.

We were not unafraid.

We climbed anyway.

Saint Phalle said that scary things are good because they help children conquer their fears.

I knew that truth in my body before I had words for it.

Climb up. Heart pounding.

Enter the dark.

Sit at the edge.

And go.

That was Jerusalem.

My family made aliyah in 1975. My parents had married in Jerusalem in 1968, returned to the United States for my father’s rabbinical training at Hebrew Union College, and then felt the pull back. Not symbolic Zionism. Lived Zionism.

We came with vision. With idealism. With friends dreaming of building something new.

And we came into a reality where terror was everywhere.

Do not touch anything.

Do not pick anything up from the ground.

Do not stand near a trash can.

These were not abstract fears.

They were instructions for staying alive.

Fear was ambient. Constant. My mother carried it in her body. In her voice. In the way she watched us move through the world.

My childhood split itself in two.

The monster that taught me to move through fear

and the world that taught me why fear existed at all.

So we left.

We made yeridah.

We went to Oregon.

A place where the scariest thing, for a while, was Mount St. Helens eruption and the ash falling from the sky.

From a city of many peaces and many pieces

to a place that felt whole, quiet, predictable.

And yet.

Jerusalem stayed in me.

The fear.

And the knowing that fear is not the end of the story.

As Rabbi Rami Shapiro teaches, peace is not the absence of fear. Peace is the ability to live with fear without being ruled by it.

The golden city teaches this if you let it.

Not the absence of fear

but the movement through it.

That is the deeper reading of independence.

Not triumph without cost.

Not certainty without doubt.

But a people who walked forward anyway.

Like children climbing the monster.

Like the youth in The Silver Platter stepping forward, not because they are unafraid, but because something larger calls them.

Yom Ha’Atzmaut asks us a hard and holy question.

What would it mean to walk forward now

not pretending fear does not exist

but refusing to let it define the future?

Israel is not finished.

It is becoming.

We are not finished.

We are becoming.

Do not be afraid.

Or rather

be afraid

and go anyway.

Into a future that is vast

unfinished

and still, somehow, within our reach.