The pine tree cast its shadow over the quiet grave. Outside of my small refuge, the sun bakes silent crowds. In rows and lines, they stand huddled around uniform stones; family, friends, and fellow citizens light candles and place small rocks on the lips of the garden graves. Above, the Israeli flags flap gently in the calm breeze, their blues and whites bleached by the bright sun.

I stand alone before a simple headstone. I do not know this soldier, nor does anyone else. Where other graves bear the names of the fallen, this bears one word: “Anonymous.”

This is far from the only one.

Of the 6,000 casualties in Israel’s War of Independence, 861 are classified as “unknown.”

Silently, I ask the headstone, “Who were you? Where did you come from?”

I recall my aunt telling me of her childhood in Tel Aviv. She described the docks of Jaffa: the remnants of families disembarking from leaking ships, pairs of siblings, a parent and child, streams of orphans. With their meagre possessions in hand, they poured from the docks into the slums and streets of their new homeland.

In her building lived a woman and her son—the last remnants of a family that once filled a home. When the war came, the son was called to serve. He never returned. My aunt didn’t need to describe the mother’s cries; though I cannot grasp the depths of the pain they express, I can hear them clearly. They are the sound that endlessly echoes on Mount Herzl.

Yet even he had someone to mourn him, to inscribe his name on his grave.

So, I ask the stone again, “Who are you?”

“Were you one of the orphans for whom no shivah was sat? One of the countless faceless with no mother left to cry?”

Tomorrow I will celebrate Israel as the modern re-enactment of that ancient story, the miraculous revival of the Jews from the brink of extinction. Yet before me lies a contradiction. A country in which the old would be made new, where the backs of the huddled would be straightened—built with the ashes of the old, carried on the backs of the huddled. Before me lies one of the ghosts of Europe, denied their second chance at resurrection.

Perhaps, then, a different question.

Did you throw yourself against the battlements at Latrun, falling amongst the cedars to open a path to a besieged Jerusalem? Did your weapon fall from your grip on the desert sand of Umm Katef, your blood mixing with the arid sand that the Egyptians would not take due to your sacrifice?

“Where did you give all that you had, so that I might stand where I do?”

The stone does not answer.

“You are not like those others,” I assure the silent stone.

This grave is not like the unknown soldiers whose monuments stand in the world’s capitals, before whom they parade and pay tribute. While they embody a nation’s experience in war, this stone carries the story of an entire people.

“War stole their generation; hatred stole your world.”

I ask myself the question: “How much greater is the sacrifice of the sole witness to an entire extinguished world, than one from amongst a living nation?”

“We had been stripped of our name, made anonymous victims for thousands of years; you secured us our home, allowed us to recover our nation, reclaimed our name through your sacrifice.”

The redemption of the nameless masses in the form of a single nameless grave.

“Are you happy to hear this?” I ask the stone.

“Were you a Zionist?”

Those who fall in war are not, by that condition, made idealists; they are simply people with a cause imposed upon their sacrifice.

“Are you happy that you now stand shoulder to shoulder with the warriors of Israel, flanking Herzl, whose dream you helped make a reality?”

“Did you march proudly to Avraham Stern’s hymn, Hayalim Almonim (Anonymous Soldiers)? Did you raise your head, eyes filled with determination, at its willingness for sacrifice?”

In the nights of the blackest despair, Through the length and the breadth of our land, we shall raise our banner of strength without fear. The tears of our mothers bereft of their sons, And the blood that our heroes have spilt, shall be the cement – our bodies the bricks. And thus will our land be rebuilt. The stone still does not answer.

In the nights of the blackest despair, Through the length and the breadth of our land, we shall raise our banner of strength without fear. The tears of our mothers bereft of their sons, And the blood that our heroes have spilt, shall be the cement – our bodies the bricks. And thus will our land be rebuilt. The stone still does not answer.

The Sages discuss the two trees to which Israel was compared: an oak and an olive tree. They teach that when the trunk of an oak is cut, it is killed, for its heart is above the ground; whereas an olive tree will grow back even when cut, as its heart lies beneath the soil.

“Israel’s heart lies with you, beneath the earth. You gave us roots. And from your sacrifice, we have grown branches, sprouted leaves, lived.”

I look at the seemingly silent stone, my eyes pleading as Moses’s did, begging it to quench my thirst for answers as I ask one last time:

“I have a name. A sacred name. A name that history may try to forget – but never will.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)