When my wife Miriam and I travel, we love authentic cultural experiences. To that end, we had a wonderful time this Pesach at a Seder in Mexico City, warmly welcomed by other guests and the clergy. We knew we had reached the right place when we could smell the matzoh ball soup from the sidewalk – over the 15-foot-high security fence surrounding the congregation.

We arrived late, just in time for the festive meal. After dinner, the remainder of the Seder was primarily in song – in Hebrew, Spanish and Ladino. We loved the singing and spirit. Even the teenagers were participating. There was a palpable feeling of unity, pride and joy in the room. 

One of the songs was Shir HaShalom, the song of peace. For many of us, this song entered our consciousness on November 4, 1995, when Shir HaShalom was performed at the conclusion of a peace rally in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, with then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres joining in. Minutes after the rally ended, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a fellow Jew. A copy of the song’s lyrics, stained with Rabin’s blood, was found in his jacket pocket.

As the room sang along, I started to cry, and the tears continued to flow on our ride back to the Airbnb. The death of Yitzhak Rabin is a tragedy that still reverberates today. We will never know how history would have played out had Rabin lived. What we know is that the 30 years since Rabin’s death have been filled with war, terror, loss and sorrow. 

Israel has gone through a breakdown of civil society, and while the country comes together during difficult times – most notably after October 7 – by and large our (yes, our) Jewish homeland has become increasingly discordant, even tribal, with competing visions and narratives often playing out in destructive ways.

Our fates are intertwined

My father, Michael Blain, was a Holocaust survivor who passed away in 2022 and who worked professionally for Israel Bonds. In the final years of his life, a common refrain from our conversations was how worried he was about Israel. That worry was focused on external enemies. I don’t know if he........

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