Israel’s Memorial Day ceremony still takes place. The siren sounds, the rituals unfold. But the conditions that once allowed it to function as a shared ground of meaning are no longer in place.

At the ceremony that opened Israel’s Memorial Day earlier this week, held at Beit Yad Labanim in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the day itself as “an anchor of unifying togetherness.” He placed October 7 as the starting point of a victory narrative, “since the October 7 attack, the IDF and security forces have been delivering blow after blow,” and joined Simchat Torah, the holiday on which Hamas attacked, to the list of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Treblinka: existential threat met by heroic survival. The framing was unmistakable. The catastrophe that demands a reckoning was positioned instead as the opening chapter of national revival, and the state ceremony as the place where this story is inscribed.

Such a story requires more than words. It requires a shared framework within which it can be told, and an audience willing to receive it as its own. Neither assumption holds this year.

A state ceremony is not a collection of gestures. It is a mechanism that organizes loss within a story, and that establishes how we are meant to stand before that loss. To function, it must presuppose a framework of shared meaning, and at the same time........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)