In the span of a few weeks, the Jewish calendar moves through one of its most compressed and revealing stretches.

Pesach. Yom HaShoah. Yom HaZikaron. Yom HaAtzmaut — this year marking 78 years of Jewish sovereignty restored in our homeland.

Not just a sequence of commemorations. A narrative arc. And one worth paying attention to this year more than most.

Pesach reminds us where we began: leaving Egypt, where we sojourned and were eventually enslaved for 400 years. But Chazal adds something uncomfortable to that story. Only a fraction of the Jewish people actually left. The Midrash tells us that 80% chose to stay — too settled, too embedded, too uncertain about what waited on the other side of the desert. They removed themselves from the unfolding Jewish story not through persecution, but through inertia.

We don’t hear about them again.

The story moves forward without them — into the desert, toward Sinai, toward nationhood. The ones who left didn’t know where they were going either. They left anyway.

Yom HaShoah reminds us what happens when the world turns on the Jews, and when we have nowhere to go. Not just the horror of what was done, but the particular vulnerability of a people entirely dependent on the goodwill of other nations — nations that, when tested, mostly looked away. The lesson isn’t only about hatred. It’s about what happens when a people has no sovereign address, no army, no land to return to.

Yom HaZikaron reminds us that the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty wasn’t free. It was paid for — continuously — by people who believed enough in the Jewish story to fight and die for it. Many of them were survivors, or children of survivors, who understood viscerally what statelessness had cost. They built anyway.

And then Yom HaAtzmaut.

Seventy-eight years of independence in the Land of Israel. Not a creation — a rebirth. A return. A continuation of something far older than the modern state. A living chapter of Tanach unfolding in real time, in the same land, in the same language,........

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