There is something about Yom HaZikaron I don’t think I will ever get used to.

Every year, when the siren cuts through the morning, I find myself in two places at once. Standing still with everyone else, and watching, trying to take in what it actually means for an entire country to stop breathing together. Not as a symbol. As a lived reality. Buses pulled to the shoulder. Drivers get out of their cars and stand on the highway. Children in classrooms. An entire nation, for two minutes, refusing to move.

In some of the work I do, and in the conversations I sit in every day, I don’t only see the moments everyone else sees. I see what comes after. I sit with people in the days following loss, and then in the weeks, and the months, when the world around them has begun to move again, and they are still exactly where they were.

What continues to move me about this country is how instinctively we show up for each other. When someone is murdered. When a soldier falls. When a family is shattered. There is no question of whether we will be there. People come, sometimes without knowing the person at all. They sit. They listen. They bring what they can. There is a shared, unspoken understanding that no one should be alone in that kind of pain.

And for a while, that holds.

There was someone I sat with soon after October 7th. In the beginning, their home was never empty. People flowing in and out.........

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