The New High Holy Days

Friday April 25, 2025/27 Nisan 5785

Hevre/Friends,

Six years ago Rabbi Donniel Hartman framed the cluster of sacred days that unfold between this week and next - Yom HaShoah v’Hagevurah, Yom Hazikaron, and Yom Ha’Atzmaut - as “The New High Holidays of Israel”. He argued that together they capture the pain, the perseverance, and the possibility embedded within the miraculous rebirth of the State of Israel as experienced deeply by Jews in Israel and around the world. Is there any relationship between these days and the classical High Holy Days in the Jewish calendar?

Yom HaShoah and Rosh Hashanah share a focus on memory; after all, Rosh Hashanah is also called “Yom Hazikaron/Remembrance Day”. On Yom HaShoah we remember the six million Jews murdered in the unfathomable terror of the Holocaust; a number whose vastness can belie the specificity of each precious life taken. On Rosh Hashanah we plead for us to be remembered by the holy One; we experience our own fear of being forgotten. Rosh Hashanah is also known as “Yom HaDin”, the day all beings are judged for their actions. Indeed, on Yom HaShoah we are summoned to remember our people’s suffering by working to alleviate all suffering from the world. As survivor Donia Rosen wrote in her secret diary on June 23, 1943 while hidden by a righteous gentile, addressing herself to Jews of the future, “I want you to leave a mark for us—a headstone as tall as the heavens, a commemoration that the whole world will see—a pillar of neither marble nor stone but of good deeds. I believe with perfect faith that only such a headstone can ensure you and your children a better future.”

Both Yom Kippur and Yom HaZikaron summon us to confront our mortality which lurks along the path of our personal and communal dreams. We’re forced to ask ourselves over and over again: what is of ultimate concern to us? what are we prepared to risk to protect it? With humility and grief we reconcile ourselves once again to the price we keep paying - as individuals and as a people - to fulfill our destiny and our responsibility. 

Sukkot rounds out the season of Yamim Noraim, our Days of Awe, while Yom Ha’Atzmaut caps off these 20th-century High Holy Days. They share a deep and difficult awareness of the complexity of joy; happiness not absent pain and struggle, but happiness in spite of pain and struggle. Holidays that evoke celebration not deluded by notions of invincibility, but, like the walls of the Sukkah, rooted in a profound awareness of fragility and vulnerability. “Simchah” that’s real, and that’s honest.

The Jewish world continues to reckon with how October 7 will take its place among our holy days of mourning. As our calendar of sacred days continues to grow over the course of our Jewish history that’s yet to unfold, may it be filled with days that commemorate triumph over tragedy and that move us closer to a time of peace; within our hearts, within our land, and throughout the world.

With continued prayers for our ability to bring home all the hostages, protect the soldiers, heal the injured, comfort the bereaved, and build a lasting peace in Israel and around the world, and with blessings for a Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

Photo Courtesy of Ronen Avisror