Between Sacrifice and Redemption: Yom HaZikaron, Yom HaAtzmaut, and the Choice Facing the Diaspora

They were the She’erit HaPletah—the Remnant of the Fire.

They emerged from Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen not just to survive, but to fight. Holocaust survivors—rabbis, students, partisans, orphans—rose from the ashes of Europe and marched directly into history. Rabbi Yehuda Amital, who lost his entire family to the gas chambers, picked up a rifle and fought at Latrun. Avraham Melamed, who survived the Kaufering death camp, joined the Palmach and defended the Negev. These were not mere survivors. They were redeemers. Their Torah was forged in fire, and their faith walked beside them into battle.

And they were not alone. Tens of thousands of volunteers came from every corner of the Jewish world—from Yemenite villages to American campuses—to fight for a dream most had never seen but already knew. Some carried weapons. Others carried stretchers. All carried the weight of a people’s destiny.

Today, their spiritual and familial heirs serve in the IDF—doctors, students, musicians, poets turned warriors, firefighters and first responders. They return from around the globe, leaving behind families, comfort, and careers to serve on the front lines. After October 7, they came in waves. Tour after tour, they show up. Not for applause. Not for ideology. For Am Yisrael.

More than 25,000 have given their lives for the State of Israel. And on October 7, many more died not as soldiers, but as shields—stalling the enemy with their bodies, buying minutes that meant hundreds of lives saved. Some, like Sgt. Segev Schwartz, used their last breath to protect their brothers. A Torah scroll now bears his name.

These men left behind letters. Not cries of despair, but declarations of faith: “Even if something occurs,” wrote Ben Zussman before rushing into battle, “I don’t allow you to sink into despondency. I had the privilege to fulfill my dream... and rest assured, I am looking down on you from heaven with a broad smile.”

Yom HaZikaron is not just a day of grief. It is the prelude to Yom HaAtzmaut. It is the acknowledgement that redemption is not handed down from heaven—it is wrested from the jaws of history through blood, courage, and faith. The intimacy between these two days—the unbearable mourning of loss and the joyful celebration of sovereignty—is not a coincidence. It is a covenant.

Yom Haatzmaut, 1949

David Ben-Gurion understood what too many have forgotten: that the Jewish state is not the culmination of history—it is the instrument of redemption. His concept of mamlachtiut wasn’t a slogan for administrative competence or clean governance. It was a covenantal compass—a framework for building a state that remains forever in motion, forever accountable to something larger than itself.

Today’s political class invokes mamlachtiut to mean “putting Israel before politics.” Ben-Gurion meant something far more profound. He realized that his vision of a New Jew formed in a New Zion was incomplete. For him, mamlachtiut justified dismantling the Palmah, dissolving partisan school systems, rejecting a constitution, and demanding the urgent ingathering of exiles, despite poverty, overcrowding, and chaos.

As Ben-Gurion put it, “The resurrection of the Jewish state does not mean the fulfillment of the vision of redemption… it is only the main instrument and means of our redemption.”

Israel was not given to us finished. It was given to us as an opportunity to fulfill the Jewish people’s sacred mission.

What Ben-Gurion called mamlachtiut, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik called the covenant of destiny. They came from different worlds—one secular and pragmatic, the other halachic and theological—but they converged on a single, urgent truth: Jewish freedom is not a release from burden. It is the beginning of responsibility.

Soloveitchik distinguished between the covenant of fate, which unites Jews through suffering, and the covenant of destiny, which binds them through chosen purpose. Fate is passive. Destiny is willed. Fate is exile. Destiny is sovereignty, law, and moral agency.

Ben-Gurion said it differently, but meant much the same. For him, mamlachtiut meant treating the state not as an administrative endpoint, but as an instrument of redemption. “Not the law but the performance is what counts,” he wrote. “The state of Israel cannot fulfill its historical mission through proper laws and faithful clerical work alone.”

Soloveitchik said, “The Jew who enters the covenant of destiny becomes a partner with God in creation, in revelation, and redemption.”

Between Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut lies that very turn—from fate to destiny, from memory to mission. And both men warned us: institutions alone won’t carry us there. It takes will. It takes sacrifice. It takes Jews who believe that redemption is something we help build, not something we wait for.

The miracles that have sustained Israel—from 1948 to 2023—were brought about by Israelis of all religious outlooks, races, ethnicities, and political positions. They emerged not from prophecy fulfilled, but from prophecy lived. It is written: “You shall possess it and you shall dwell therein.” (Devarim 11:31). According to the Ramban, “We were commanded to take possession of the Land that God, may He be blessed, gave to our forefathers, Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov; and we must not leave it in the hands of any other nation or let it remain desolate.”

As Rabbi Eliezer Melamed has stated: “We should view the slain as holy souls, whose entire lives were refined and sanctified through their self-sacrifice for the people and Land of Israel. About such heroes, Chazal say, ‘No one can dwell in the section of Gan Eden where those who were killed by the kingdom dwell’ (Pesachim 50a).”

Their shared sacrifice has made the sacred and shared destiny of Israel possible. It is impossible to contemplate what would have happened to Jews around the world without these courageous warriors. Indeed, we cannot imagine what Jewish existence would be like without a powerful and defiant Jewish state.

They proved—by their actions, not their rhetoric—that the ingathering of exiles and the rebirth of the Jewish nation in its ancestral land is not just a noble idea. It is a calling worth dying for. Which means, inevitably, it is a calling worth living for.

We owe them everything. The children we raise? The towns we build? The Torah we teach? All of it—the entire enterprise of Jewish renewal—stands on their shoulders. The ethical society we aspire to create, the one the prophets dreamed of, is not ours alone. It is theirs.

Their merit underwrites our existence.

To honor them is not to mourn, but to build. To carry their sacrifice forward—not in candlelight vigils, but in complex decisions, moral clarity, and unapologetic loyalty to the Jewish future.

So to the bereaved, we say: Stand tall. You have given this generation its spine. To the defenders, we say: Press on. The legacy is yours to carry. Your victories ensure our redemption.

Let us celebrate Yom HaAtzmaut. But let’s also use it as a time to shine a light—merciless and unblinking—on the sunshine Zionists: those who will only accept a Jewish state if it conforms to their own quivering, neurotic image of moral superiority. A state that apologizes for existing. A people that survives only on sufferance. They want a Zionism stripped of strength, sanitized for elite approval, and safe for faculty lounges. It is time for them to choose.

Today, Diaspora Jews—especially those who mistake political fashion for prophetic purpose—must make a choice.

Too many are more interested in defending Harvard’s reputation than defending Israel’s existence. They wrap themselves in progressive platitudes like tallit and tefillin, perform acts of borrowed righteousness, and call it Jewish continuity. They host queer Torah circles while ignoring Jewish girls raped in Gaza. They hold vigil for criminals on death row but go silent when Jewish families are burned alive in Ofakim. They are animated by the defense of diversity, but apathetic toward the defense of Zion.

They weep on Yom HaShoah but do not rise on Yom HaZikaron. They cheer Jewish history—but abandon Jewish destiny. Their Judaism is narcissistic, not covenantal.

David Mamet noted: “If you can't say of your fellow Jews 'my people,' get out of my way. I don't want to know you, because our people are getting murdered, and to posit an exemption because of intellectual differences... is insane.”

Between sacrifice and redemption lies the narrow path of responsibility. Between Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut stands the Jewish future. Time for those who want to be loved for their self-loathing to get out of the way.