What Victory Looks Like

The yahrzeit candle was lit in our study, on a desk we use nearly every day. Modi lit it Monday night at sundown. By Tuesday morning we had been around it for hours — now having coffee, and it still looked like a candle. That is what it’s supposed to look like. A candle.

We stopped once that day, stood next to it, said a few words of prayer, and took a moment of silence for the fallen. The Israeli music Spotify has long since decided is our entire personality played quietly through the whole day.

That was Yom HaZikaron. On Wednesday came Yom Ha’Atzmaut. Seventy-eight years.

The parsha this Shabbat is Acharei Mot-Kedoshim. The names tell the story on their own. Acharei Mot — “after the death.” Kedoshim — “holy ones.” The Torah doesn’t narrate the move between them. There is no interlude. Chapter eighteen ends, and chapter nineteen begins:

דַּבֵּ֞ר אֶל־כׇּל־עֲדַ֧ת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֛ל וְאָמַרְתָּ֥ אֲלֵהֶ֖ם קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃ Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, the ETERNAL your God, am holy.

— Vayikra 19:2

After death: be holy. No throat-clearing, no step-down cadence. Characteristic of what the Hebrew calendar does. Yom HaZikaron ends, and Yom Ha’Atzmaut begins. The siren says stop. The next breath says sing.

What gets me about Kedoshim is what it means by holy. The parsha has just finished telling us about the Kohen Gadol entering the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur — one man, one day, wearing white linen, immersing in the mikveh five times. That is the version of holy we expect Torah to be talking about.

Then comes chapter nineteen, and the list is: don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t swear falsely. Pay the day-laborer before sundown. Don’t curse the deaf. Don’t put a stumbling block before the blind. Leave the corners of your field for the poor and the stranger. Rise before the elderly. Use honest weights. Don’t take revenge. Don’t bear a grudge. Love your fellow as yourself.

That’s it. That is what holiness is.

The Kohen Gadol’s holiness is once a year. The other kind, Kedoshim’s, is Tuesday morning in your study, near a candle that is there because you remembered to light it.

On Tuesday night in Jerusalem they lit twelve torches at Mount Herzl. This year it almost didn’t happen. Organizers filmed the dress rehearsal in advance in case renewed fighting with Iran made a live public event impossible. But it happened.

Thousands of Israelis sat under the stars, and the Knesset Speaker, Amir Ohana, opened the ceremony by naming what victory looks like. Twenty thousand Jews had made aliyah during a year of war. A hundred and seventy-seven thousand babies had been born in Israel. That, he said, is what victory looks like.

This is precisely the Kedoshim claim. A baby being born is the cardinal mitzvah. A family arriving at Ben Gurion with their suitcases is the cardinal mitzvah. A people still choosing to exist is Tuesday holiness, and it is the kind the Torah asks us for.

A mother, Talik Gvili, lit one of the twelve torches in memory of her son, Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili, z“l, whose remains were returned from Gaza. Standing on Mount Herzl, she told the crowd that they remain, and will remain, there forever.

Ari Shpitz, who lost both legs and an arm in Gaza, lit a torch for the wounded.

A Druze IDF officer lit one for the covenant between his community and ours.

The Argentine president, Javier Milei, who flew in for the ceremony, delivered his remarks in Spanish and closed in Hebrew: Am Yisrael chai — the people of Israel lives.

The two minutes of silence are not passive. They are a mitzvah from the middle of Kedoshim: lo ta’amod al dam re’echa — do not stand by the blood of your fellow. Holiness is refusing to stand aside while a people holds its dead.

Then Wednesday came. Thursday. Now Friday. Tonight I will again count the Omer — day twenty-three, three weeks and two days. Discipline inside endurance. Augmented by a Rabbinical Assembly scratch off card. Modi and I will light candles. We will eat a meal. We will have arrived at another Shabbat.

After death [and before], be holy.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham