Three years ago, on a spring morning in the Jordan Valley during Passover, my family’s life was shattered. My wife, Lucy, 48 at the time, and two of our daughters—Maia, 20, and Rina, 15—were murdered in a terror attack that belongs, tragically, to a pattern Israelis know too well.
If you want to understand Israel, you could start with its politics or its wars. But you would miss something essential. To understand Israel—and perhaps, the Jewish story more broadly—you need to understand how we relate to time, memory and loss. Because in Judaism, the past is never just behind us. It is something we are constantly choosing how to carry.
We have two words for this: zikaron (“memory”) and chag (“holiday” or “festival”). Zikaron means memory, but not the casual kind. It is the deliberate act of stopping, of stripping away distraction and facing what was lost in its rawest form. Its root is the Hebrew word zakh, which describes the pure and highly filtered nature of the olive oil used in Temple service. Zikaron represents a point in time, almost frozen. A yahrzeit is zikaron. Yom Hazikaron—Israel’s Memorial Day—is zikaron. It is where we allow grief to speak in its clearest voice.
And grief, I have learned, does not “move on.” It moves with you.
Then there is a chag. We usually translate it as “festival,” but its deeper meaning is closer to a circle—or, more precisely, a spiral. Because Jewish time is not static repetition. Each year, we return to the same moments—Pesach, Sukkot, the High Holidays—but we arrive as different people. The same story, at a higher level.
That is not just theology. It is a survival strategy. Because if zikaron is where we confront the pain, a chag is where we decide what to do with it.
This year, and for the past two years, those two modes have collided in my own life. The Hebrew date of the attack—the 16th of Nissan—always falls in the middle of Passover. On the very day we remember our deepest personal loss, we are commanded to celebrate our national freedom. It sounds impossible. And yet, it may be one of Judaism’s most profound insights: that joy and grief are not opposites. They are partners.
In the language of modern psychology, I recently heard Harvard Medical School professor Dr. David Rosmarin describe a four-step model for dealing with anxiety: identify, share, embrace and let go. Listening to him, I realized he was describing not just therapy, but a deeply Jewish process—one that mirrors the movement from zikaron to chag.
First, we identify. We stop and name the loss. For me, that is not abstract. It is Lucy’s students, whom she will never teach again. It is Rina’s laughter among her teenage friends. It is Maia’s future—the home she never built, the life she never lived. Zikaron is the courage to look directly at what is missing.
Second, we share. Judaism rarely allows grief to remain private. We sit shiva. We say Kaddish. We tell stories. Because pain that is shared is not halved; it is humanized. It becomes part of a collective memory.
Third, we embrace. This is the hardest stage. Not to numb the pain, not to scroll past it, but to sit with it. To allow it to shape us. In Israel today, this is not theoretical. It is happening in real time, in homes across the country, in a society that is simultaneously fighting a war and rebuilding itself.
And finally, we let go. Not of the people we lost, God forbid. But of the illusion that we were ever in control. Letting go is not defeat. It is an act of faith. It is the quiet recognition that we cannot rewrite the past, but we can choose how it writes us. Letting go is what can take us to celebrating their lives, to the chag.
This, I believe, is where the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offered one of his most powerful insights: that if history is “His Story” then “Me”-mory (zikaron) is more about “me.” It is deeply personal. If I had to add to that insight, I would say that a chag in Latin—a “fest-us”—is about “us.” It represents how we can progress as a society based on our past shared experience. That is the move from zikaron to chag. From memory to festus, from “me” to “us.” From a frozen moment of private pain to a living force that builds our future.
We see it in Israel everywhere today: in young soldiers who carry the memory of fallen friends into battle, and then channel that memory into the determination to build and defend our land. In communities that rebuild after terror. In families who sit around the seder table with empty chairs, yet still stand together as a people, committed to renewing our nation and writing the next chapter of our story.
This year, once again, our family will mark that day during Passover. Once again, the youth of Efrat will lead a musical Hallel. Once again, we will try to hold two truths at once—that something irreplaceable was taken from us, and that life, with all its fragility, must still be lived with joy and with the community.
Because if we only live in zikaron, in memory, then we remain trapped in the private past. And if we only live in chag, then we risk forgetting what gave our lives depth in the first place. But if we can move between them—if we can allow grief to become growth—then memory itself becomes an engine of renewal.
In a world increasingly defined by outrage, victimhood and the recycling of grievance, that may be Israel’s quiet message: that the past is not a prison, it’s a calling.
Lucy, Maia and Rina are no longer physically with us. But their lives are not behind us. They are ahead of us—shaping the choices we make, the values we live by, the future we are still building.
Perhaps that is what faith ultimately means. Not that we understand everything. But that we trust that even the deepest pain can be carried forward—and, somehow, transformed into light.
