The Double Meaning of Yom Kippur

Posted below is an essay I wrote last year, when the Yom-Kippur

War "Blame Game" reached a crescendo. The recent controversy

over the Chinse Farm would suggest that little has changed.

The Double Meaning of Yom Kippur Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. It is a time Of both judgment and atonement. It is the culmination of a 40-day Period of soul-searching and stock-taking, and which Jews, both Individually and collectively, try to learn from their mistakes and Become better people in the future. Yom Kippur is more a-historical than other holidays. Unlike

Passover and Shavuot, Yom Kippur is not dependent or based on Any specific event that occurred in our history. It is

a day removed from time, a universal standing before

the Almighty to ask for forgiveness. Yet Yom Kippur also has a different significance,

a meaning grounded completely in history. For on this day, the second

bloodiest War in Israel’s short and bloody history began. On that day, Syrian And Egyptian forces attacked the thinly defended IDF lines along the Suez Canal and the Golan heights, starting what would be known as The Yom Kippur War, or simply the ’73 War. It lasted less than a month, and in the end we were victorious, but the Cost was horrific. In less than a month, the IDF had suffered 2781

dead plus tens of thousands wounded, almost one half of

the human cost of the War of Independence, which took more than a year. The war sent shock waves throughout Israeli society, and the trauma Still reverberates to this very day. It was a war in which the seeds

for both Gush Emunim and Peace Now were planted. It is more

than likely that the war had a part in the fall of the Labor Party

and the rise of Menachem Begin. Besides the raw numbers, a feeling took hold that these losses were unnecessary*, that the government, specifically Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, by failing to call up enough troops in time, had caused needless loss of life, all due to the post-Six Day War feeling of invincibility known in Israel as the ‘conception’. Others would later claim that they were responsible for the war because they failed to heed Sadat’s ambiguous 1971 call for a negotiated land-for-peace deal, thus ‘forcing’ him to go to war. Thus started what has become a national pastime, an annual carnival -the Yom Kippur War “Blame Game”, or the anniversary of the ‘Mehdal’. Every Yom Kippur the same story, the same arguing over who was more responsible for the failure to call up the troops-the government or the military. Every year, Meir, Dayan and “Dado” are dug up from their graves to face a kangaroo court of public opinion that decides each year whether or not they deserve to be shot. Rather than pay respects to those who fought and died, or were scarred, both physically and emotionally, in defense of this country, pages upon pages are wasted on the irrelevant question of who was more at fault or who was more responsible for the circling of the Third Egyptian army. Nobody ever stops to think and wonder whether these arguments and blame games lead anywhere or serve any tangible purpose. No one does any real soul-searching or try and learn lessons from ‘Israel’s Shiloh’**. Rather than ask “what went wrong”, newspapers and pundits spend each year asking “whose fault was it” or "who screwed up". The time has long past for us to take the lessons of Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement and put them to use to understand Yom Kippur the historical event. The time has long past for us to learn what really happened and why. It is time that we look at the pain straight in the eye, and come to terms with what we lost, as well as what can be healed or learned in the future. Rather than argue endlessly what generals and leaders did or did not achieve, we should be asking those who were there-the soldiers themselves, those for whom the war was a living, breathing nightmare, not some abstract theoretical discussion. We must hear their story and learn from them, as well as those who were in the home front, the real experience that was the Yom Kippur War, and learn from it. To achieve closure, however partial, we must be willing to face reality and not run from it. We have the tools, we have the people, and we have the experience of 3,000 years of annual stocktaking to be able to face this challenge. The only question that remains is-do we have the guts?

* Recently this has been supplanted with charges of

misconduct and negligence of senior officers

at the Chinese Farm.

** One of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, in which the Federal army was taken by surprise by the Confederates, due in part to the high command’s failure to foresee, or properly prepare for, a Confederate assault, being busy with their own offensive plans. The Federals were ultimately victorious, but the losses were staggering-some 13,000 Federals and 10,000 Confederates were killed, wounded or missing the end of the two-day battle.