One can imagine it happening differently. The official day commemorating the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin could have been a day for all Israelis to join in mourning a blow against the entire public, an annual opportunity to affirm our essential unity.
In a different world, it might not have mattered—as it should not matter—whether one was for Rabin’s policies or against them. Nothing would so indicate our mutual respect for each other’s opinions and fundamental beliefs as our willingness to put them aside, to overlook them on this one day. If we could have achieved that, perhaps Israeli society might have salvaged something meaningful from Rabin’s death.
It should not matter whether one was for Rabin’s policies or against them.
The self-appointed guardians of Rabin’s memory turned their backs on that possibility. Their moral imagination does not stretch so far. Under their tutelage, the darkness of a political assassination has bred further darkness: A day devoted to causeless hatred of other Jews.
Israeli President Shimon Peres has admonished nationalist Israelis: Why do you not join in commemorating Rabin?
The question is as offensive as it is cynical. On this day, Israel’s nationalist community is expected to remain voiceless. Its leaders are excluded. The appointed role of nationalist Jews is that of scapegoats. Like Jews in medieval Europe herded into churches on Christmas Day, their role is to confess in public the crime of their unbelief, and to affirm that it is equivalent to the crime of complicity. It is beneath anyone’s dignity to accept that role.
There is an element of totalitarian culture in the way that Rabin’s memorial day has come to be celebrated. A hallmark of the totalitarian personality is the deliberate cultivation of public hatred against unspeakable enemies. Such emotions are politically useful; they make people easy to manipulate.
Today Ehud Barak and the leaders of the Labor Party are using the occasion of Rabin’s commemoration to raise fears of lurking political assassins, hoping that people whose emotions are stirred to fear and hatred thereby will vote for them. The real tragedy, however, is not the cynical way in which Rabin’s memory is being used. It is the glimpse afforded of the spiritual world of the self-appointed guardians of Rabin’s memory, a world in which fear and hatred are not evil emotions to be shunned, but legitimate sentiments to be indulged, even reveled in.
For the self-appointed guardians of Rabin’s memory, fear and hatred are not evil emotions to be shunned, but legitimate sentiments to be indulged. It is when we contemplate political leaders in thrall to these lawless passions that we most fear for the future of Israel, even while pitying those who have succumbed to them. Heaven forbid that we ever become like that ourselves.
Sunday of this week marks the anniversary of the death of our nation’s matriarch, the biblical Rachel. Alas, Rabin’s memorial day has become entirely divorced from the simple yet noble human emotions which Rachel epitomized: empathy, compassion, charity and lovingkindness. Of her Jeremiah the prophet lamented :
A voice is heard on the heights
The cry of bitter weeping
Rachel weeps for her children.
Indeed, the spirit of our matriarch Rachel must weep when she looks down upon her children on this day. Alas, the time of her consolation is not yet come.
