The vaccination campaign that began towards the end of December 2020 was such a moment.
The degree of joy and sense of freedom that accompanies the arrival of vaccines is limited to the constant mood of the present age.
The distant past has brought to Israel much more exciting and dramatic happy times.
But the fact is that the issue of vaccines in the first months was accompanied by a sense of civic mobilization, and a kind of pride that for years we had not experienced as a collective experience.
People photographed themselves at the moment of the stabbing.
There was a mobilization of the health care system when nurses in their 70s and 80s returned from work to work as reservists at the front.
Immigrants who were new to the country at the time, with a deep awareness of the way things are done in other countries in the West - especially in the US, France and England - were thrilled. In the Life of the Nation in June 1967.
These memories, on Freedom Day, come against the backdrop of what Americans like to define as an "epidemic";
And now it's not just the virus.
In the US there is talk of a pandemic of narcotics, and an epidemic of painkillers, and suicides.
The follow-up over the years shows an increase from about 20 percent who reported "sadness and hopelessness" as a constant feeling in 2009, and from 40 to 75 percent among the youth who report this bitter melancholy in the current period.
The highest level is the property of the LGBT people. It would not be a gamble to diagnose that a similar trend exists in various sectors of Israeli society. This is because the factors that the researchers point to as pushing the level of despair and hopelessness - work intensively here as well.
Receiving the hostages in Operation Entebbe, Photo: IDF Archives at the Ministry of Defense
It is about dealing with many hours a day on social media, Facebook and Instagram;
Loneliness and social isolation amplified by social media;
All in all, this is defined in an article in "Atlantic Magazine" as a "carnival of negativity" that spills over from every hole in the media, to its various issue.
"In the last decade, teenagers have internalized tensions related to what is happening in the world. They are under increasing stress due to concerns related to gun violence, climate change and the political environment ... the increasing pressure creates a very gloomy narrative about the world," the article said.
It is as if there is a prohibition of joy and happiness.
It is appropriate to look back on a particular longing for a time when there was legitimacy for joy, and even for emotional contact, including physical contact.
I do not remember when it happened that the experience of the liberation of the Six Day War began to be defined as "euphoria."
Trauma haunts ecstasy
There is no article, study or book that does not cling to this anchor of "euphoria" following the victory in the six days.
But for those for whom June 1967 is still a living memory - it is a different phenomenon;
A phenomenon that seems rarer today than any single vibrating moment of ecstasy or euphoria at the national level.
It was perhaps the most notable historical moment, and the first since the establishment of the state, in which the Israeli public really experienced the fulfillment of this thing that Naftali once wrote: "to be a free people in our country."
That line from "Hope."
There was a sense of well-being at the lifting of the threat of the Arab siege on the State of Israel in May-June 1967.
But behind it all was a temporary experience of freedom.
Here, too, Israel, we too are masters of our destiny.
It is a feeling that is overall the normality of countries like Norway and Belgium.
But not of Israel.
Maccabi fans in Kings of Israel Square, Photo: Moshe Shai
It is not complicated to mark these moments.
What is amazing is that they occurred with a shaking intensity, especially over one decade, between '67 and '77.
Looking back today, it is surprising that Sadat's visit in November 1977 came a total of ten years after the Six Day War.
And in the middle?
Trauma haunts ecstasy, and vice versa: the Yom Kippur War, Operation Entebbe, Maccabi Tel Aviv's victory over CSKA - ate it and jumped into the pool in the square, Menachem Begin's upheaval and Sadat's visit. In the end, peace with Egypt began and ended, and it did A moment of euphoria.
Literary scholar Mordechai Shalev called it "the joy of the poor."
This is Alterman.
In an oceanic flow of "sometimes I take a blow after a blow," for a moment flicker "is our time of freedom."
"Poor Joy," to embrace the gray hedonistic mood of the present age, is a "condolence prize" for massacres and torrential waves of hatred.
The documentation of the joy of existence that gripped the Israeli public with the return of the hostages from Entebbe in July 1976, shows this moment more than the details of the military operation itself.
An ongoing holiday feeling where everything merges.
Everything is organized by itself.
All the committees and bureaucracies of the receptions collapse in the face of a winning and stylish spontaneity.
Yes, they came back.
They are ours.
And a man meets his foreign friend on the street and asks: Have you heard?
There is debate as to whether the moments of freedom and breathing well also include political victories, which naturally leave large sections of the population in disappointment and heartbreak.
These are mainly election campaigns.
Nor in every election campaign.
On the night of May 17, 1977, he was the son of a well-known historical right-winger in a tent camp, in a series of paratroopers.
He was on guard duty when he heard on the transistor that there was a "reversal" and that Begin had won.
He did not hesitate for a moment, and ran to sound the alarm designed to bounce in a state of high alert.
This is still more than Hapoel Tel Aviv's win in the league.
Menachem Begin, 1977, Photo: Begin Heritage Center, Alon Reininginger
Despite the Likud era, there were not many such moments in the experiential mythology of the right.
Victories that became temporary moments of freedom were when Benjamin Netanyahu defeated Peres in May 1996, and in the Likud's victory in 2015.
The left is experiencing such a sense of well-being on June 13, 2021, when it became clear that a government had been formed that was pushing Netanyahu out of power.
"Going to celebrate," is the typical motto.
This was also the feeling in May 1999, with Ehud Barak's victory over Netanyahu, and much more powerful.
There was an election victory, and in the present era, a victory over a political opponent is similar in its emotional intensity to a victory in a war.
What's more, victory in war is becoming a rare phenomenon not only in Israel, but in the world in general.
This may be what was missing in the vaccination campaign.
The feelings were deeper, more substantial;
But the enemy was invisible.
Coughing instead of "Oh ha what happened ?!".
The good feeling comes from the head, the mind, and less the heart.
The constant gray noise that afflicts life in Israel no longer stems from an external threat.
Yes, the Berlin Walls of the Israeli-Arab conflict fell almost without us noticing, and the occurrence did not lead to a common sense of freedom, but as usual with us to another "Oh ha, what actually happened?".
Perhaps the next fulfilling experience of independence will be when Tel Aviv ceases to be Hong Kong from above and Nagasaki from below;
When the era of excavations and cranes is over, the streets are closed, and an old steam locomotive will cut Ibn Gvirol.
Welfare and addiction
Most of life, public and private, passes away.
Like flying over large expanses of land, which are merely a land or sea bridge between two distant points.
Points that are the main thing, and at best are also good news.
The same stations that created the great moments of freedom and well-being also carried with them a negative effect.
This is not a hug and kiss, as in a song by Hava Alberstein, these are recommended by the Ministry of Health as a daily dose for survival;
But something bordering on an overdose of ecstasy or a burst of immense satisfaction explodes.
And this probably caused a kind of addiction in the collective consciousness as well as damage to the consciousness of the state leaders.
This tickling need for victory is overwhelming and crucial on the battlefield.
Thinking in terms of closing circles.
Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan are the epitome of this complex.
Both starred in dramatic war events, most notably the War of Independence in 1957 and the Six Day War in 1957.
In Dayan's, the '73 default war was added.
On the one hand, the permanent option set by the IDF to resolve crises through a military decision on the battlefield; on the other hand, the periodicity of ceasefire agreements and finally peace agreements. Dayan v. Egypt, Rabin v. Palestinians and Syria.
It can be argued that some of the troubles that accompany Israeli life, such as a gravel shredder beyond the window, originate in this complex of the Israeli leader doing something great and gaining fame, of which all Israeli citizens will share.
After all, an Israeli prime minister is not exactly on the long list of morning awards, but in the short list of the renewed State of Israel since the Bible and the destruction.
The Age of Excavations.
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There are high points, which we have understood their significance only over the years.
The observer from today on the attack on the nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, thinks that as a result of the amazing surgical operation, an euphoric precedent has spread in the country.
Not at all.
Many have tried to claim that Menachem Begin conducted an election campaign.
Others marveled.
But only gradually, over the years and especially in the wake of the first Gulf War, did it sink ten years later until the realization that the bombing of the reactor was a historic operation, liberating not only Israel but also the West from the threat of an atomic Arab dictatorship.
A similar thing happened with the Syrian reactor in 2007.
Over the years, we seem to have gotten used to it.
Israelis are no longer drunk on military or intelligence operational successes.
One of the things that happened following the Six Day War was the breaking of the siege on Israel, in the simplest sense of the word.
Only the elderly still remember the "Stop, border in front of you" signs you would encounter every time you turned to the other side of the bed.
The electrical circuit of the 1967 territories was reconnected with the forbidden homelands, and more of them - the Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert.
It was a real sense of release and freedom.
Move around freely anywhere.
Moreover, the people of Israel began to fly abroad.
Of the territories added to the country during the '67 occupations, Sinai gave a sense of freedom, especially to young people.
This is not because in Israeli mythology the land bridge between slavery and freedom was laid there.
There was no supervision.
The parents were far away, the country was hardly present.
The displacement of the settlements, and especially the settlements of Fatah Sinai between Gaza and Al-Arish, was investigated and left one of those known traumas;
But the meaning of abandoning Sinai seems to have been completely suppressed for the secular, nature lovers, geology and archeology, spaces and hikes.
From the summit of Mount Sinai, one could only descend.
Also get out of the country.
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