"And the land is divided into the districts of remembrance and the Galilee of hope, and their inhabitants mingle with each other ... and the land is a bundle of land: it is well connected and everything in it, and it is strongly bound, and the wires are sometimes painful."
This is what the poet Yehuda Amichai wrote in his poem "Love of the Land", and as he described in his words the one and special moment that will befall us tonight (Wednesday);
The sharp transition between Remembrance Day and Independence Day;
An seemingly incomprehensible, but necessary transition, between grief and mourning and memory and the erupting joy and overflowing heart with feelings of gratitude.
And in fact these days, on the eve of the 74th Independence Day of the State of Israel, in the same "tightly tied package" that "the strings sometimes hurt" - the dynamic Israeli reality also moves between two mountains, so symbolic, so sacred, each in its own way: Between the exciting and "symbiotic" Temple Mount and between Mount Herzl shrouded in silence and sorrow, between the renewed Israeli revival and its heavy price and the Jewish memory that is impossible without it.
The two mountains seem to symbolize two poles, "Israeli" and "Jewish", which are often described as competing with each other, but at the deepest level these mountains actually complement each other.
Zionism is, after all, a sniper of the race of Judaism, or as Herzl once said of it: "It returned to Judaism, even before it returned to the land of the Jews."
On the Temple Mount lies the genealogy of the Jewish people, the remains of the Temple and the coal ashes from the great fire that consumed it.
On Mount Herzl lies our children, the "silver tray," which is still elongated, on which we have been given the Jewish state.
Mota Gur ("The Temple Mount is in our hands") and his warriors, who liberated Jerusalem and the Temple Mount 55 years ago, went immediately afterwards to Mount Herzl and the military cemeteries to bury there their comrades who had fallen in the same battle.
For them, the connection between the two mountains was quite clear: the Temple Mount symbolizes the loss of Jewish independence and sovereignty, and Mount Herzl on the eve of Independence Day - their renewal.
A common future
These are two sides of the same coin.
Just as we would not move to the agenda of burning Israeli flags and waving Palestinian flags on Mount Herzl, so we should not move to the agenda of desecrating Israeli sovereignty, its symbols and its flags on the Temple Mount.
Bereaved families arrive at Mount Herzl, hurting and mentally wounded.
The Temple Mount is visited by Jews who carry in their hearts a different, different "bereavement" for all the loss that this mountain embodies for them.
They are not competing with each other, but are eyeing a common future.
Two mountains, each in its own way telling a story of a struggle for independence;
A story about a commitment to historical justice and national culture that transcends physical survival and salvation.
The common story of the two mountains shows that despite the revolt of secular Zionism in the traditional Jewish-religious way of life, there was a consensus that the past and national culture in the State of Israel could not be revived without relying on Jewish heritage, which nourished national consciousness for generations.
And this is, in fact, the basis of the essay embodied in the State of Israel today;
The essence of the connection between Mount Herzl hit "Israeli" and the Temple Mount hit "Jew".
Between Mount Moriah and its past, for all the hopes it symbolizes, and between Israel in the eighth decade of its life and the heavy price it paid to continue to exist, which lies in the land of Mount Herzl.
"In the soul of the Jew, as we have always heard, a Jewish point awaits its day," the wise Nathan (Alterman) taught us many years ago.
"The Jew can be ignorant or educated, clever or foolish, and he can be you narrow or a friend ... but he can not ... be a Jew, without a Jewish point."
Mount Herzl cannot exist without the Temple Mount, and the Temple Mount cannot exist without Mount Herzl.
And the "Jewish point"?
It was the thread on which Zionism and Judaism were sewn and woven and became one piece, it is the State of Israel.
Happy Independence Day!
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