Indestructible

Yitzhak Rabin Memorial

     There is an area in Rabin Square that is dedicated to the death of one of Israel’s great Prime Ministers, Yitzhak Rabin. It consists of a sculpture that contains broken rocks, which represents the earth-shattering experience that the Israelis went through when Rabin was “murdered in the struggle for peace.”

    

    About 25 yards away from this memorial was an impromptu memorial filled with hundreds of candles and pictures for the three teenage boys that were recently found dead after 18 days of relentless search. This, too, was described as an event that created another earth-shattering experience among the Jewish people.

     Each of these events, while 20 years apart, shook the state of Israel. But there was something that was not right in the description of these two incidents. When I hear the phrase “earth shattering”, I identify with a broken path, a permanent bump in the road. While these experiences were extremely difficult to deal with, I cannot describe them as “earth shattering”.

   Neither Yitzhak Rabin nor the three teenage boys are gone from our world. We as Jewish people have taken the values and principles that were continuously taught by Rabin and have tried to apply them to ours. By keeping his values alive, it acts as a type of cement that has slowly mended our shattered world back together. This is the same frame of mind that we have to be in as we try to pick our lives back up from the horror of the death of the three boys.



-Sydney Sussman