Balancing tragedy and joy with weddings, funerals, and unbreakable spirit - opinion

On Friday, during a wrenching memorial service honoring Ben Mizrachi, a 22-year-old friend murdered by Hamas terrorists while saving fellow-concert goers at the Nova music festival on October 7th, my silenced phone vibrated. My daughter had messaged our family – “Wedding Pics!” – accompanied by festive emojis.

It’s been that kind of a year.

Since October 7, we as a family have lost too many friends, attended too many funerals. We’ve seen the worst: parents burying children – and even worse, grandparents burying grandchildren. Friday was filled with memorial services ending 11 months of mourning prayers since October 7 – this is a leap year with an extra month to synchronize the Jewish lunar calendar with the sun, so Passover falls during spring. That cast a pall over Israel, darkened immeasurably on Sunday, when we heard about the six hostages that Hamas murdered.

And no, they weren’t “found dead,” nor did Israel’s government kill them – Hamas did.

Since October 7, many of our children and neighbors have been deployed, fighting for Israel’s existence and to guarantee that the kind of barbarism Hamas unleashed never occurs again, anywhere. Fighting to restore deterrence is not vengeance; it’s an essential and legitimate battle aim.

In his short, searing, exquisite, must-read new book Israel Alone, Bernard-Henri Lévy terms October 7 a time-tearing Event, capital-E. We are “again, survivors,” he writes. True, but, as in the Holocaust, Capital S-survivors lost loved ones, limbs, homes, jobs, mental stability. The vast majority of survivors remain outside that anguished circle – empathetic, implicated, so-far-still-lucky Israelis, Jews, pro-Zionists. We’re obligated to support, love, and rebuild, because, as Lévy notes, “Tragedy is Greek, not Jewish.”

We choose life – l’chaim.

FOR US, during this year of living brokenheartedly and dangerously, three of our children wed, in between stints serving north to south. The first wedding occurred in November – amid, coincidentally, the six-day cease fire that freed 105 hostages from Hamas’s torture. Dozens of “maybes” on our guest list became “yeses.” The next day, we happily paid for an extra 42 last-minute guests.

The second wedding was in mid-June – despite rumors throughout May that “we” were going “in” on June 1, meaning into Lebanon, so that 80,000 evacuees from the North can return home safely.

Dancing between threats

The third wedding occurred on August 19: Tu B’av, Jewish Love Day. That plunked our daughter’s marriage between the Iranian and Hezbollah threats to exterminate Israel – and last Sunday’s preemptive strike, which humiliated Hezbollah by destroying thousands of launchers so that few of its 6,000 rockets caused any damage, beyond to chicken coops.

At each wedding, the parental guest list shrank, but the list of fallen friends the couple memorialized under the huppah grew. My kids keep navigating the unthinkable – deciding what level of intimacy with a killed comrade compels you to leave your unit and attend the funeral, understanding that you can’t attend them all even if that friend’s death would have been devastating before October 7.

Nevertheless, at each wedding, we danced ecstatically. As one friend, who had five grandchildren born this year says, “that’s our defiance.” I’ve mastered “heavy metal” dancing. That’s when you’re whirling in the center of an intense traditional hora – already hazardous when you’re old enough to be marrying off kids – and you keep slamming into the heavy metal of revelers fresh from the front, prancing wildly with their M4 automatics slung on their shoulders.

Then, when my 94-year-old father died, my daughter characterized our year “as three weddings and a funeral” – actually many funerals.

With all this joy, I’ve experienced bullet-dodger’s guilt. As a dad, I know my kids only share some of their brushes with death. As a historian, I know that the difference between telling a great war story and getting a dignified military burial is a matter of millimeters – and sheer luck.

ISRAELIS’ COLLECTIVE commitment to keep singing and dancing, to keep marrying and having children, however, is a profound choice. During this memorial service that should never have been, one of Ben’s army buddies spoke about the wedding their army unit had attended the previous night – and how Ben’s spirit accompanies them when fighting for their lives in Gaza – and dancing their hearts out at weddings.

Ben’s mother, Dikla, then toasted the three babies born last week on their kibbutz. “It’s a mitzvah” – a commandment – “for us to keep dancing and rejoicing and building this country,” she insisted.

It’s too easy for someone like me, a lucky, lower-case “s” survivor, to be so upbeat. When Survivors say that, it resonates.

Dikla’s words lessened my guilt – a bit – especially as she and her husband triply congratulated us so lovingly, through their tears. This is the secret to Israeli success – and to Jews’ continuity throughout the ages.

Jihadists think Jewish tears show weakness. Yet, as with Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut, when Memorial Day bleeds into Independence Day, our tears of joy and mourning mix. That fusion creates a spiritual cement that explains how Ben and his friend Itai Bausi, unarmed, continued ferrying the wounded to the Nova concert’s medical tent, instead of fleeing for their lives until both were murdered – and how those holy hostages Alexander, Almog, Carmel, Eden, Hersh, and Ori survived 329 nightmarish days – until Palestinian terrorists slaughtered them.

That strength inspired young Israelis, dismissed as a whiny TikTok generation last year, to become heroes this year. And that resilience is blessedly contagious, which is why so many pro-Israel college students, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have bravely embraced Israel, defying the Academic Intifada instigated by so many professors and classmates.

Ben’s memorial ceremony ended, with the MC reminding us that Ben – a foodie – loved eating breaded chicken “schnitzel” in challah-bread, washed down with a beer every Friday. It being noon by then, in the spirit of our big, broad-hearted, forever-smiling friend, hundreds of us chomped into sandwiches and wiped our hummus plates clean with fresh pita.

When I got home, the first thing I did was go through my daughter’s wedding pics, every last one, capturing us smiling, beaming, and dancing between the raindrops.

The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian and the author of The Essential Guide to October 7 and its Aftermath: Facts, Figures, History. His new book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream will be published September 17.