In Israel, the equation is very clear, but if we must walk the tightrope, why not dance across it? - by Rain Forest

...We didn’t ask to live with the sharks swimming below us. Every time one of us falls, we all fall. The pain is devastating… there really are no words to describe it. At the same time, if we must walk the tightrope, why not dance across it? What could be more glorious?

Forest Rain..
Inspiration from Zion..
28 April '18..

I’ve heard that people who are bipolar often go off their medication because, although the lows of depression are difficult and sometimes even dangerous, the highs they experience are so thrilling, they don’t want to give them up for the sake of being normal. The highs open the door to genius, to creativity, to the sublime.

And it is impossible to attain the high, without also experiencing the low.

The Israeli experience is something like this. I hesitate to compare my beloved country to a disorder but like the bipolar person, our “normal” isn’t normal.

Everyday life in Israel is about as normal as casually making sandwiches for the kids while walking on a tightrope, with no safety net, over a sea of blood-thirsty sharks. We do make fabulous sandwiches – as well as self-driving cars, solutions for world water shortages and cures for cancers – with a smile and full of joy for life – on the tightrope, over the sharks.

Some days are more intense than others. Probably (unless there is a war), the most intense day of the year is the day of Yom Hazikaron, IDF Memorial Day, which at night becomes Israel’s Independence Day.

On Yom Hazikaron my family attends the ceremony held at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. The children of the school attend as well as many of the school’s alumni. There is something special about generations of alumni coming together, on this important day.

The Reali was founded in 1913. The State of Israel had not yet been formally re-established but this did not stop the Jewish community in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael) from building institutions of education for the next generations, the new Jews who would be free in their homeland and be educated in Hebrew, the language of their ancestors.

The ceremony at the Reali is probably the most impressive and moving Yom Hazikaron ceremony in the country. Israelis are notoriously bad at ceremonies. Pomp and circumstance is a foreign concept, there is something about focusing on the way things look (rather than their content) that goes against Israeli nature.

The Reali ceremony is simple, yet profound.

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