There is so much noise in this country. So much certainty. So much fear. Each day brings more arguments, more fault lines, more words hurled like stones. More voices are convinced that if they shout just a little louder, the truth will finally be heard.
We fight over justice, over safety, over what must be done and what must never be allowed to happen again. We fight because we care, because we’re afraid, because the stakes are too high to stay silent. But we are shouting all the time.
But today, for a moment, the noise falls away. Not because anything has been healed. Not because we agree. But because something deeper than certainty settles over us. Something beyond argument. Loss.
We stand together, in silence. The siren sounds. The country holds its breath.
Because we know, without needing to say it, that there are things we cannot explain. Losses too vast for language. And that, in the face of what cannot be understood, the most human thing we can do is stop. Not to solve, not to interpret, not to make meaning. Just to stop. To be still. To remain.
And this stillness, it is not what’s left when the shouting fades. Not the quiet that follows collapse. Not the emptiness after everything has been said.
'Demama' holds what words cannot carry
In Hebrew, this place has a name. Demama.
The stillness before speech. Before thought. Before the need to be right. It holds what words cannot carry. It does not ask to be explained. It asks only that we stay.
We have stood in this stillness before.
The Torah tells us that on the day the Mishkan was dedicated, Aharon’s sons were consumed by divine fire. They are called Kedoshim. And the verse says only this, Vayidom Aharon. And Aharon was still.
Not because he understood. But because he knew that to speak would be a desecration. There are moments when language cannot hold what has happened. Only silence can.
That is the demama. That is where we are standing now.
We, too, have lost our sons and daughters. Our children, sacrificed for this country, are Kedoshim. The holiest among us. They were taken. And there are no words. No explanation. Only presence. Only standing. Only demama. Only this.
David. Ivri. Shalev. Three boys. Three lives. My sons stood beside them, fought with them. I stood beside them at their funerals. I knew their names before they became memories.
They are Kedoshim.
The question is not how we remember them today. That part, we know. We light candles. We lower flags. We visit graves. We sit together. We whisper their names.
The real question is what happens tomorrow.
What if we didn’t leave this place? What if we carried the demama with us, not as silence, but as memory, not as retreat, but as reverence?
What if it shaped the way we speak, softened the way we argue, changed the way we live with one another, in a country still raw with grief, and still aching to be whole?
Perhaps the greatest honor we can give the Kedoshim is not only to remember them today, but to let their absence remind us how little we know, how fragile this home is, how deeply we need one another.
Perhaps we honour them by staying in the stillness, by carrying this demama with us, not just today, but into the day after, and the one after that.
And maybe, if we are willing to remain there just a little longer, we may yet become the people they believed we could be, something worthy of their memory.