Nearly every first-time visitor to Israel visits Yad Vashem—Israel’s (and the world’s) most comprehensive memorial, museum, and research institute for the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. More than merely a memorial, Yad Vashem seeks to carry the insights gained from the Holocaust and the last World War into our present and future. Memorializing the dead by telling their stories, providing evidence for their lives and their deaths ensures that the world will never forget the evil that human beings can wreak on one another. Turning that experience of remembering into moral lessons for present times is deeply Jewish and among the imperatives of the entire campus which educates, preserves, documents, and continues to support research into that darkest hour.
Of all the phrases that could have been mined from Jewish texts to give a name to this institute, Yad Vashem was selected from Isaiah 56:5. Here’s the full sentence:
I [God] will give them, in My House
And within My walls,
A monument (yad) and a name (vashem) (יָד וָשֵׁם)
Better than sons or daughters.
I will give them an everlasting name
Which shall not perish.
This article will arrive in your inbox on Memorial Day. Our country’s sacred island in time devoted to giving our fallen soldiers a yad (monument) and a shem (name). The sacred day was instituted shortly after the national devastation that was our Civil War. It was the beginning of healing for a nation traumatized by internal bloody conflict. In the pursuit of the emancipation of American slaves or resistance to it, citizens fell on citizens. As grass grew on those blood drenched killing fields, our country committed itself to not only memorializing the dead but also to ensuring that the cause for which they lost their lives would provide the nation with “an everlasting name which shall not perish.” It was the continuing struggle to fulfill the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all [people] are created equal. Despite that, women would not vote until the 1920’s, Jim Crow wouldn’t end until the 1960s, racism remains a challenge, and America’s commitment to house the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is threatened today. The work of securing our fallen heroes a living yad vashem extends long after they have given their lives for the cause of American freedom.
Just as Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum calls on the world to contemplate the enduring lessons of the victims of the Shoah, so too should our observance of Memorial Day invite us to reflect on the timeless sacrifice of those Americans who gave their lives in service to our democracy. The day reminds us that the freedoms are hard fought, that autocracy always looms over the horizon, and that it is on us to ensure that the fallen have not lost their lives in vain.