It has been almost 28 years since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. On November 4th, 1995 at 21:30,  he was sensely shot dead at Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv at the end of a rally in support of the Oslo Accords.  I pause to remember the man he was and his importance to the Jewish people. In President Bill Clinton’s eulogy for Rabin he wrote:

Yitzhak Rabin lived the history of Israel. Throughout every trial and triumph, the struggle for independence, the wars for survival, the pursuit of peace and all he served on the front lines, this son of David and of Solomon, took up arms to defend Israel’s freedom and lay down his life to secure Israel’s future.

As I look back on the years since his death I think about how much has changed and how much as stayed the same.

There are clearly growing generational gaps between the Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and the Gen Zers. We have not even begun to understand the impact of the recent political and environmental shifts let alone the effect of Covid-19 on this next generation. The political divide in Israel today seems intractable.

As much as Clinton was right that Rabin “lived the history of Israel”, at some fundamental level we need to ask ourselves which history of Israel we are trying to tell. Is it going to be a place for the politically right or of human rights? How will we hope to thread the needle of it being a local democracy and the home of the Jews? Will there be checks and balances or not? Will it be governed by the rule of secular law or the law of theocracy?

While I have my own political perspective, I am suspect everyone does. I do not ask these questions because I think it is simple, but because they are hard. These are existential questions that we need to struggle with over time. We are only 75 years into this project of the Modern State of Israel.

I was thinking about this today in trying understand the significance of Tzom Gedalia.  Gedalia was the governor of Yehudah. His assassination by a fellow Jew ended Jewish autonomy following the destruction of the First Temple.  While it might be close to 28 years since the assassination of Rabin, it has been 2605 years since the assassination of Gedalia. We have little information as to what Gedalia did, only what was done to him by his fellow Jew. We also know very little about Abel, only what his brother did to him. As they say, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” When will we learn? If nothing else not eating today has afforded me the time to explore these questions of the current and future Jewish state.