My son Naff, a combat engineer in the IDF, just wrote this and sent it to me, on the occasion of Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day:
Today is a day where we remember. A day where we look back on one of the darkest periods of our history. A day that, as I get older and understand more and more, is not just about mourning what we lost, for me today is about looking back on the horrors of the past to remember where we were and at the same time look at how far we’ve come.
We have risen from the ashes of a broken world and we didn’t fix it. Fixing it wasn’t good enough – we created a new one, a better one, one where I can serve, for the first time in two thousand years, in a Jewish army, and commit myself to the sentence that everyone uses today “never again”.
If I could go back in time and visit my great-great-grandfather in the camps and tell him “Sabba, I’m your great-great-grandson and I live in the land of Israel, but not only do I live in the land but I also voted last year for a Jewish government and on top of that I serve in the first Jewish army in two thousand years.” What would he say? Would he believe me? Probably not, that’s why I see today as a day to measure how far we’ve come as a nation to show the world you can kick me down but I will get up over and over again.
Have a meaningful day, people, and I want to thank all the people who don’t just use the words “never again” one day a year to post to Facebook because it’s what’s done. I want to thank the people who stand behind those words every day even when it gets hard. It’s because of people like that that we’ve gotten this far.
עם ישראל חי
{Written by Naff’s mother, HaDassah Sabo Milner, shared by blog site, A Soldier’s Mother}