The Sceptic Blog

1.  Two years ago I was giving a citizenship talk to the Hasmonean Girls’ School sixth form and we somehow got onto the subject of Yom Ha’atzmaut and how one celebrates it.  A girl at the front announced smugly “I don’t celebrate it at at all, because it’s in the Omer”.  I congratulated her on her perspicuity and added that since the Omer restrictions are to commemmorate the deaths of Rabbi Akiva’s pupils, and since the rabbis attribute the plague that killed them to disunity and in particular the inability to show each other respect while differing on matters of law and philosophy, by ignoring Yom Ha’atzmaut she was indeed keeping the Omer appropriately by introducing a little more division and disunity into the world.

2.  The vast majority of the observant Jewish world today celebrates Yom Ha’atzmaut as a modern miracle and a significant spiritual opprtunity.

3.  Of course, different communities do it in their different ways, and according to their different halachic understandings.  In the matter of Hallel, in particular, opinions vary as to whether and how it is to be said.

4.  To omit Hallel on halachic grounds is for the present just about tenable (although I suspect that in another few years it will have become such a tiny minority opinion as to be practically untenable).  But to say tachanun is another thing altogether.

5.  I brought an Israeli friend with me to shul on Yom Ha’atzmaut a few years ago.  When we got to tachanun and the rabbi and a few others started to say it he looked at me with shock and disbelief.  He could not believe that anywhere outside the deliberately isolationist communities of the chareidim tachanun would be said on Yom Ha’Atzmaut, and our community, while nominally part of the Adas, does not have the appearance of a chareidi shul.

6.  The general tzibbur of Jews in Eretz Yisroel celebrates Yom Ha’atzmaut as a yom tov akin to Purim and Chanukah.  The din of al tifrosh min hatzibbur (do not separate yourself from the community) comes into play at a global level as well as at an individual level.  It takes little to defer tachanun: a private simchah such as a bris is enough to prevent an entire community from saying tachanun: the simchah of 6 million Jews in Israel should be enough to prevent tachanun from being said by the rest of the worldwide community (apart from the fact that even for those of us who do not presently live in Israel the State and its foundation are of enormous spiritual significance).