On Building Something Enduring

What Israel teaches about memory, resilience, and the moral work of survival

Each year, at sundown, the siren sounds across Israel and something rare happens in public life: everything stops. Cars halt on highways. Pedestrians pause mid-step. Shops fall silent. This is Yom HaZikaron — Memorial Day — a solemn accounting of the lives lost in wars and terror.

And yet, before that day is even over, a transformation begins. The flags rise. The mood shifts. Music returns. Yom Ha’atzmaut begins — Independence Day — a national celebration not of military might or historical grievance, but of sheer existence.

The juxtaposition is deliberate. Mourning and joy are held side by side, not as contradictions but as parts of the same human fabric. Israel does not forget its dead before celebrating its survival. It does not deny the cost of its independence, nor does it collapse into despair. It lives — not without grief, but through it.

And this, I think, is one of Israel’s great teachings to the world.

Seventy-seven years after its founding, Israel remains a study in improbable endurance. Surrounded at birth by hostility, defined in part by catastrophe, and shaped by waves of immigration from nearly every continent, the country is not the result of historical inevitability. It is the outcome of moral vision acted upon — a collective act of will, stitched together through memory, language, danger, and extraordinary work.

There is no need to romanticise the country to see this. One can acknowledge its political tensions, its inequities, its burdens, without denying the profound human achievement it represents. What has been built — in medicine, agriculture, technology, culture — is not merely a matter of output. It is a form of continuity: an insistence that Jewish life, long defined by dispersion, fear, and fragility, can also be defined by rootedness, creativity, and responsibility.

And responsibility is at the core of what sustains Israel. The kind that begins not in theory, but in action. Few societies have so many citizens who know — not abstractly, but bodily — what it means to defend their home, to carry loss, to rebuild, to serve. Military service is not a ritual but a lived burden. Even those who dissent from policy or protest the direction of the state do so with the knowledge that they, or their children, are also the ones tasked with its protection.

This produces a social texture that is difficult to replicate elsewhere: a kind of intimacy between citizen and state, between private fate and public destiny. It is not utopia. But it is a democracy that demands much of its people and receives, remarkably, their ongoing commitment.

In recent months, that commitment has been tested anew. The attacks of October 7th — brutal, intimate, designed to rupture — reopened wounds long scarred over. And yet, amid the pain, something ancient stirred: not just defiance, but solidarity. Lines of volunteers formed before lines of blame. Families opened homes to the displaced. Reservists reported for duty without call. The country wept, but it did not fall apart.

This spirit — not triumphalist, not naïve — deserves attention. In a world often preoccupied with identity as performance, with grievance as posture, Israel remains, for better and for worse, a place where identity is lived, and sacrifice is real. Where young people do not only imagine history, but enter it. Where community is not a slogan but a structure of survival.

And from this, the world can learn. Not how to imitate Israel’s politics or reproduce its conflicts, but how to take seriously the work of building something enduring. To understand that freedom is not declared once but must be renewed, through institutions, courage, and shared memory. That solidarity is not a sentiment but a practice. That real pluralism is not achieved by erasing difference, but by holding it within a framework of mutual obligation.

There is something unapologetically human about Israel. It is proud, chaotic, argumentative. It contains vast differences of origin, opinion, and ambition. It stumbles often. But it also begins again, constantly. It fixes, adapts, improves. It grows things in the desert. It translates ancient texts into modern life. It carries the dead without glorifying death. And it celebrates survival — not as a final word, but as the beginning of new responsibility.

On this Yom Ha’atzmaut, as fireworks rise above the same streets that yesterday held memorials, it is worth pausing to note the full arc of the day. Not only that Israel has endured, but how: with resilience, with sorrow, with astonishing tenacity, and with a refusal to be either victim or idol.

For those of us who watch from elsewhere, the message is not merely national. It is existential. That life, even when threatened, can be chosen again. That freedom, even when partial, is worth defending. That history, even when cruel, need not dictate what comes next.

And that meaning — real, difficult, earned meaning — is still possible, if one is willing to build for it.

Miklós Cseszneky