The idea of martyrdom—even the word martyr—is an uncomfortable one for today’s Jews. Christianity built itself on stories of martyrs. The liturgical, calendric, and political emphasis on martyrdom came at the expense of Jews, who were from the outset implicated in the persecution of its martyr par excellence. Likewise, Islam’s guarantees of sublime and carnal rewards for its martyrs have over the centuries been used to encourage all kinds of bloodshed, including the strategies of human sacrifice endorsed by Hamas and Iran today. Even the great Moses Maimonides seems to have been embarrassed by martyrdom, and assigns death for the sanctification of God’s Name (the preferred Jewish term) as a path only to be taken in strictly circumscribed situations, perhaps a fate even inferior to others. This attitude has roots that reach back into early rabbinic thought.

And yet, the idea of religious self-sacrifice finds its very origins among Jews: in the willingness of the protagonists of the book of Daniel to give their lives and in the actual martyrdoms described in the second book of Maccabees. It persists in the liturgy, which describes ten of the most luminous sages of the 1st and 2nd centuries—including the great Rabbi Akiva—embrace their fate with equanimity, if not enthusiasm, when facing their Roman executioners. The ravages of the First Crusade on Rhineland Jewry brought an unprecedented upsurge of religious martyrdom as well as martyrdom by proxy, creating consternation for halakhists in the generations to follow. The perceived failure of so many in the Iberian Peninsula to emulate the Ashkenazi example was grounds for much proverbial and literal self-flagellation in the early modern Sephardi diaspora.

In the liturgy, the two greatest elaborations of martyrdom are works of religious poetry (piyyut) read on the two most solemn fast days on the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur and Tisha b’Av. For most Ashkenazi congregations, Eleh ezk’ra, “These shall I remember,” is read on Yom Kippur, and Arzei ha-l’vanon, “The Cedars of Lebanon,” on Tisha b’Av. The former poem likely dates to the 6th or 7th century, a golden age of piyyut in the Land of Israel; the second to 13th-century Germany.

Despite similarities in content, the aims of the poems could not be more different. And yet, they are exquisitely complementary. Eleh Ezk’rah is recited near the end of the musaf service of Yom Kippur, which attempts to recount, and to an extent to reenact, the Temple rite of the holy day. Its dominant emotion is one of yearning for the return to the Promised Land and the restoration of God’s house in all its glory.

For early rabbinic literature, dating to a time when the Temple was part of living memory, the Temple is more than the beating heart of Jewish existence: it is the proverbial cork in the bottle, what keeps chaos from overwhelming the order of the universe. Geographically, the Jerusalem Temple stood at the seam between the desolation of the Judean desert and human civilization, as represented by the Israelite capital. For the Talmud (Sukkah 35 and Jerusalem Sanhedrin 10:5), the Temple is the site at which David encountered and halted the waters of the abyss, which threatened to engulf the earth. For the biblical text, it is where the Divine plague is stayed in the heavens above (2Samuel 24:16 and 1Chronicles 21:16-17). The Temple, in the Jewish cosmos, is thus where order keeps chaos at bay: in part through constant ritual activity, in part by its mere existence. The liturgical description of the Temple service concludes:

The splendor of [the Jews’] light broke forth as dawn, their voices they would raise and exult in the glory of the Eternal rock. “Happy is the people who have it so; happy is the people whose God is the Lord.” (Psalms 144:15)

What follows is the high priest’s private prayer for the Jewish people’s material success, and for the triumph of order over chaos in the subsequent year. This portion of the service approaches its conclusion with the poem Emet mah nehdar (“In truth, how glorious!”), a litany of vivid similes describing the splendor of the high priest upon his emergence unscathed from the inner sanctum. Much of this work derives from the apocryphal book of Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus, composed in Ptolemaic Jerusalem in the 2nd century BCE—decades before the oppressive reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Maccabean revolt, and the various troubles and internal strife that followed. In other words, this poem is a dispatch from a better time, when the Second Temple stood atop a peaceful Jerusalem, before the high priesthood was tainted with pretensions to political power or proffered for purchase.

Then the liturgy takes a dramatic turn, jarring us awake as if from a pleasant dream. “Happy is the eye that saw all of this; our soul yearns even just to hear of it,” is the refrain of the next piyyut. Thereafter come a series of poems of lament, describing the chaos that reigns in the Temple’s absence. Each is arranged as a reverse alphabetic acrostic; with God’s home destroyed, language itself has been upended.

These laments culminate with Eleh ezk’rah and its story of ten martyrs. In the world it describes God’s house on earth has been destroyed and guilt cannot be expiated by human procedures. In the absence of the Yom Kippur rites, even ancient sins like the sale of Joseph return to cry out for justice, lest the waters of the abyss engulf the earth. In a macabre inversion of the Yom Kippur service, the high priest utters the Divine Name, enters the celestial sanctuary, and from “behind the curtain” learns that he and his colleagues are destined to be the sacrificial offerings. The section ends with a double appeal to God on what was supposed to be the day of expiation: deliver us from our oppressors, as you promised, and in the meantime, accept the sacrifices of the martyrs as a substitute for the Temple offerings and forgive us our sins.

Unlike Eleh Ezk’rah, the Tisha b’Av liturgy’s “The Cedars of Lebanon” appears not as a culmination but as centerpiece, close to the middle of the many dirges recited in the day’s service. It is part of a liturgy that focuses not on the glory of what was lost, but on the trauma of the loss itself, and the subsequent suffering that has befallen the Jews in the centuries of exile. It is recited with empty stomachs, parched throats, and bare feet at the sweltering peak of the summer. The discomfort of the day recalls the miseries of injury, torture, grief, and humiliation.

But there is hope. While Eleh Ezk’rah serves as a sorrowful postscript to the triumphant recitation of the Yom Kippur service, the sorrowful Tisha b’Av service has a hopeful coda: Eli Tsiyon v’areha, “Wail, Zion and her cities.” Traditionally sung in unison by the congregation, this poem does nothing to downplay the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile, but tinges this suffering with hope. “Wail, Zion, like a woman in labor, like a young wife mourning the loss of her husband,” it reads. In its final verses, it addresses God directly: “For Your name which was desecrated in the mouths of those who stood up to cause her distress, and for the supplication [of the Jews who] scream out to you, listen and hear her words.” Those reciting these words know that God’s name is inseparable from the fate of the Jews, that God and the Jewish people are locked in an eternal relationship that will never be abrogated. It is after all His name that martyrs sanctify. But the labor can be agonizing, and the wait can be excruciating.

Here the ten martyrs serve a different purpose than they do on Yom Kippur. They are not sacrificial offerings but the “cedars of Lebanon” and “heroes of Torah”—great trees, who grow from equally noble soil. At the moment that all the traumas are re-experienced, the relationship that they called into question nonetheless remains intact, and will inevitably be restored, because the people that brings forth these martyrs is faithful, stubborn, and committed. In a world given over to chaos, not only does God endure, but also the Jewish people.

Israel Meir Lau, the former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, reported that his teacher Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (1910–1995), an acclaimed halakhic authority and scholar, once said that whenever he felt the need to pray at the graves of the righteous, he would go to Mount Herzl. Those familiar only with Auerbach’s impeccable haredi credentials might be surprised that he chose Israel’s national cemetery—which serves both as the burial place of Theodor Herzl, Golda Meir, and various presidents and prime ministers as well as of countless generals and soldiers—as his favored location for prayer, but not those who understood him better.

On my first visit to Mount Herzl, on a guided tour with my daughter’s seminary in May 2023, I found much that was remarkable. The graveside stories about Israel’s prime ministers inspired; the wall of victims of terror evoked melancholy. But what gripped me viscerally was the memorial to the netser aharon, the “last shoots”—lone survivors of their families or communities destroyed in the Holocaust who went on to fight and give their lives for the nascent Jewish state. Battered souls laden with precious lonely memories who offered up their lives, the only things they had to give, on God’s altar in an effort to push back the chaos consuming the world. From the serenity of the idyllic, tranquil hill located due west of the still-desolate Temple Mount, Eleh ezk’rah—these shall I remember.

My last visit to Mount Herzl came on June 16. Amid the ongoing war, the injury, torture, grief, and humiliation, these sacrifices were heartrendingly fresh. In the section beside the graves of the legendary lamed-hey (the thirty-five)—the heroic convoy of storied Palmach fighters massacred on their way to deliver supplies to the blockaded Gush Etzion settlements in January 1948—stand rows of gleaming new headstones, all dated 5784, the year that began in September 2023. Many of the graves have mementos of a life cut short, of a childhood only just finished: favorite toys, sports paraphernalia, photos, flags. And then beside them six fresh graves, without headstones yet because they are too new, covered with wreaths.

But we were there for one particular sacrifice: Eli Moshe Zimbalist. An American-born yeshiva student and soldier in the 601st battalion of the Combat Engineering Corps, a kind and gentle soul who struggled with and overcame a learning disability, an accomplished young carpenter who built our deck swing, a loyal friend and exemplary soldier, a devoted brother to a special-needs sibling, the apple of the eye of his parents, Simi and Sarah, pillars of the community. He was also my cousin’s nephew. Hundreds from the Givat Sharett neighborhood of Beit Shemesh assembled in the scorching summer heat to accompany him on his last journey.

Representatives of his various social circles, the loving communities which adored him, rose to speak: his parents, his siblings, his neighborhood, his synagogue, his yeshiva, his unit. Each revealed a different facet of this remarkable young man, and the void his absence will leave.

Common to all was one underlying assumption, whether spoken or unspoken: this horrific price is one we are ready to pay. The parents proudly recalled Eli Mo (as he was known to those close to him) telling them, “Don’t worry about me, worry about the hostages,” and in the midst of their agony graciously thanked the army for arranging his last respects. For each of the speakers, it was obvious that rescuing hostages, standing in defense of Jewish civilization and the Jewish state, and protecting half of the world’s Jews who constitute it were worth sacrificing one’s life and even parting with one’s children—the worst of agonies.

The second face of Mount Herzl is one I had not seen in peacetime: that of the Cedars of Lebanon of Tisha b’Av. As much as it tells us about who is buried there, it tells us even more about who buried them, and about the fertile soil in which they grew. The community that sends its children to fight: the community whose members, at times of trauma, lovingly step forth, ready to carry a hole in their hearts for a lifetime for the sake of the Jewish people, for the sake of God, whose Name their killers profane, and for the sake of a two-millennium struggle to cling to Jewish identity, to enable a future for the project to which God has assigned us. This is a community for whom faith is lived unselfconsciously, in a way that doesn’t require treatises or even definitions.

This is a community that takes no delight in martyrdom, but understands that the supreme sacrifice can at times be necessary to push back chaos and to reassert the cosmic order. To cite the same Psalm quoted by the Yom Kippur liturgy, “Happy is the people who have it so; happy is the people whose God is the Lord.”