As Our People Grieve: The Silver Platter

Our Lost Children

There comes a time when words, events, incidents—even, perhaps (God forbid), atrocities—no longer have their power to shock. I offer these words, not as condolence—there can be no condolences for the horrible butcher’s bill this war has created, and I will not offer any. Likewise, I doubt whether reprisals—and there will be reprisals, we can be certain of that—will ever erase our loss. I am merely a Jew and a son, brother, father, cousin; a relative to those who were and now are no more. I cannot offer God as a succour at this time, either; the heavens are silent and the scudding clouds might as well be stone.

There remains only our family, indeed our entire Jewish People, with our grief. I offer these words to us, and to you.

For years, on Yom HaZikaron, the 4^th Day of the Hebrew month of Iyar, the Day of Remembrance soon following Pesakh, for all those thousands of young and old lost in Israel’s various conflicts and terror incidents, the following poem is read. This sad morning, mourning our dead, I believe the poem is all that remains, nearly one year since October 7 (our new date of infamy) began this deadly conflict. And the light at the end of the tunnel is still too dim to read what may come in the future.

It was written by Natan Alterman, a poet in the earliest days of the Jewish State, when all longed for a new state of Israel, which many believed would herald a new Messianic Age. In keeping with the Zionist belief in the importance of Statehood to bring “normalcy” to his suffering people, Alterman wrote his most famous poem, “The Silver Platter.” He took the title from a notable remark from the sage first president of Israel, the British-Russian Jew and chemist Dr. Chaim Weitzmann, whose sober reckoning of Partition was: “No State is ever handed out on a silver platter. The Partition Plan gives the Jews an opportunity” in response to the 1947 United Nations plan for partitioning Israel into two states, one for Arabs, one for Jews. As we all know, the 1948 Israeli Independence War eliminated the Plan. History moved differently, and we are all the recipients of the current state.

The scene of the poem is a second gathering at Mount Sinai, preparatory to our receiving (we might assume) the Torah. Instead, a boy and girl appear, descending from the Mount:

The Silver Platter

by Natan Alterman

And the land grows still, the red eye of the sky slowly dimming over smoking frontiers

As the nation arises, Torn at heart but breathing, To receive its miracle, the only miracle

As the ceremony draws near, it will rise, standing erect in the moonlight in terror and joy

When across from it will step out a youth and a lass and slowly march toward the nation

Dressed in battle gear, dirty, Shoes heavy with grime, they ascend the path quietly

To change garb, to wipe their brow
They have not yet found time. Still bone weary from days and from nights in the field

Full of endless fatigue and unrested,
Yet the dew of their youth. Is still seen on their head

Thus they stand at attention, giving no sign of life or death

Then a nation in tears and amazement
will ask: “Who are you?”

And they will answer quietly, “We Are the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given.”

Thus they will say and fall back in shadows
And the rest will be told in the chronicles of Israel

As Our People Grieve: The Silver Platter

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