Recently, I read Ayelet Tsabari’s “Songs for the Brokenhearted.” It’s a novel about grief and love, mothers and daughters, and the complexities of Sephardi and Israeli identity — set, in part, in 1995. One thread follows a teenage boy drawn into the same ideological currents that gave rise to Yigal Amir. As I read, I found myself traveling back in time: from Petah Tikvah to Jerusalem to the Tel Aviv peace rally that changed history — and changed me.
Perhaps the book especially resonated because I spent the summer of 1994 in Israel. It was a season that now feels almost euphoric. The first Oslo Accords had been signed, and hope was palpable everywhere. I remember climbing Masada at sunrise and being told we’d have to descend early: King Hussein of Jordan was coming. The impossible suddenly seemed possible.
A year later, in November 1995, I was in my New York apartment when the news came of Rabin’s assassination. I remember the darkened room, the walk to the Israeli Consulate, the swollen eyes after Rabin’s funeral. That night, I understood that my identity was bound to am Yisrael — that when Israel mourned, I mourned too.
While I am neither historian nor political analyst, I am not alone in saying that Rabin’s death changed the course of Israeli history. Even today — maybe especially today — the “what ifs” still reverberate across Israeli society and Jewish communities around the world. Looking back, I can trace the ways I was profoundly changed on and by that night; I leave it to the scholars to do the same for Israel and world Jewry.
This fall, as the 30th anniversary approached, I found myself drawn to “Class of 95/Machzor 95″— a collection of Israeli poetry that looks back on that night and all it changed. Reading it, I was struck by how the voices of that generation — the ones who came of age in that grief — are still asking the same questions I am: what broke that night, and what might still be repaired.
And yet, even as I write this, I can still hear that song — the one Rabin sang just moments before he was shot: “Shir LaShalom,” the song for peace. I can hear the crowd’s voices rising, the paper lyrics fluttering in the night air like fragile prayers. “Don’t say the day will come — bring the day.”
Since Oct. 7, 2023, I’ve thought often of that night — and of how the crowds still gather in Tel Aviv, not in Kikar Rabin but in Kikar HaChatufim, Hostages Square. Different plaza, different decade — but the same ache in the air, the same need to stand shoulder to shoulder and sing. I think of what it means to be a part, deeply, of am Yisrael — to love, to grieve and still to yearn for the promise of Medinat Yisrael.
Maybe that’s what endures: the insistence that we keep showing up, keep singing. That to believe in peace, after all that has been shattered, might seem naïve but is actually holy. That the act of standing together — with candles, with songs, with tears — is itself a form of faith.
Thirty years later, I still believe the melody matters. To remember, to grieve, to dream — and to keep singing “Shir LaShalom,” even when the harmony feels impossible. Because hope, too, is a form of courage.
“Don’t whisper a prayer —
sing a song for peace with a loud shout.
Don’t say the day will come —
bring the day.
Because it is not a dream —
and in all the city squares,
sing only for peace.”
(“Shir LaShalom,” Lyrics: Yaakov Rotblit; Music: Yair Rosenblum)
To the memory and legacy of Yitzchak Rabin, z”l.
Rabbi Sari Laufer is the Chief Engagement Officer at Stephen Wise Temple and Schools in Los Angeles.
