On the 25th of Shvat, we honor the memory of Yair – the warrior poet who ignited the struggle for freedom that led to the liberation of our homeland from foreign rule.
On this date in 5702 (1942), Yair was shot dead while handcuffed by British detectives in Tel Aviv.
Born Avraham Stern, Yair was not just another revolutionary. He was the revolution – the revolution trapped and embodied within a man, whose poetic language of freedom was unintelligible to most of his people.
The British made a mistake when they murdered Yair because in doing so they freed the spirit of revolution and allowed it to permeate our people until even Yair’s political opponents were picking up arms to drive the empire from our soil.
Yair and his followers – the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Leḥi) – were unique in that they were able to think outside the box. They understood Britain to be the true enemy standing in the way of Hebrew liberation.
It was Britain who, in order to advance its imperialist agenda in the Middle East, created an artificial conflict between Palestine’s Arabs and Jews. And it was the British occupation of our country that prevented us from being able to defend ourselves in the homeland or to rescue our brothers and sisters from the Holocaust in Europe.
Yair taught his followers that a freedom fighter is not someone fighting to be free but rather someone able to fight because he’s already free. And it was precisely this psychological freedom that empowered the Leḥi to challenge one of the most powerful empires in the history of man.
Yair and his followers declared war against the British and, after a nearly decade long urban guerrilla war, they eventually tasted victory and won freedom for Israel.
In our people’s ancient mystical teachings, there is a concept often referred to as Knesset Yisrael – the Jewish people’s collective national soul – a giant spiritual organism that shines into this world through millions of bodies in space and time called Jews. And we believe there to be a very unique shade of this giant collective soul that reveals itself in each generation as a seemingly insignificant minority actively working to advance our people’s history, aspirations and national mission to the next stage of what Israel is here on earth to do.
Yair and his Fighters for the Freedom of Israel were an obvious manifestation of that unique shade of Knesset Yisrael – arguably the last time it took concrete form.
History is rarely advanced by the mainstream. By those afraid to stand out as too different from the herd. History is almost always advanced by the visionaries and radicals who are willing to dream while the herd merely sleeps.
The memory of Yair should inspire us all to identify what goals of Jewish history remain to be achieved, what obstacles are standing in the way of those goals and what we can do to become characters in the story of smashing those obstacles and advancing Jewish liberation to the next stage.
