In a normal year, the power of rituals is less obvious. In a normal year, the patriotic rollercoaster running through Remembrance Day and Independence Day is more of a non sequitur to daily life in modern Israel. This year, it is these twinned days that are what the doctor ordered, while daily life seems slightly out of place.
Rituals are clumsy things.
They come along at prescribed times and demand that you be happy or sad, or think about things beyond yourself, like God and country. The most powerful ritual I have come across is the shiva , the seven-day period of mourning under Jewish law. The laws of shiva are brilliant because they force you to concentrate on mourning for seven days, allowing you to resist the modern inclination to move on too quickly. During the shiva , you do not have to try to recover, your job is not to recover. Unlike other rituals, shiva has no timing problem, because it is linked directly to the circumstances that demand it.