With the culmination of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars, and Independence Day and the accompanying roller-coaster rush of emotions Israelis experience, the memories of personal stories, tragedies and triumphs linger in our minds and hearts. As a grandchild of survivors, I feel not only the collective but personal loss on Holocaust Remembrance Day, but as an immigrant, I am on the margins of the immediate pain that so many bereaved families daily experience in Israel. Independence Day is a victory of today and of centuries, the fulfillment of both a dream and a promise, but it is also a time to thank our soldiers whose service sustains us all.
Initiation into the IDF for me, and for all of those who immigrated to Israel after a certain age, begins with our children’s first call up to the draft office and will continue through the numerous visits, calls, applications, screenings, training, swearing in and advanced training as each soldier moves from a stiffly new uniform to stripes on the sleeve, pins on the breast, and more acronyms indicating his or her rise in rank. All of this is new, strange and certainly frightening to the unassuming immigrant who has known very little of the military and advanced weaponry in his or her former and, in comparison, less-than-glamorous, Diaspora life.
The show of strength and pride is daunting. I remember the swearing-in ceremony of one of my son’s at Latrun where trumpet blasts, hundreds of marching soldiers in a parade of various tank units, and the final promise to “even sacrifice my life” culminated in the spectacle of the flag unfurling in the wind to the strains of “Hatikvah.” A lieutenant colonel spoke and suggested that the young people in the crowd ask their grandparents if when they were young they could have imagined a Jewish army in a Jewish state. The idea was a distant dream.
Since by this time I have three soldiers, one son who completed his service as a commander in the Special Forces Nahal, one who is a commander in tanks, and one who is currently training to be a commander in tanks, I have been well-initiated into the army. Equipped with this knowledge and yet remaining a kind of outsider, I would like to explain that what has surprised me the most about the Israeli Army, however fault-ridden at times are the education and values it teaches and inculcate that reach far beyond military training or expertise.
My Nahal soldier was taught to have distance and respect for his commanders, to work as part of a team, to be first to volunteer, and to get up on the bus and offer his seat to a commuter because the uniform symbolizes the state. He was trained to take responsibility, to share, to wash the floor, to care for and protect the soldiers who were under his command, and to work to help soldiers whose family or financial situation were compromised.
WHEN A LONE soldier was sick, my son accompanied him to the hospital, stayed with him through surgery, and slept on the couch in his room until he was released. Then he took a public bus back to base. When he became a commander and was busy putting out fires on the Gaza border to protect farmers’ fields, he was distraught to realize the rest of his unit had the honor of carrying wounded Syrian children over the Israeli border to be treated in military field hospitals. At the end of his service, his unit planned and built a special area on the base dedicated to the future soldiers who would enjoy it. You don’t, he told me, leave the army without giving something back.
My second son, very soon after he began training in Tanks, called to say he would be delayed coming home for Hanukkah because his unit was being sent to an old age home. The reason? To sing and dance with the elderly people and to gladden their hearts for the holiday. A few months later they were sent to meet with a group of Holocaust survivors, but not to hear their life stories; the soldiers brought guitars and sang songs and spent time with them just visiting.
I called my uncle who served in the US Army and asked him if he had ever heard of an army engaging in such activities and he said, “Definitely no.” One time, a woman on a bus, seeing his green uniform and weapon, without a word, handed him her baby in his car seat to carry on the bus because she knew it was safe. As a commander, my son has traveled hours on a bus to make a home visit to a soldier whose family needs their son home to earn money; my son tries to work out a solution.
He has learned to own his mistakes, to accept the consequences, and to be patient even if there is no tangible reward.
And of course, he was sent on the anniversary of the death of a soldier from his unit, to be a living representative and mourn with the family at the grave. It is this particular event that I will never forget. He was sent to Mount Herzl and one of the conditions is that he must research information about the soldier who was killed so that he may speak in a consoling and informed manner to the family. On the way to the cemetery, my son called me to say he had been surprised to learn that this soldier was killed in Gush Etzion in 1948, defending the last stronghold on the road to Jerusalem.
We live in Neve Daniel, a small town in Gush Etzion and this seemed a fortuitous coincidence. When he arrived at the grave, he spoke with the family and with the elderly daughter of the soldier. She had only been a small girl at the time and had barely known her father. She looked at my son and told him she didn’t really even know the area of Gush Etzion but her father had died defending a place called Neve Daniel.
“Neve Daniel?” he said. “That is where I live with my family.”
She had grown up without a father. He had lost his life defending a place she didn’t know and here was a tall, young soldier who had come to honor his memory, who was able to live and thrive there because of her father’s bravery and sacrifice. What better witness and testament to a man’s death is there?
Our soldiers see in themselves the power of strengthening others, of continuing to defend the state of Israel, the land of Israel, the people of Israel – forging a link in this eternal chain. For this I cannot thank the army enough.
The writer holds a PhD in English literature and is faculty member at Achva College.