It’s 6:30 a.m., super cold in the desert, and we just went to sleep a few hours ago after a full night of hiking, maneuvering and positioning on IDF reserve duty.
But we are up, and there’s even a fire warming our frozen feet, and a cup of coffee proudly made by a buddy.
I take out my special tefillin bag, and start by donning my tallit, the white cloth starkly contrasting with olive green of the uniform and the jeeps.
Immediately, I sense a change in the atmosphere. Most of my fellow soldiers are secular, or more accurately, do not put on tefillin regularly. We don’t talk about it much, just a word or two here and there. They all know someone who does it. A friend, a brother, a grandfather; someone in their life does this strange bit of wrapping leather boxes and mumbling while swaying.
As I pray, one guy turns up the rock music coming from his phone but I don’t let it disturb me, and soon he turns it off. Another silently pushes a stick in the fire. The sun is coming out, and the desert cold begins to be replaced (mercifully) by desert heat.
From the few words we have exchanged on the issue, I try to imagine what my fellow soldiers think as they see me praying: Do I believe in God? Does God talk to man? Does He really command man to put on these things? Am I still a Jew if I am not observant? Is it important for me to self-identify as a Jew, or does my Israeli identity suffice? I finish my session and begin to wrap up the tefillin, and fold the tallit. I don’t prod anyone to borrow my tefillin. I do my thing proudly, but without missionizing.
If anybody asked, I would be happy to lend my tefillin. But they don’t ask, and I am content to just to be there among these great men.
While they may not consider themselves observant, to me, they observe so many of our people’s essential values, like “Ve’ahavta l’reacha kamocha” – loving the other as much as one loves oneself. They show this by volunteering to take a week out of their busy lives to practice the art of war in the service of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
Actually, many of them appreciate me for putting on my tefillin – I take care of that department for them.
Our unit has many departments: sharpshooters, light artillery, scouts, anti-tank, and explosives, but someone has to be the praying guy, the good luck charm, the shaliah tzibur. So along with our other duties, a few of the guys and I have praying duty, and just like our whole unit has to operate the many departments with one goal in mind, I make sure to pray for all the other men as well.
When I am done, it is as though time starts up again, and we go back to regular training, working hard and looking forward to the end of the exercise.
The last day of miluim (reserve duty) is always a pain because we spend hours and hours returning our stuff to the Yamach – the army warehouses. I helped my commander return the gear from our three jeeps, including communications equipment and special gun mounts – but this meant that of 2,500 men, I was almost the last guy to leave base for home.
Now I was in a rush to get back to Jerusalem. A friend is conducting a pidyon haben for his newborn son, and I want to attend. The special ceremony, in which a firstborn son is redeemed by a kohen, was being held in Zvil, a yeshiva hall in the ultra-Orthodox area of Jersalem’s Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood. I have no time to change, so I show up wearing IDF fatigues, while everyone else is wearing black hats, white shirts and jackets, and I felt the silent tension the minute I walked in.
Based on my conversations with haredim and the societal debate in Israel, I imagine the inner debate going on in the black hat-covered heads when they see me: Is the IDF an army fighting for Jewish values? Is the State of Israel a machine for growing Judaism, or is it hostile to it? Is this soldier a threat to my way of life, or is he the protector of it? Does he know the importance of Torah, or is it secondary to him? I too feel the call to be a fighter for the Jewish people, but why am I told that it is wrong? Judaism in the army, the army in Judaism – it is one of the dialectics of our time. But I for one would not give up either. I love my tefillin because they are my otherworldly tool of spiritual enhancement (I even have two pairs!). But I also love my land, my country and my people. And for that reason, I very much love my army – it defends all that I hold dear, and it is the place where you actually get to meet the land (because the army exists in places where people barely do), and you get to meet the people (outside of your social and geographical bubble).
For me, though, putting on my tefillin in the army is actually not so much of a dialectic, but rather, the most organic and natural of things. Looking to the past I can see that the great biblical generals were fighters and sages, good in war and good at praying.
Even God Himself is called a Man of War. And past the superficials, I find that today’s IDF has much of the same spirit of Joshua and King David, even if dressed in modern secular garb.
A friend asked me, how much longer do I have to do miluim? I told him that I hoped I could continue for a long, long time.
