The Times finally got something right about the Army

This piece on the Army and Powerpoint is spot on.

When I look out of the helicopter this is what I saw

I am in the airport in COB Speicher, Iraq, waiting for a ride back to work.  I just got off a Chinook, coming from a relatively remote FOB where I had some work to do for a few days. 

I don't get very emotional about places.  Well, maybe sometimes.  I am definitely not one of those people who is moved when I hear something like "Benjamin Franklin stood on this very spot over two hundred years ago!!!!"  "So what", I think to myself,  "I'm standing here now."  OK, perhaps once in a while a place moves me.  Checkpoint Charlie a few years ago got to me.  I was sad that Berlin was reunified.  I always thought of her division as a punishment.  But then again reunification was a symbol of the end of Soviet communism.  So I had mixed feelings.  Sitting on the Brooklyn Heights promenade reading Whitman, or in the West Village thinking about Alan Ginsburg's New York or the walls of Jerusalem with Judah Halevi and Judah Amichai sometimes make me misty as well.  But I already digress.  

In grade school, for the first few years of my education in Yeshiva Torah Temimah, we heard lots of biblical tales and let's face it, most of them are implausible.  And even if they were true, they were told of people whose lives had little resemblance to my own.  The characters conversed with God, saw and performed miracles, fought angels, and sired nations.  I never met anyone who got water from a rock, no one did.  So when I picked up some silly red string at Rachel's tomb in Hebron as a teenager or stood atop Mt. Nebo in Jordan a couple of years ago, I was somewhat nonplussed.  After all, who can really identify with Moses or a "matriarch"?  I know, I know "THIS IS WHERE JACOB FOUGHT THE ANGEL!!!"  Yeah yeah, but THIS is where I AM NOW standing around looking at sand on the floor!  Had the "patriarchs" really even been there or was all this mythology created by some ministry of tourism flunky to get me to buy local knickknacks?  Seriously, does this matter to anyone?  Did they even exist?  What could possibly prompt an emotional experience from these places?  

But then I grew up.  I progressed from fourth grade to fifth and story time was over.  My education got more sophisticated and everyone stopped pretending that Biblical stories were really true - no one denied them, but we stopped making a big deal of them.  To be sure, they were certainly nice morality tales or homilies.  From these fantastic tales I learned the value of not lying (yeah, I see the irony) and loving my neighbor and all that.  But truth?  Even the Rabbis gave up trying to convince us of these things once we hit nine whole years old.  Certainly these things might have happened, but you have to admit, they are hard to believe.  

By fifth grade my Jewish education switched from fables and myth to more real-worldly matters.  Who can forget their first Talmud lesson: What do you do if you find some fruit or money or packages spread out all over the floor of the market?  What if it is a ring of figs or fish or meat, or if it is flax or wool that you find?  Keep it?  Look for the owner?  The Talmud tells us: Rabbi Meir says that the owner must have already despaired of finding and getting back his unmarked figs. Just keep them.  

This was something I could use.  OK, growing up in New York in the 80's there were no farmer's markets yet, but still there was some principle there I can learn from.  Who said it?  Rabbi Meir.  Who was this Rabbi Meir?  He must have been real.  Did he perform miracles?  I doubt it.  He apparently had to get his figs from the market like everyone else.  They didn't fall from the sky for him.  We are told that he once prayed that some muggers should die.  Did they?  No.  He was a real person with real worries.  He worried about things like what to do when you are traveling from the old city of Jerusalem and go past Mount Scopus holding some consecrated meat that you forgot to burn.  (This is actually a walk I have taken a few times  - sans the consecrated meat.)  The rabbis of the Talmud actually did a lot of traveling.  Many of them traveled from Yavneh (near what is now Tel Aviv) to Falluja (a bit southwest of where I woke up this morning).  The trip was undoubtedly more dangerous and unpleasant for them than it was for me. 

And the rabbis knew of the dangers.  They were of a different breed of people than those who populate the pages of the Bible.  They all had jobs; they were butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, etc.  Did the biblical Isaac have a job?  Not that we are told.  Did Judah, Joshua, or Job have jobs?  Not that we know of.  They were all rich and busy serving the Lord.  But Rabbi Meir of the Talmud toiled away day and night being a scribe.  Just a regular job in the year 200.  

But there's more.  These folks with ordinary jobs and annoying travel plans were not merely people whose lives and teachings we study.  These are the people who have shaped who we are today.  To be honest, no one learns what it is to be a Jew from looking at the life of Abraham.  (Again, there are some nice lessons about hospitality, but that's all.)  Jews wake up in the morning and put on T'filin, pray, go to the bathroom, make love, die, cry, eat, work and rest.  They find lost objects and they are involved in legal disputes whose principles we can still derive from Talmudic analyses of goring oxen.  What it is to be a Jew was shaped - for me anyway - not by King David's swashbuckling and lusty exploits, but by Rabbi Meir and his ordinary observations about life in his neighborhood.  

And this is where I finally get to the point.  My Chinook just passed over the neighborhood of one of Rabbi Meir's Babylonian colleagues, or one just like it.  There is a market where a few copper coins might have fallen on the floor and some rabbi might have wondered who they belonged to and what the owner must have been thinking about them.  And I'll bet anything that the improvised fire-pits the Arabs make to cook in the field are no different than those that the Rabbis of the Talmud saw when they were wondering about the quality of baked offerings. And, (this will amuse my brother) the way that the Arabs wrap their kafeiahs around their heads in a sandstorm is the same way that that Shmuel of the Talmud insisted we wrap our talis each morning.  Some things have not changed much.  

Certainly not the geography.  

By sheer coincidence a bit of Talmud I was I was glancing at the other day was somewhere at the end of Berakhot where the Talmud was discussing the blessing that one makes when seeing the Euphrates.  And it was clear that the rabbis knew well the cartography of the Tigris and Euphrates and the channels and the places where it was diverted by the Persians. . .  I just spent the last 25 minutes looking at the Tigris myself.  Many of the Rabbis spent their time in Mechuza - a wealthy town off the banks of the Tigris - talking about perfumes.   

Such is the Judaism that we recognize today:  The Judaism that is recorded in the Talmud that many of us spend a lifetime trying to master, the Judaism forged by hundreds of Rabbis toiling over hundreds of years to figure out what Judaism needs to look like in a post-Temple era, the Judaism that thrived and flourished for thousands of years from the Talmudic rabbis to the Ben Ish Hai - that is the Judaism that I grew up with.  It it hard to describe the feeling that one gets the first time he is in the place that Modern Judaism was conceived.  I don't know why some Rabbis thought the Euphrates required a blessing, but I know why I'd say one.  It is here that the details and protocols of modern Judaism were hashed out.  It is on these streets that the Rabbis argued over each detail and each theoretical principle that the Judaism of today stands on.  It is in these rivers that the Rabbis purified themselves and from these waters that they drew water and derived sustenance.  These are not people whose existence has ever been questioned.  These are not people about whom we tell fantastic tales.  These are people about whom we tell the most fantastic tale of them all: they created the document that shaped our lives for two thousand years.  They determined how we live, what we eat, who we marry, and what we say.  They made us who we are and they did it in a way that has endured and kept us enduring all this time.  What they worked out while talking in the markets and courtyards of Pumbeditha (now Falluja) was enough to spiritually and intellectually sustain Jews for millennia.  They make sure that Jews had a unique and special lifestyle that saw us through the inquisitions and crusades, the Holocaust and the pogroms, the industrial revolution the sexual revolution, and the internet revolution and the Copernican revolution.  The principles of law they worked out then work as well for camels (which are still around here in abundance) as they do for cars.  

It is sad that Jews, or anyone else for that matter, can't visit here today.  For a Jew whose every moment is guided by Jewish law seeing the tomb of Samuel pales in comparison to walking the same streets that the rabbis walked when they worked out what blessing one utters over cake.  When I think about the time I spent in yeshiva trying to understand what a "hatzer" - courtyard - must have looked like and I come here and see one, halacha - Jewish law - moves from an abstraction to a reality.  It is no longer some theoretical construction that exists only in some old book, but it is the way real people with real lives really lived.  And it is the way that many still live today.  

(Updated 4/20/10: Corrected a severe anachronism)

Worth noting

I thought that this story was worth noting. 

Yom Hashoa on COB Speicher

COB Speicher just held a Day of Remembrance ceremony for the victims of the Holocaust. It was very nice. It was somewhat sparsely attended, but it was quite moving nonetheless. On of the LTs was the MC. There was an invocation by a local chaplain followed by a presentation video from the Holocaust museum. Again, quite moving. The MC then spoke well about the theme of "what you do matters" and recited the famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller. Then there was a ceremony where 7 candles were lit, for the women, the resisters, the children, the non-Jews, the survivors, the world, and the last one for those who continue to stand up to tyranny. This ceremony was followed by a speech by one of the Jewish soldiers there (possibly the only other one beside myself) who spoke movingly about the importance of remembering the past and our role in preventing the re-occurrence of such a genocide.

(I understand that there was some sort of ceremony on JBB as well.)

In Speicher

There are a few differences I have already noticed between JBB and Speicher.  Here are some preliminary observations since I have only been here less than two weeks. . 

First, at night it is pretty dark here.  There are hardly any street lights and it is harder to ride bicycles at night.  It is harder to walk and find stuff too.  Second, things are pretty spread out here.  So there are far fewer buildings and housing areas and stores and stuff.  There is no movie theater here, I think either.  It is also much dustier here.  There is just a lot of that here.  Dust storms are common and when you ride your bike in one you feel it in your lungs and also when you wipe your face afterward.  

Let you think it is all bad, I actually am much happier here.  There are a few nice things about Speicher.  Since everything is so spread out people will stop their vehicles on the side of the road to give rides to those who are walking.  People are generally friendlier here.  I think the atmosphere is a bit more relaxed for a lot of people.  It is actually a lot quieter here.  The fighting seems much farther away.  

My room is different.  I live in a large shipping container.  It is actually fairly comfortable despite the fact that it really looks like I am living in a large shipping container.  I do not yet have TV hooked up, but I have fairly reliable, though quite slow internet.  I spend a lot of time listening to galgalaz radio for some reason.  I do not have a roommate yet and I hope to keep it that way.  

I'll write up something a bit more detailed later on. 

The 188th Crybaby Brigade - Book review

(I am writing about a book I just finished reading.)  

I read on the dust cover that Chasnoff is a comedian, so I am thinking his book will be funny, right?  Wrong.  It is bitter and cynical.  But that's OK.  Lots of good books can be bitter and cynical.  But this book was bitter and cynical about an institution I like, y'know Israel, the Israeli Army, stuff like that, and that's fine too.  It was still a good read.  Not quite what I was looking for, but what I got.  Joel Chasnoff's The 188th Crybaby Brigade is probably a pretty accurate description of what it is like to be a junior enlisted soldier going through tironut, basic training, in a combat unit of the Israeli Army.  

I say that it was probably a fairly accurate description because I could have written that book myself and I recognize most of the details of Army life in his book, except for those here and there which are specific to Israel.  Yes, I would have to change a few details, like I am in Iraq now with the US army and he was in Lebanon with the Israeli Army.  He had some conversion issue in his family which I do not.  But it is interesting to see how similar my military experience was to his.  I mean, it is scary how similar our experiences really are.  The same things that disappoint and frustrate me on a day to day basis about how things are run in the US Army are generally the same things that made his life miserable.  Both of us apparently had long swathes of experience that made us wonder how we win wars given all we know about how things work (and we both came up with the same answer).  

Interestingly, our experiences were similar both in terms of what we experienced in the Army, say about "guard duty", "duck walks", "initial reception", annoying leadership, and the like, but also on a personal level.  Reading him talk about telling his family was pretty familiar.  And listening to how many people asked him why he joined the Israeli Army and not the US Army was a mirror of my own experiences.  I can't begin to recall how many people have asked me why I joined the US Army instead of the Israeli Army.  (As if the point was just to join an army and then we flipped a coin about which one it was going to be.)

Of course I am willing to bet that both of our experiences are anomalous.  Americans who are raised very Jewish do not typically join the IDF.  Nor do they join the US Army.  Some do, to be sure, but it is very rare.  Those of us who do, come in to the Army completely unprepared.  Whereas Israelis hear stories and get advice from their friends, brothers, sisters, parents, and teachers.  They are raised knowing what is in store for them, whereas Americans do not.  People who go to yeshiva for 20 years do not know what they are getting into when they join the American army either.  So both can be pretty big culture shocks and one never knows what to expect.  (One does not hear the same cynicism from, say, Haim Sabato who, like Chasnoff,  was in the Armored Corps in the IDF and described the Yom Kippur war in his book Adjusting Sights.)  It strikes me that if you don't know what you are doing, you are bound to be disappointed.  Your assumptions about the kind of place you are in are dispelled one by one.  You go in thinking that this is the greatest army in the world and that makes you think that it must be run by people with common sense and the training is logical and resources and positions are allocated in some way that is to the benefit of the Army.  But none of this is true.  Eventually you realize that the army is really now what you imagined it when you went in.  

Seeing the similarities between the experiences he had in training and in Lebanon and my own here in Iraq made me think that it would be interesting to have American Jews in the US Army and American Jews in the Israeli Army trade stories or something.  It would be informative to see how similar and different we really are.

The book read well and I am glad I read it.  This is certainly a book I will plagiarize large sections of my own life story from.

Seders in Iraq

We had two seders on Joint Base Balad, Iraq, one of each of the first two nights of passover.  Both were well run by the Jewish chaplain who is here on JBB for a few weeks. Both were really nice experiences. 

 

The first seder was rather traditional and intimate, about 15 people showed up - at least 10 of whom were Jewish.  One of the Army officers (the youngest) asked the four questions and a soldier from the Air Force found the Afikomen (both were female).  We had Kosher for Passover self-heating LaBriute MREs for the meal as well as plenty of matzoh (regular and some shmurah hand-made in NY), gefilte fish, macaroons, chocolate, jelly friut slices, and other traditional Pesach fare.  One of our JBB regulars made great (Ashkenazi) charoset (with great difficulty as she had only a pocket knife and blender) and we got some sefardic charoset in the mail.  We used little packets of horseradish for maror as well as some horseradish sauce. There was also a little wine- as part of an exception to GO#1B for religious purposes.  

 

During the seder the chaplain was talking about the difficulties he had getting the stuff from the Army for the seders.  The K for P MREs arrived a bit late.  We ultimately did get plenty - half chicken and half beef stew.  There were also plenty of leftovers.  He then went on to tell us about the different people in the US who sent all kinds of things and all the offers he had for help.  Our 20 cans of macaroons came from one person, our gefilte fish came from another.  A third sent kosher for Passover toothpaste and lots of new toothbrushes.  We got tons of kosher for Pesach cereal, Barton's chocolate, marshmallows, and much else that I must be forgetting.  The piece de resistance was a whole lot of gift cards donated to us by a few really generous folks from different schools, congregations and organizations in the US.  It was truly inspiring and humbling to be the benefactor of such largess from such complete strangers who never met us and probably never will.  I sent some of the people thank you emails, but it seems a bit inadequate.  The seders would not have been the same without their generosity. 

 

The second seder was open to the Jewish service members and the first 40 or 50 others who signed up.  The seder itself was thus larger and somewhat less traditional .  There was a lesson on Hora dancing, a movie clip of the Jews crossing the Red Sea from Moses the Lawgiver, and some rather non-traditional music.  One of our guests found the afikoman and everyone left with a bag of stuff that was donated to us.  The rabbi did a great job both nights. 

 

A friend who is stationed a bit farther north in Q-West sent pictures of his seder and I would assume there were seders in Baghdad and Kuwait as well and probably elsewhere in theater.

It was a bit sad not to be able to be with my family and friends this year on Passover, but we pulled together and had an experience that most of us will not soon forget.

Update: 3-MAY-2010 - I am told that COB Speicher's seder was planned out by a TCN who used to work in a South African Jewish retirement home and was able to prepare a whole bunch of traditional seder stuff. I also saw pictures of the Seder on one of our bases in Kaiserslautern, Germany.

New Location

I am no longer in JBB.  I am now in COB Speicher.  I will keep you all updated as I get settled in.