Thanks Syag Lchochma!
Part II?
I said, “Kashrut was occasionally problematic, especially at the tinier places I was at but one manages.”
When I was at that (then) tiny roadblock between Ramot & Kever Shmuel, we had a hot fleischig lunch delivered (in foil pains) every day from a nearby Border Police base (the one next to where yesterday’s vehicular terrorist attack started). For the other meals we were on our own. We had a big tent with a few gas burners and big cooler that served as our fridge (for the cheese, cottage cheese, eggs, salami & such). The guys there would cook whatever they liked so I would only eat cold food for the other two daily meals (it was do-it-yourself). I got kind of sick of that & took to making soup in our coffee pot (the only thing anyone ever made in it was coffee so I figured it was OK). IDF charoset comes in little foil packets & was made with lots of pureed dates, Sephardi-style. It was also laced with so much ginger that it could have been used for maror. Mixed with alot of cottage cheese & spread on matzah it made an OK breakfast.
One year I was seconded (as the Brits say) to the Nahal Haredi. This was, I think, 2001, when it was still in its infancy & one actually had to be haredi to get into it. (Now anyone get into Netzah Yehuda, as the Nahal Haredi battalion is called.) We were at a little base in the Jordan Valley, just north of Jericho. Seeing that great social-religious experiment up-close-and-personal was very cool. You could divide the guys there into two groups. First, there were the Idealists, very dedicated, idealistic young haredi men who really wanted to serve in the IDF, as long as certain conditions were met (more about those in a minute), and some of whom had been ostracized by their families & communities for serving in the IDF. Then there was the Fringe, guys who, for whatever reason, didn’t fit into the haredi yeshiva world here & were on the fringe of haredi society. (More than a few of these guys had ADD/ADHD written all over them.) Some forward-thinking rabbonim figured that something had to be done to help these guys to avoid their drifting into petty crime & such. With the army thy could work & make lives for themselves. So these two disparate groups were tossed together to make the Nahal Haredi. What were the “conditions”? 1) No women at the base. 2) The kitchen was mehadrin, maybe not all Badatz, but everything had to have some mehadrin heksher. 3) Barring security emergencies, they would have time to daven shaharit in the base shul every day. At shaharit in the morning I could tell who was who: The Idealist were davening & the Fringe were goofing off or otherwise just passing the time.
One of the Fringe guys told me a story that still makes me want to cry. He said that he was in a haredi yeshiva high school somewhere here & one day raised his hand to ask a question. He said that he wasn’t trying to be a smart-aleck & that he really wanted an answer (I believe him). His question was, “Why is it important to believe in G-d?” The rav came over, slapped his face & told him to get out. He never went back.
It was nice that year riding around on motorized patrol & talking about the parsha or some other frum topic & not the usual bs that reservists talk about.
That was the year I was in for Tu B’Shvat. On Leil Tu B’Shvat, I was out on mototized patrol. As we were riding around I found myself looking up at a beautiful sliver of a crescent moon. Think what’s wrong with that picture. I *knew* it was Tu B’Shvat & wondered why the moon wasn’t full. I thought that maybe I had nodded off or had taken a knock on my head. Just when I was ready for the Twilight Zone music to kick in, I asked our officer to look at the moon. He said, “Yeah, nice eclipse, isn’t it?” I felt *so* much better.
My last stint of reserve duty was in February-March 2003. I was a male escort. Really. I was seconded to a company that rode shotgun (actually we had M-16s) on all the schoolbuses & other vehicles that took kids from the (mainly chiloni) yishuvim in the Jordan Valley & along the Allon Road to/from the various regional schools. We would have to get up very early & be driven by our Druze drivers down to the various meeting points to meet buses before they started picking up the kids. One of our Druze drivers was a youg guy doing his first stint of reserve duty. As we drove through this one Arab area, he would always scream curses at the local Palestinian Arabs. I asked him why one day. He turned to me with dead seriousness and said, “You cannot hate them the way we do. We will teach you how to hate them.” I was a bit taken aback. (‘Course when you realize that the Border Police officer who was murdered in yesterday’s attack in Jerusalem was a career Druze officer who left behind a pregnant wife & three young children, you begin to figure out why there is so much bad blood between the Druze & the Palestinians.)
I did the medic’s course back in 1991 at the big base at Tzrifin, across the highway from Kfar Chabad. We were there for Pesah (but got out for Leil Seder). Our seargent came around before Pesah & asked who among our group ate only matza shmura for the whole of Pesah. These guys ate at a separate table in the dining room. The incredibly nice people at Kfar Chabad *donated* enough matza shmura for the whole of Tzrifin (as they do every year, I think)!!!
One year I was at a base at Dotan in northwest Shomron. Next to the base firing range was an ancient well that local Bedouin say is *the* well that Yosef was dumped into. We went out one day to have a look. That was ultra-cool.
The year that I saw all the stars was the year I was in for Tisha B’Av. The CO took me off motorized patrol that day & posted me at the base gate where I could sit in the shade. It was still hot. I asked our Rav back in Yerushalayim & he said that since I was at a base on the Egyptian border, I had to be alert & could drink if I need to to stay alert, which I did. IDF rules say that any soldier who fasts is entitled to a hot meal after the fast. There was precisely one other soldier at the base who was fasting but the cook was cool. He fired up the grill & made us schnitzel & chi..french fries, and then joined us.
Whenever, at any of the places I was at, we were short for a minyan, it was always the (more traditionally-minded) Sefardi guys who would help us make up the minyan. (Chiloni Ashkenazim couldn’t be bothered.)
And when I was discharged (before I schlepped out to my base to get the discharge certificate), I received a form letter from our battalion CO informing me of my impending discharge & asking me if I wanted to volunteer to keep doing annual reserve duty even past the legal discharge age. I read the letter & showed it to my wife & said that I would like to be one of those guys that you read about in the paper, who keep doing reserve duty well into their 40’s and 50’s so I could be an example to our boys. I quoted Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” My wife didn’t say a word. She just glowered at me. What a look! Phasers from the Enterprise at full power could not have borne into me like that look! I tore up the letter and that, as they say, was that. (Do other wives do that?)