I had the honor of performing the role of ba’al tekiah this year on the first day of Rosh Hashanah at our synagogue, blowing the shofar to symbolically alert Jews to repent. At the end of the next day, I was to heed another “clarion call” of self-evaluation and self-improvement, at Warrior Leader Course run by the NCO Academy at Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania.
Fascinatingly, the Days of Awe and the time spent in this course complimented one another in a way that has seldom occurred in my military career. Sure, I’ve often found Torah-observant Judaism and military service are analogous. We obey orders that often have no discernible root in logic. But just as we elevate the mundane tasks of daily life to a Divine level through our obedience, so too does the following of a seemingly ridiculous order have a ripple effect within the service. Obey a strange mitzvah or fill a sandbag, somewhere, the Divine spark is enhanced or a levee does not break. Someone can be brought closer to or prevented from prematurely meeting G-d.
As far as this school is concerned, where the focus is on professional development as a leader, one could make the argument that there is also little distinction between personal and professional development. To evolve as a leader—to become something more—one has to personally shift perspectives, adopt new means of accomplishing old tasks, and force oneself to do things one had not previously considered doing.
But two weeks is not necessarily life-changing. In most cases, this school is not. Neither is 10 days at the beginning of the Jewish calendar. Yes, we repent, rinse, and repeat year after year, because if the sacred boilerplate truly affected gross personal change, we as Jews would only need to do it once in our lifetime.
For my part, the High Holidays and Warrior Leader Course made me realize that I am rapidly approaching being the man I deeply desire to be. A good husband, a good father, a fine leader of men, a productive worker, an obedient-yet-critically-thinking Jew. It is my premise now that for those Jews in the military, that we approach the totality of what we, as Jews, are meant to be. A Jew in the military cannot but recognize the causality of our faith as applied to reality around us. A Jew in the military cannot but recognize the power and hand of a Creator. A Jew in the military cannot but recognize the validity of our lifecycle events. We see it come and go quickly before our very eyes in garrison, in theater, and anywhere else our booted feet take us. Jewish service members embody the best our community has to offer.
On Yom Kippur, though, I realized one big personal shortcoming as two conversations with congregants talked to me about the military experience in a way that tried to isolate me from my own experience as much as they were isolated from my experience. In both cases, with my wife and I, who have both endured the pain of long military separation for deployments and training, it’s a reality that we know too well. Who someone knows tangentially at a duty station across the continent does not afford us the ability to relate. I don’t like relating it to people, it feels like too much work, and there’s this sense that many of our coreligionists feel like we’re the equivalent of janitors for doing what we do. Maybe, but instead of cleaning up vomit in aisle 5, we’re cleaning up terrorists in hot, dirty places.
It true to say that many American Jews, it would seem, can only relate to many experiences by proxy. Many of our kids identify with Israel because of a short Birthright trip, though they remain detached enough from Israel that many of them can join ranks with schmucks like J Street and tell Israel what to do, whether having visited for months, weeks, or never. Of course, you’re always measured against the other kid, the one that became a doctor.
My wife opined that this is the way the small Jewish community relates to itself, by telling you who they know that does the same thing. Perhaps this is post-Shoah culture as well, where all of us feel the heat of the ovens on our skin just because we live and die as a community. I can see this.
However, this also reeks of a sort of “not invented here” syndrome. I believe it to be the same thing as when a congregation has enormous cantorial talent perhaps in its own congregation, and yet contracts a guest cantor for the High Holidays without looking within first. We all know it happens, how often we overlook internal talent. When did this become ingrained in our communal identity?
I don’t even know if my premise is correct, or if it holds true from community to community. Generalization, after all, is a good way to look stupid. What I do know, however, is that whenever I meet a former or current Jewish service member, I am immediately struck by worldliness, a lack of pettiness all too present with some boards and committees, and commitment to the community that is truly meaningful, and not just the obligatory fund-raising and arm-twisting message the synagogue president gravely delivers on Yom Kippur. This is not to say this occurs in Jews without military service, of course. I’m just saying I’ve never seen a departure from that in Jewish service members.
We’re approached in shul by neoconservatives and liberals who try to relate to our experience and make it relate to their political views. On other days, we have people that just want to make idle, noncommittal chit-chat. We suffer it in lonely, head-nodding silence. We stand apart because it’s not someone else that we know who has lived an experience. We’re the ones who have felt the sting of sand from a Chinook’s rotor wash. We’re the ones who, with an engine going out on the C-141, begin taking funny pictures of each other as the plane does an emergency landing because gallows humor is how we deal with such things. We’re the ones that have sat on a vessel, 6 months under the surface of the ocean. We’re the ones that have buried friends, 19 year old kids blown up in a Baghdad market, for what, except for an ephemeral line in the sand most Americans can’t or won’t give a tinker’s damn about, because, damn it, healthcarejobsdeficithousingbubble is more important. We’re the ones that endure that frustrating apathy punctuated by political lip service here at home. Damn it, politicians, if we wanted lip service, we’d begin with unbuttoning our trousers! At least Vietnam vets had people willing to spend enough time to spit on them. This generation of soldier gets not even that. We’re the ones who have endured firefights with enemies of rationalism and modernity, over drugs, oil, or ideology. People talk about the IDF with a mystified awe, but meanwhile, the Jews that stand on the wall between the American Jewish community and tyranny aren’t carrying Uzis and wearing OD Green–they’re right here, wearing US uniforms and flags. The guy that keeps you safe at night isn’t a pilot in the Israeli Air Force or a soldier invading Lebanon. He’s Daniel Agami, z”l, a good kid from Florida who should be on the lips of every Jew for the horrific-yet-heroic way he freely gave his life, or a fresh kippah-wearing recruit at Benning who will be soon receiving the blue cord of the infantry and then going to Airborne School to become an American paratrooper. These are the folks our b’nei mitzvah crowd should be seeking to emulate.
So this came in the middle of Warrior Leader Course, when I was bleary-eyed tired from the onslaught of all that is supposed to make you a leader of soldiers. For the past 16 years, I have really struggled with a profound disdain, to say the least, for civilians who have never served. Again, not all, but many. So on yontiff, decorum means you have to politely nod and indulge their tangential relationship to something they don’t know, they’ll never understand, and meanwhile think, “would it kill you to kiss my ass and shut up about who you know for 10 minutes?” It’s not the presumption that we care about their sixth degree of separation from the service. It’s the absence of any curiosity about our experiences that is obnoxious. After all, if they expressed the same curiosity with their friend as they did with us, I can’t imagine they know all that much about their friend’s friend’s experience either. Yes, that’s “friends” x2.
But then, after I crossed the stage at Warrior Leader Course (my daughter asking later, “why did you have your mean face, daddy?”), it hit me where and how I was failing. I don’t do what I do because I want a fellow congregant I might see once a year (or less) to kiss my tuchus. I bet she didn’t give two thoughts to a single airman, Marine, sailor, or soldier, deployed abroad during these Days of Awe. But we’re thinking about it. We’re thinking about our military Jewish community. We’re thinking about our larger community, which is why you find Jews leading from the front in our military roles. We realize that because of who we are and how we are positioned, many who have never met a Jew before will judge our entire community by our comportment. Most civilian Jews don’t get that experience, and they should consider themselves lucky. I want the Kentucky hilljack who never met a Jew before to go home and say, “I met this Jewish soldier, and he was one of the best soldiers I ever met. Jews are neat.” I don’t want them singing along when Sasha Baron Cohen in his Borat persona leads them in singing songs about tossing us down a well.
We all suffer so many indignities, from cleaning pubic hair from toilets, to flying multiple sorties in a 48 hour period, to kicking down doors in Iraq, that we will never be able to fully relate the breadth of our experiences to our loved ones, let alone the untested masses. It’s lonely, unless we’re amongst our own service Jews. We all serve, I assume, in part, so the rest of our community doesn’t have to think about it. And if you think about it, so what if Bev’s son David became a dentist pulling down six figures, and you’re a steely-eyed trigger-puller? You can go to Brandeis, be comfortable and remunerated, or you can be awesome. You can also use your college benefits and establish comfort and remuneration later, after you’ve established awesomeness and a six-pack abdomen. I promise that this will actually move your needle on JDate just a hair ahead of the oblivious, anxious young podiatrist with the Mazda Miata and velvety-soft, unworked hands.
Sometimes we just do it because our little girls are proud of us walking across a stage with our mean face as we pivot on the balls of our feet. The military, after all, does not walk in curved lines, nor do we smile while we’re marching.
For whatever reason we do what we do, I do hope that our service, our leadership, and our continual drive for improvement can subsequently elevate the rest of our community. This Yom Kippur I had to weigh out my own comportment as a Jew for this past year, but I also had to weigh out my effectiveness as a leader. In both cases, I felt assured of my strengths and have a clear path for improvement of my shortcomings. I am extremely grateful that the two overlapped and reinforced one another. By themselves, either could have been the same rote experience we all endure in our yearly Jewish lives or professional military advancement.
G-d and the military both ask basically the same thing from us: Don’t just go from event to event, checking the blocks. Move the needle. Improve the circumstances around you. One of our instructors used a line from The Lion King, “Everything the light touches is our kingdom.” This is as true of a Sergeant as it is any thinking Jew. Take ownership of the things you can control around you. If it’s in your power to change it, then it belongs to you. Improve anything you can touch. Your relationship to your loved ones, your wife, your husband, your children, your parents, your community, and your G-d—all of these things can bear the weight of continual improvement. Think of G-d as the First Sergeant with a white glove, looking for dust in the obvious places and some not-so-obvious places. In our human lives, G-d will come up with a dirty glove after it runs along the length of our year, but G-d gives us ample cleaning supplies in the form of Torah and common sense. We have ample guidance. Any failure to make “good” happen is our own.
You’ll think, too, of Yom Kippur as your yearly spiritual After Action Review. What was supposed to happen? What did happen? What went right? What went wrong? What will we do better this year? Sustain what you did right, improve what you did wrong. Then come back to G-d next year not just repentant, but that you have a plan to not be as repentant next year.
This is what it means to be a leader. This is what it should mean to be a Jew.
All the best to you and yours.
