The calendar turns to September and Tishrei and we turn to memory.
Twelve years ago last Wednesday, the morning news broke from New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Uncertainty and confusion gave way to fright and fear. In Toronto, buildings were evacuated and schools dismissed. In America, physical devastation and personal loss shifted into desperate searching and profound mourning. Resilience became resolve that the 2,978 victims of September 11 would be remembered, that buildings would be reconstructed, and -somehow –that lives would go on.
Forty years ago, on a Friday night, Kol Nidre ushered in a day of fasting and prayer. Yom Kippur afternoon, the sacred tranquility was shattered by a surprise invasion of Egyptian and Syrian forces. Yossi Klein Halevi, in his new book, We were Dreamers, writes:
Sirens sounded like a premature blast of the shofar that ends … Yom Kippur …. Israelis assumed it would end quickly.... After all, the IDF was stronger now than it had been in 1967. Surely Israeli intelligence had detected the Egyptian and Syrian troop buildup and allowed them to enter a trap. But there was no trap. ….
Israel was completely unprepared to respond.
Avraham Rabinowitz described the scene in the Cabinet.
At 12:30 p.m., [Golda] Meir … was pale. … She began with a detailed report of events …. She spoke in a monotone …. Then she reached the bottom line. In the early hours of this morning, word had been received from an unimpeachable source that war would break out at 6 p.m. this day on both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts.
The ministers were stunned. They had … been told for years that even in a worst-case situation military intelligence would provide at least a 48-hour warning to call up the reserves …. Now … two-thirds of the army [was] … unmobilized.. … An aide entered and handed [Dayan] a note. The defense minister announced that Egyptian planes were [already] attacking in Sinai. … Meir declared the meeting closed, sirens began to wail in the streets outside…. For [the next] two days or so, Dayan … spread despondency …. Meir … listened to him “in horror” …. She would acknowledge that she had thoughts of suicide.
Halevi: The … command post beneath the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv…. [was] crowded with shouting officers, exhausted assistants sleeping on the floor, retired generals hoping to be useful. …no one seemed to know what to do …..The chaos … reflected the desperation at the front. By the second day of battle, the IDF hadn’t yet managed to organize. …In the fallen forts along the Suez Canal, there were rows of Israeli POWs, stunned and disheveled, with hands padlocked over their heads. On the Golan Heights, Syrian tanks were approaching the Galilee [the heartland of the North].
Uncertainty and confusion. After three days, it appeared as if Israel would be overrun. Then, with determination and daring, the tide began to turn. But the costs were very high.
As individuals, Yom Kippur is a day when we contemplate mortality and morality. In Israel, the day is magnified by the enormity of the deaths of almost 3,000 soldiers, intensified by the injuries that affected so many more, and deepened by the psychological trauma that permeated family after family.
Trauma makes us forever different. Israelis saw their own mortality (Halevi) and today’s Israel was shaped in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. The euphoria that followed the Six Day War evaporated. The vulnerability of Israel was felt once again.
The most powerful war novels explore the souls of soldiers and civilians. The Israeli novel, Tiyyum Kavvanot, tells of a young observant soldier in the Yom Kippur War. The title, Adjusting Sights, refers to calibrations of the soul and of the tank turret.
Hayyim Sabato’s novel is about more than the spiritual crisis of a young soldier. It is about adjusting sights in many areas of life. And it is about each of us who has faced fear and fatigue, confusion and uncertainty, loss of faith and the need to believe.
It was the end of Yom Kippur…. We were two young soldiers, Dov and I. … We had studied together and trained in the same tank. I was the gunner. Dov was the loader. Together we … boarded the [soldiers’] bus. We thought we’d be back soon. … [After] three terrible days that followed… I heard of Dov’s death.
…In late spring we hosed down our tanks … handed in our gear … and returned to the Talmud… I wanted to tell the Rabbi what had happened after he blessed us. How our tanks were knocked out on the second day of the war, and how they burst into flames … and how the blackened loader hit the ground with his leg on fire and … how our tank commander, Gidi, shouted, “Gunner, fire!” and I shouted back, “I don’t know what to aim at.”
“Gunner, don’t lose the horizon. This is a war, not a maneuver. Do you hear me, gunner?”
“Yes, sir, I hear you. What should I aim at? Where?”
In the intensity of the Golan battle and with a damaged tank, Hayyim must figure out how to adjust his gun sight. The loss of his buddy and the chaos of war force Hayyim to also adjust his spiritual direction.
…We prayed when we could. You never knew when you would have another chance. … the war had taught me what concentration in prayer was - in the ambush, with no radio and unadjusted gun sights and the missiles coming closer and the tanks around us bursting into flames. Gidi had shouted, “Gunner, pray! We’re taking fire!” I prayed. There wasn’t a hair’s breadth then between my heart and my lips.
The following year, at the conclusion of the fast, Hayyim is again in Jerusalem.
… I looked at the moon and saw Dov. …. Sometimes God had mercy on the undeserving and shone His light on them. That mercy and that light stayed with you forever. … [But] sometimes God descends to His garden to the bed of spices to gather lilies – my friends, Sariel and Shmuel and Shaya and Avihu. And Dov. ….
The penitential prayers echoed in my ears: Asher be’yado nefesh kol hai, veru’ah kol besar ish…. Who holds in His hands the souls of all that live/ And the spirit of each mortal/…/Master of all worlds, spare the work of your hands! … A small cloud had drifted across [the moon]. … I stood there in silence…. I aimed my thoughts at Dov and I said, Shalom aleichem Peace onto you. Shalom aleichem.
In a few weeks, Dr Yitzhak Brook of Georgetown University will be our guest. A physician during the Yom Kippur War, he will speak in October about his experiences. He recently wrote:
Coping with fear and anxiety under fire was one of the most acute problems I faced. … Soldiers … came to me for counseling. … Initially …I told them to be tough … and to go back to their duties. … It eventually dawned on me that … “yes, I am afraid as well.” …. I observed a relief in their faces when I admitted my own fear. … I told them that courage should be defined as the ability to perform one’s duty despite fear and anxiety.
Dr Brook had to readjust his sights to acknowledge his distress, and still carry out his responsibilities. Despite the losses of our loved ones, despite our fear and hesitation, we too are called upon to perform our duties in life. The courage to go forward may require us to adjust our sights, to change the way we view life.
Usually, the readjustment of the gunner’s sights is a simple act of calibration. However, at times the mechanism to make the alignment is lost or broken. The classical Jewish instrument for the recalibration of our souls, the mitsvah tradition, is unknown to so many. Yet it still preserves power to help.
I have seen this as people say kaddish for their loved ones. Yom Kippur also helps to adjust our kavvanot, to get our lives into better focus.
But arrogance and complacency often block us from what we need to do to adjust our spiritual sights and realign our moral lives. Halevi identifies the impact of arrogance and complacency on Israel. Many believed that the war demonstrated the need for a geographical buffer zone. Religious Zionists began settlement in Judea and Samaria in earnest. Israel became increasingly isolated. The oil embargo began. African and Third World countries broke off diplomatic relations. The Zionism is Racism resolution passed in the United Nations. “For right-wing Israelis, … the sin of Yom Kippur was complacency, allowing ourselves to believe that [we] no longer faced existential threat. The conclusion was: We must remain alert, never lower our guard”, recognize “the futility of concessions and weakness.”
Sadat came to Jerusalem. Peace activists felt the Yom Kippur War could have been prevented. They blamed the leaders who were unresponsive to Arab overtures and the popular post-1967 T-shirts that mocked the defeated Arab armies. Left-wing Israelis saw Israel sharing responsibility for the absence of peace. For them, “the sin of Yom Kippur 1973 was arrogance, an excessive reliance on power. The conclusion was: We must be open to peace and not only rely on power.”
In our own lives, arrogance is the need to “big ourself up”—whether publicly or just inside our own minds. Arrogance often reflects inner anxiety. Repeatedly during the al het confessional, we will speak of the sin of arrogance, excessive pride נטיית גרון, hard-heartedness אמוץ הלב, and conceit עינים רמות. “In the moment of transgression, behaviour that should embarrass seems proper, masked, as it were, by the powerful emotions that prompt it: anger, fear, greed, resentment, confusion, and self-righteousness. Only later, … does our action come once again into our mind, so that we may face it, acknowledge it for the mistake that it is, and make amends. (Jonathan Slater)
Complacency stems from self-satisfaction. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditschev claims, “If a person performs a mitzvah and thinks it has been done perfectly, God disregards the mitzvah… because of the person’s attitude” (Lev 4.27, Kedushat Levi). Complacency is dangerous in our daily lives and our spiritual practice. We feel that we know best and don’t need to ask for help. But what is familiar can become perilous. Just two years ago there was a sense of relative stability in Egypt and Syria. It’s the same old. Now it is totally different.
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo writes: Our [ancestors] understood these hours [of Yom Kippur] to be … a time of great spiritual embarrassment…..… but we have lost the sense of trembling before God. We are complacent. Judging from what some political leaders tweet, cyber-bullies post, or fraternities chant, there is no longer a feeling of shame regarding what we do. We have been numbed by our needs and pleasures. We are neither contrite nor embarrassed.
In America post- 911 and in Israel following the Yom Kippur War, events compelled leaders and people to face new realities. To adjust sights, one rotates the lenses until double images align.
Facing the killings of over 100,000 Syrians, the use of chemical weapons, opposition forces supported by al-Qaida, and a divided Congress, we are watching the United States struggle to align its vision of a world order governed by international norms with a fear of becoming entangled in an extended conflict far from its borders.
Israel is trying to align the need for territorial concessions for peace with the requirement of security and a recognition that peace isn’t likely so long as the Arab world rejects the legitimacy of Israel. These competing visions and voices call for an adjustment of sights to gain some clarity. But it is not so clear who or what is out there.
In Adjusting Sights, Hayyim eventually comes to a different and deeper understanding of God and life. There is appreciation and gratitude. Yet his experiences have taught him that life is not so easy and faith not so glib. One does not always return home in a few days. Some never return. Faith is clouded, like the moon. Hayyim does not discard his faith. He struggles with it. Just as we do.
At yizkor, we are called to struggle with our clouded-over faith. As we evoke those we have loved, we are called to adjust the way we recall their lives, to align all the elements of their personalities, to form a balanced picture of the people we remember.
Yom Kippur also is a day when we place ourselves in the coordinates. We aim, as it were, at ourselves. Without arrogance or complacency, hopefully with humility, we must adjust our sights, our focus on the world, on our families, on ourselves.
“Gunner, fire!”
I shouted back, “I don’t know what to aim at.”
“Gunner, don’t lose the horizon. This is a war, not a maneuver. Do you hear me, gunner?”
“Yes, sir, I hear you. What should I aim at? Where?”
~~~~
During these Days of Awe, I’ve spoken about memory and anniversaries, about the Yom Kippur War and 911, about our personal challenge to adjust our sights to frame a new spiritual alignment. Now I want to ask you, before Yizkor, to consider making an investment in Israel.
Israel is not a poor country. It still needs our tzedakah for social services, education and many other projects.
But I’m speaking now about two other mitzvot: yishuv ha’aretz and binyan ha’aretz, the mitzvot to settle and develop the Land of Israel. Israel Bonds is a secure means to remember personal and national anniversaries and to invest in the future. The new highways, rapid train lines and many other infrastructure projects that will enable Israeli technological innovations to benefit Israel and the world, all receive their basic support from Bonds. This is social and strategic investing.
Prior to Yizkor is a propitious time to commit to mitzvot. Your actions stem from the values and vision of those who saw the dream of Israel come into being. You can carry that dream forward.
Haim Sabato, Adjusting Sights. 2003. http://www.tobypress.com/books/adjustingsights.htm
Yossi Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation.2013.
Itzhak Brook, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-meaning-of-courage-memories-of-the-yom-kippur-war/
Yossi Klein Halevi, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/resolving-israels-internal-war-of-atonement/
Jonathan Slater, in Lawrence Hoffman, We Have Sinned, 2013. p.229.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo, http://cardozoacademy.org/current-thought-to-ponder-by-rabbi-lopes-cardozo/yom-kippur-to-dream-harder/
