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Days of Awe We were young and we were innocent, students in the Hesder yeshivot that flourished after the Six Day War. The yeshivot we attended, wearing the knitted kippa of religious Zionism, looked like all the other yeshivot through generations of Jewish tradition, yet there was a difference — the tang of learning Torah in Eretz Yisrael. In the yeshiva we plunged into a spiritual world that saturated our entire being. We dealt with Halacha and ethics, argued over Talmudic dialectics, immersed ourselves in Bible and Jewish philosophy. Maimonides and Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari were the underpinnings of our worldview. The influential spirit and teaching of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook permeated it all. We were brought up to regard the State of Israel as the beginning of Redemption. Israel’s independence, the miracle of the Six Day War, the return to the expanses of the Land of Israel — all bolstered our faith. We considered ourselves descendants of generations of Torah scholars as well as citizens of the State of Israel, as we celebrated its independence and felt responsible for its security. Coming from this background, we enlisted in the IDF. We served in the paratroops and infantry, and we trained. The encounter with non-observant soldiers, many of them Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzniks, was a novel experience for us, yet we knew we were brothers. It’s how we were brought up. We never dreamt Israel was still fighting for its life. Our world was intact, without cracks or scars. We were young and innocent, and dreamers. Yom Kippur was the climax of the Days of Awe, themselves the culmination of our yearlong spiritual endeavors. Our prayers pleaded for forgiveness; we reverently awaited the great blast of the shofar signaling the end of the fast day and proclaiming clemency and purity, as the gates of joy are flung open. Then the siren sounded, undulating and piercing. The world changed, forever. I knew it could never again be as it was before. Happy faces filled with anxiety, and white garments were hastily exchanged for khakis. It was hard to take leave of the yeshiva, with its all-pervasive atmosphere of Yom Kippur purity. The abrupt summons came as we prayed for appeasement and forgiveness. WITHIN HOURS we were in another, altogether different world. Rapidly loading equipment on tanks, we glimpsed the anxious expressions of the commanders as screams for help came over the radio from the Golan Heights. Ripped all at once from our world, we burst onto the battlefield. As our tanks rolled over the Bnot Ya’acov bridge we watched the engineering corps soldiers mine the bridges to ready them for demolition. Suddenly we were face to face with death. All around us tanks were being hit one by one, planes fell, long columns of Syrian tanks were approaching. Shocked fear gripped us all. Our entire existence was being put to the test — our modes of personal conduct and our worldview alike. We were beset by troubling questions about this war that we, the yeshiva students, shared with the rest of the nation, about the State of Israel and its place in history, and above all about God and Divine providence. The questions gained in urgency. What would happen to the People of Israel? The Land of Israel? One look at the commanders’ faces was enough, though we didn’t even need it: We could see for ourselves dozens of Syrian tanks sweeping down towards the Kinneret. We saw them taking the divisional headquarters in Nafah. We saw our own planes, the symbol of the Six Day War victory, falling from the sky. We listened as the radio communication system went dead. Tank battalions fell apart. The State of Israel was fighting for its life. And then I felt the things we had learnt in books stir and course through me. Verses and homilies and study seemed to come to life in front of my eyes. The Land of Israel and the People of Israel. Protecting Israel from its enemies. Maimonides’s injunction against the display of fear in time of war. Who thought we would be stopping with our bodies an enemy sweeping over the Golan and threatening our country? My religious life became actuality rather than mere study. I had always prayed to God but now I cried out to Him from my heart’s very chambers. I knew about prayer from the depths; I thought I understood it. Now I knew the meaning of real, pure prayer, without the slightest obstruction. I had always believed in God, but now my belief changed, grew clear and profound: "For Your hand holds every living spirit and the soul of every man; the soul is Yours and the body Your creation, have mercy on Your creatures." Countless times had I repeated these words of the Yom Kippur prayer; I thought I understood them. Now they were bursting out of me of their own accord, clearly visible. WHAT DID I see in those awful days? The world, inside and out. In fear and shock and dread I saw true love between soldiers and commanders, religious and secular — a love I can’t even describe. I saw the devotion of the rank-and-file soldiers as they desperately clambered back into tanks that went up in flames, to stop the enemy with their bare hands. I saw a commander standing in his jeep in the middle of a grisly battlefield and calmly give orders to his men. I saw confidence win out over fear, faith over dread, hope over despair. Pain and sadness pierce the heart but don’t break it. A battalion with most of its tanks hit and many commanders killed pulled itself together within hours and was ready to head unhesitatingly back into battle. I saw that a level head can be maintained even in the maelstrom. I saw gentle yeshiva boys turn into stalwart courageous fighters holding their ground and not retreating. I saw everything inside and out. And I stored up the sounds and smells and sights. I knew the day would come when people wouldn’t believe me. Who would believe that only the battalion second-in-command and two tanks, one with no shells and the other with no gun, were left to carry on the attack? Who would believe that soldiers who looked broken and defeated could within a few hours form a battalion and launch a counterattack? Who would believe that a young officer draped a wounded soldier over each of his shoulders and ran among the tanks under heavy fire looking for more wounded? So, for all the grim dismay at the surprise, despite the anger at the state our tanks were in, and the shock at discovering that the People of Israel was still fighting for its life, we also had great pride. Pride in not breaking down, in turning an impossible defensive into victory, and in the wonderful inner strengths we discovered we had, especially the ability to keep a level head amid calamity. Nor was our conception of the State of Israel shaken; it just altered matured. If we had been innocent in thinking we could trace the process of the redemption of the People of Israel in its land, we grew out of that. We didn’t falter, or deny the teaching of Rabbi Kook, that the very return to Eretz Yisrael, the liberation from foreign domination, and the flourishing of the land, are in themselves the seed of redemption. On the contrary: people’s ability, achieved with God’s help, to turn shock and vulnerability into victory strengthened our belief, though undeniably it lost its innocence. It became evident that the process of Israel’s redemption had begun with the return to Zion, but we cannot trace its future progression which may be delayed, or tortuous, and we can’t always expect miracles visible to all. At times, our return to the land may be a painful process. We have no prophet today who can reveal to us God’s plans for leading His people to liberty and redemption. Man must be humble before God and recognize his human limitations; yet we remain steadfast in the knowledge that we are witnessing the realization of prophecies: the ingathering of the exiles, the blossoming of a wasteland, and Israel’s independence. This is evidence of the process of our redemption, although mortal man can neither divine the ways of God nor comprehend them fully. God’s providence is too wondrous a thing. Another wondrous thing happened to us: The innocent belief of youth which the sights and sounds of the Yom Kippur War lacerated so brutally, and filled with questions, didn’t shatter. True, it changed. It is filled with pain and sadness, but more mature, and deeper — and intact. Yes, we see now that faith in God amounts to more than mere tranquillity; it is also spiritual upheaval, and questions with no easy answers. We learned that faith entails responsibility, and we penetrated the meaning of many biblical passages. We came to the profound realization that man can never aspire to fully grasp God’s design. A man who sees his life hanging by a thread, and cries out to God from the very bottom of his heart, will never live as he did before. He finds himself seeking the meaning and purpose of life. If he is sensitive, he will be able to keep things in proportion, separate the wheat from the chaff. In the Hallel prayer we recite from Psalms: "All nations have beset me; by the name of the Lord I will surely cut them down. The beset me, they surround me; by the name of the Lord I will surely cut them down. They have beset me like bees; they shall be extinguished like burning thorns; by the name of the Lord I will surely cut them down. You pressed me hard, I nearly fell; but the Lord helped me." The first verses express how we felt after the Six Day War, at seeing the enemies who had encircled us quelled like a fire in thorns. The last verse expresses our feeling during the Yom Kippur War. I nearly fell, we all nearly fell, but God lifted us up and we praise Him: The Lord is my strength and might; He has become my deliverance. A poem I wrote during the war, on a scrap of paper on the gun shield, in my gunner’s compartment in the tank:
The writer, a Talmud instructor in Yeshivat Ma’aleh Edomim, is author of the award winning novel Adjusting Sights.
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