Modern Day Wars and Ethnic Struggles

I've been thinking a lot about the Arab-Jewish conflict over the last few months. Since it's Hanukkah (a holiday that appears to be about latkes and candles, but really is about celebrating at least one time when God helped the terrifically outnumbered and outweaponed Jews regain holy ground), others have been thinking about it, too.

In Torah Study this morning, we made a wide detour from talking about Joseph in Egypt to discuss whether Jews, Christians and Muslims were doing enough to break down barriers. All of our holy books speak badly about the other religions. We must learn to see individuals rather than broad classes of human beings to dismiss as lesser beings simply because that is how our ancestors behaved.

Many religious folks are willing to say some of the scriptural teachings do not apply to them, like the Jewish prohibition against eating pork and shrimp or the Muslim and Mormon prohibition against drinking alcohol. Does it make any sense to say that food and alcohol laws are not the word of God, but horrible generalizations about entire other cultures are the word of God? My Torah treats Ishmael with sympathy. When I meet the descendants of Ishmael, should I treat them any differently.

Today alone I watched a movie, attended a class and read an essay that all deal with the barriers between religious groups. The movie was Ishmael, which I watched with my fiance. It was a great movie, both serious and funny. The main character identifies very strongly as a Muslim, then finds out by accident that he was adopted by a Muslim family and that his birth parents were Jewish. This temporarily destroys his life. Eventually, he has made Jewish friends but has reentered Muslim society, so he has the best of both worlds.

The class was the first in a three part series on how we view God and is taught/led by Rabbi Maurice at Temple Beth Israel in Eugene, Oregon. The class included a good cross section of Judaism today. Although there were no ultra-Orthodox present, we had pretty much every other type of Judaism present: from atheists, secular-living-but- wish-they-believed, believers who don't study, non-believers who study a lot, and believers who study a lot. A common theme among the women present was that we are willing to believe that some (or most) of the Torah is the Word of God, but that the exaggerated war scenes feel like the imaginations of men to make the Jewish people, who were is sorry shape during the time the Bible was compiled, seem like a mightier, more glorious nation. As mothers, nurturers, wives and modern women involved in the creation story within our own homes, we have trouble believing God really wanted entire towns slaughtered.

I brought up that archaeology does not support that the Hebrews destroyed and dispossessed all the Canaanites; in fact many of the towns in question were already vacant. During that time period, there were famines and political and economic unrest severe enough to drive hundreds of people out of their homes. Rabbi Maurice reminded the class that also immediately following the stories of Joshua's victories, there were stories of trying to live side by side with Canaanites and skirmishes with Philistines.

Thursday in Speech 111, the teacher brought up the invasion of Kuwait and how it terrified school children in the early 1990's. Although many of them and their parents probably had no idea where Kuwait was, somehow large numbers of American kids were afraid we'd be attacked next. So the military decided to run a letter writing campaign and teachers across the country supervised students writing letters to soldiers. A couple of my classmates remembered writing such letters! By contrast, I remember diving under the table when we heard the air raid siren during Vietnam. (Sigh.)
After coming home, I turned on the computer and found this, from Chabad.org, in my in-box:

Do you know what a Protestant B is? I know what a Protestant is, and I know what a Catholic is, and I know what a Jew is . . . but until recently, I had never heard of a Protestant B.

I learned what a Protestant B is from an essay by Debra Darvick that appeared in an issue of Hadassah Magazine. It is a chapter from a book she is working on about the American Jewish experience. And this essay is about the experience of retired Army Major Mike Neulander, who now lives in Newport News, Virginia, and who is now a Judaic silversmith. This is his story.

Then, as now, Jews were forbidden by Saudi law to enter the countryDog tags. When you get right down to it, the military’s dog tag classification forced me to reclaim my Judaism.

In the fall of 1990, things were heating up in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. I had been an Army captain and a helicopter maintenance test pilot for a decade, and received notice that I would be transferred to the First Cavalry Division, which was on alert for the Persian Gulf War. Consequently, I also got wind of the Department of Defense “dog tag dilemma” vis-à-vis Jewish personnel. Then as now, Jews were forbidden by Saudi law to enter the country. But our Secretary of Defense flat-out told the king of Saudi Arabia, “We have Jews in our military. They’ve trained with their units and they’re going. Blink and look the other way.”

With Kuwait occupied and the Iraqis at his border, King Fahd did the practical thing. We shipped out, but there was still the issue of classification. Normally the dog tags of Jewish servicemen are imprinted with the word “Jewish.” But Defense, fearing that this would put Jewish soldiers at further risk should they be captured on
Iraqi soil, substituted the classification “Protestant B” on the tags. I didn’t like the whole idea of classifying Jews as Protestant-anything, and so I decided to leave my dog tag alone. I figured if I were captured, it was in G d’s hands. Changing my tags was tantamount to denying my religion, and I couldn’t swallow that.

In September 1990 I went off to defend a country that I was prohibited from entering. The “Jewish” on my dog tag remained as clear and unmistakable as the American star on the hood of every Army truck.

A few days after my arrival, the Baptist chaplain approached me. “I just got a secret message through channels,” he said. “There’s going to be a Jewish gathering. A holiday? Simkatoro or something like that. You want to go? It’s at 1800 hours at Dhahran Airbase.”

Simkatoro turned out to be Simchat Torah, a holiday that hadn’t registered on my religious radar in eons. Services were held in absolute secrecy in a windowless room in a cinder block building. The chaplain led a swift and simple service. We couldn’t risk singing or dancing, but Rabbi Ben Romer had managed to smuggle in a bottle of Manischewitz. Normally I can’t stand the stuff, but that night, the wine tasted of Shabbat and family and Seders of long ago. My soul was warmed by the forbidden alcohol and by the memories swirling around me and my fellow soldiers. We were strangers to one another in a land stranger than any of us had ever experienced, but for that brief hour, we were home.

The wind was blowing dry across the tent, but inside there was an incredible feeling of celebrationOnly Americans would have had the chutzpah to celebrate Simchat Torah under the noses of the Saudis. Irony and pride twisted together inside me like barbed wire. Celebrating my Judaism that evening made me even prouder to be an American, thankful once more for the freedoms we have. I had only been in Saudi Arabia a week, but I already had a keen understanding of how restrictive its society was.

Soon after, things began coming to a head. The next time I was able to do anything remotely Jewish was Chanukah. Maybe it was coincidence, or maybe it was G d’s hand that placed a Jewish colonel in charge of our unit. Colonel Lawrence Schneider relayed messages of Jewish gatherings to us immediately. Had a non-Jew been in that position, the information would likely have taken a back seat to a more pressing issue. Like war. But it didn’t.

When notice of the Chanukah party was decoded, we knew about it at once. The first thing we saw when we entered the tent was food, tons of it. Care packages from the States—cookies, latkes, sour cream and applesauce, and cans and cans of gefilte fish. The wind was blowing dry across the tent, but inside there was an incredible feeling of celebration. As Rabbi Romer talked about the theme of Chanukah and the ragtag bunch of Maccabee soldiers fighting Jewry’s oppressors thousands of years ago, it wasn’t hard to make the connection to what lay ahead of us. There, in the middle of the desert, inside an olive green tent, we felt like we were the Maccabees. If we had to go down, we were going to go down fighting, as they did.

We blessed the candles, acknowledging the King of the Universe who commanded us to kindle the Chanukah lights. We said the second prayer, praising G d for the miracles He performed, in those days and now. And we sang the third blessing, the Shehecheyanu, thanking G d for keeping us in life and for enabling us to reach this season.

We knew war was imminent. All week we had received reports of mass destruction, projections of the chemical weapons that were likely to be unleashed. Intelligence estimates put the first rounds of casualties at 12,500 soldiers. I heard those numbers and thought, “That’s my whole division!” I sat back in my chair, my gefilte fish cans at my feet. They were in the desert, about to go to war, singing songs of praise to G d who had saved our ancestors in battle once before.

The feeling of unity was as pervasive as our apprehension, as real as the sand that found its way into everything from our socks to our toothbrushes. I felt more Jewish there on that lonely Saudi plain, our tanks and guns at the ready, than I had ever felt back home in synagogue.

That Chanukah in the desert solidified for me the urge to reconnect with my Judaism. I felt religion welling up inside me. Any soldier will tell you that there are no atheists in foxholes, and I know that part of my feelings were tied to the looming war and my desire to get with G d before the unknown descended in the clouds of battle. It sounds corny, but as we downed the latkes and cookies and wiped the last of the applesauce from our plates, everyone grew quiet, keenly aware of the link with history, thinking of what we were about to do and what had been done by soldiers like us so long ago.

Silently, he withdrew the metal rectangle and its beaded chain from beneath his shirt The trooper beside me stared ahead at nothing in particular, absentmindedly fingering his dog tag. “How’d you classify?” I asked, nodding to my tag. Silently, he withdrew the metal rectangle and its beaded chain from beneath his shirt and held it out for me to read. Like mine, his read, “Jewish.”

Somewhere in a military depot someplace, I am sure that there must be boxes and boxes of dog tags, still in their wrappers, all marked “Protestant B.”