On a hot, dusty hill, I confronted the tragedy of Jewish amnesia

I will always remember that Shivah Asar B’Tammuz. It was 1974, the summer after the Yom Kippur War, and I’d been called up to serve in the IDF reserves. Despite the fast, our commander wouldn’t let me skip the training exercises we were doing that day. A dry heat wave made conditions intolerable for all the soldiers — the exercises were under the blazing sun — but it was far worse for me, the only one who was fasting. There were rules about when and how much to drink, but the rest of my platoon was ignoring them and drinking freely from their canteens, while I didn’t taste a drop of water all day.

The commanding officer, a young man from a principled chiloni kibbutz, was unbending, even when several nonreligious soldiers took pity on me and appealed to him to exempt me from the exercises. His reason, he claimed, was ideological. It irritated him that I was fasting because of “some event” that took place thousands of years ago (namely, the siege of Yerushalayim). “I have no problem with you wanting to remember that loss,” he said, “but to fast all day over it, thousands of years later? That’s taking things to a ridiculous extreme.”

So that Shivah Asar B’Tammuz, I paid full price for being frum. I suffered in silence all day. But after I went home and took a short rest, I wrote a letter to my commanding officer:

“Dear Corporal M.,

“Now that I’ve broken my fast and rested a bit after a grueling day of training exercises, I feel I ought to show you how I succeeded today and how you failed.

“Yes, you carried out your duty successfully as an officer, insofar as you led a difficult exercise that included running through challenging terrain in extreme heat and ‘conquering’ some nameless hill overlooking Rosh HaAyin in an important training maneuver. But as a member of the Jewish People, you failed to remember the value of this fast day in the life of our nation.

“Believe me, I suffered plenty at your hands today, but I pitied you more than I pitied myself. I knew exactly why I was fasting, despite the great difficulty, for the fast connects me powerfully to my people and my homeland in a more profound way than your training sessions, as important for the protection of the country as they are, ever could.

“The saddest part is that you probably don’t even understand what I’m talking about. The Beis Hamikdash was destroyed more than 1,900 years ago. But for us, it is not merely a memory, and we are not simply lamenting the loss of a sanctuary or even of Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Yisrael. Our mourning and fasting over the Churban, which reaches its climax on Tishah B’Av two weeks from now, is about what we are missing now, not what we lost back then. We are mourning the fact that we have not yet seen the Temple rebuilt, with all its spiritual benefits. ‘Anyone who does not see the rebuilding of Yerushalayim is considered as if it were destroyed in his lifetime.’ That is what our Sages say. Do you understand the impact of this statement? It is as if this generation destroyed it! We’re not talking about a vague commemoration of some bit of ancient history. It’s about a living reality in our consciousness today — a collective memory to which you are, so sadly, totally unconnected.

“When we stood there in the hills, it wasn’t the right time and place to speak my mind, with all the other soldiers looking on. I kept my thoughts to myself, but I will share them with you now. I was watching how you drank without a care, without any awareness, smug in the attainment of your military position as bringing salvation to the modern Jew — yet I was thinking of the poverty of your spiritual life, the poverty of your memory. Do you remember what it was like when we went to the Beit Levenstein rehab center to visit some of our men who’d been wounded in the Yom Kippur War? Several of our comrades had suffered brain injuries, and they didn’t even recognize us. We told them our names and tried to remind them of battles we’d fought together. It was no use. They had zero recollection. The wife of one wounded soldier stood by crying, and she told us that he didn’t even remember her, except for brief moments. His memory was simply gone. Do you recall how painful that was, to be confronted with a man who’d lost his memory and to realize how much of his humanity he had lost? He was like a fraction of a man.

“Forgive me, Corporal, but to tell you the truth, you have lost your memory too. Baruch Hashem you are healthy and sound of mind, but nevertheless, you suffer from memory loss. It’s as if something hit you and wiped out your national, historical memory.

“I remember in our last round of miluim one night when we were back in our tents after a hard day of training. You summoned me (not by name — I was simply called ‘the dati’), saying I was wanted in the officers’ tent. I came, and you had a question for me: Who was Rashi? I was embarrassed for you, a graduate of the Israeli school system and a university student, asking a question like that. I explained to you as well as I could who Rashi was, and then you went on to ask me who the Rambam was. You said, with some abashment, that of course you’d heard of the Rambam. He was some kind of famous doctor — there was a hospital named after him in Haifa. But what made him so important that they named a hospital after him? And who was he, anyway?

“Inside, I was crushed. I knew at that moment that I was standing in front of typical secular Israeli youth, in all their glory. Stripped bare of national memory. If you don’t know who Rashi and Rambam were, then you certainly have never heard of Rabi Yehudah HaLevi, the Rashba, the Shulchan Aruch, the Rema, the Maharal, and hundreds of other such off-sounding names scattered over the pathways of our history.

“So who won a victory today when we stood on that dusty hill we supposedly conquered — you or I? I, the dati who was connected on this day of national Jewish mourning to the tremendous experience and privilege of Jewish national memory, or you, so disconnected that you didn’t even know what I was talking about?

“But really, what else could anyone expect, since your teachers never transmitted the memory of the Beis Hamikdash to you. They left you with a gaping void where there ought to be a rich store of meaning. But they didn’t leave you totally severed from the message held in these days of mourning, because, believe it or not, it’s been carved into your Jewish soul — a message of hope for a glowing future, which I pray we may all merit to partake in. May it be revealed before our eyes speedily, in our days. Amen.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 771)