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They'd rather be bathing in the sea than defending it
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"Believe me," the letter began. “We’d rather be just bathing in the sea than constantly defending it.”
The missive arrived from the son of a friend of mine who serves in the Israeli navy. The young man was honored recently at a ceremony along the sea shore, near the port town of Ashdod. The navy vociferously patrols the coast up and down the busy beaches, especially in that corridor between the scorched ruins of the terror-infested Gaza City and the gleaming towers of tourist-laden Tel Aviv (pictured above). My friend’s son was cited for valor in one of Israel’s countless and obligatory and exhausting interceptions of Palestinian infiltrators who were intent on blowing up a shopping mall, a school, anything to prove their nihilistic point.
I had called to express congratulations but missed the thoughtful naval captain, age 22, who would soon complete his service and—as is the ritual of so many young, restless Israeli citizen-soldiers—take off for a year somewhere, anywhere away from the confined, vulnerable, beloved nation-state they are sworn to defend. And it’s only after the three-year compulsory service in the army, air force, or navy, and then often after a year to decompress in India or Canada or Thailand, that these lithe, modern Hebrew warriors, replete with I-Pods, cellular phones, and a hunger to see exotica, even matriculate into one of Israel’s many distinguished universities.
We like to glamorize these Israeli men and women (not the politicians, the people) and there is indeed much that is glamorous about them. But our admiration is misplaced, and even our spiritual aura poorly imagined, when we assume that they really want to be cavaliers and spies. They are as tired of the wars, the bombings, the air strikes, the security checks as are the non-indoctrinated young people on the Palestinian side who’ve not been ruined by the toxic grip of jihadists.
My friend’s son gave me an important perspective, a harbinger of my Rosh Hashanah devotions, when we will dip apples in honey and pray for the equivalent sweetness for all of God’s children. No hero in clay, this tender young man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, who was handed duty and sought to dispense with it.
“Believe me, we’d rather be just bathing in the sea than constantly defending it.”
Will this religious new year, this anniversary of Creation, finally be the year of peaceful waters?
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