Efrem Sigel’s Sar-El Memories

            Yes, Bill is AWOL while the rest of us put together gas mask kits in Ashdod, but who's to say he isn't making his own contribution to individual happiness and national security in what Israelis stoically call these difficult times?

            Bill, a spry 84-year old from the Philadelphia area, is part of the group of 100 American and Canadian volunteers milling around Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv on a late October day, waiting for our hosts, Sar-El (the word is an acronym for "Sherut l'Yisroel," service to Israel), to figure out which army bases to send us to.  Twice as many volunteers show up from the States as were expected, and it's going to take the Sar-El folks a while to sort things out.

            Lest anyone should see these people in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, with lined faces and drooping bellies, and fear for Israel's prowess at arms, I should add that none of us is being posted to infantry units on the outskirts of Ramallah.  Instead, we're headed for bases housing transport equipment, medical supplies, soldiers' gear—the grinding, unglamorous, grease-splattered work units that maintain the trucks, refurbish the tanks and make up the medics' kits, all the unseen logistics that keep the Israeli army in high readiness. 

            Recruiting the volunteers, meeting them at the airport, shuttling them to bases accompanied by madrichot (guides), providing evening education programs and weekly sightseeing trips, is what Sar-El is all about.  Since General Aharon Davidi, the paratroop commander, first had the idea for the program back in 1982, Sar-El has brought 75,000 foreign volunteers to Israel.  The numbers fell during the late 90s but rose sharply after the unprecedented wave of barbarous attacks on Israelis began in 2000.  By the time we showed up, more than 6000 volunteers a year were flooding into Israel.

            Sar-El tells us that every volunteer who comes enables a reservist to stay home with his family, and thus continue working at his civilian job, but I’m dubious.  How does the army take a bunch of untrained foreigners, almost none of whom speaks Hebrew, and put them to work efficiently?
            Three hours frustrating hours at the airport do little to dispel my unease.  My new comrades are all strongly committed to Israel, but a few (very few, in all honesty) seem to regard Sar-El as a cheap vacation. One 70-year old retiree has already done it 17 times. 

            Dazed and discomfited by the wait, I examine anew the impulse that brought me here.  Will my effort will bring tangible benefit to the army, or is it nothing but an act of gratuitous personal validation masquerading as selflessness? The answer matters; after all,  I am the who convinced Frederica to dedicate two weeks of her vacation to this trip, who patiently explained (can I really be sure of this?) that no, Bush will not attack Iraq until after the elections, until after Ramadan, until long after we're back from Israel. 

            Usually the airport rendezvous goes more smoothly, but on this day, as the Sar-El people readily admit, it is near-chaos. Pamela, the Sar-El program coordinator in Tel Aviv, and Tamara, one of the madrichot, frantically work their cellphones, looking for army bases to take these extra volunteers, who have just staggered off 11-hour flights from North America. One of them is Bill.  Along with two North Carolinians, Ronnie and Frank, Bill gets assigned to a medical equipment depot at a huge base.

            Ten days later we catch up with Ronnie, a born-again Baptist who runs his own landscape business, and Frank, a lawyer and former state senator, when Sar-El reunites us in Ashdod.  That's when we hear about Bill's excellent adventure: the previous weekend, when each of us went our separate ways—to visit relatives, sightsee in Jerusalem, climb Masada—Bill landed in Haifa.  There he met a woman (I think of the camp song we used to sing, about the deacon who went down to the cellar to pray, met a blond and stayed all day), and never came back to the base.

            The bus trip to Ashdod will come two days before we leave Israel.  Until then, we are stationed at an army base in the desert, north of Be'er Sheva. For a week and a half here I've been cleaning the grease from gigantic truck tarps, painting the front raised panels of truck trailers, or checking the storage compartments of those trailers for giant U-shaped hooks. Chains with links as big as oranges pass through the hooks to secure tanks to the flat beds of these trailers and if any of these ponderous fasteners are missing we have to fetch them from the back of a supply vehicle.

            Our work area is the long line of trailer flat beds that stretches to our right, 55 just in our section of the base.  Tony—who used to run legal affairs in Universal's theme park division—and I walk back and forth in our khaki army work uniforms and our stiff-as-dead-squirrel leather boots, clambering onto the trailers, tugging open the heavy steel doors of the supply compartments, checking, toting, checking, toting. 

            Our supervisor is Alex, a Russian immigrant and career soldier who is built like a wrestler, squat and immovable.  All day he drives trucks, switching from vehicle to vehicle, making sure they all start.  Once or twice a day he swings by, leans out the cab, gives me a big grin.  "Hakol b'seder?" he asks.  Everything okay?  "B'seder," fine, I reply.  Not sure if I've really understood, he repeats again, "Hakol b'seder?", cautions us to work "leyat, leyat" (slowly, slowly) and off he goes.

            Funny about the work, it is all the things we've been warned about¾menial, repetitive, poorly organized¾but not disagreeable. The physical labor has the effect of dulling the reflex to always question why.  Instead of my original concern, “Are we helping the army?”, I’m now wondering when the sun will duck below the warehouse roof and give us much-needed shade, whether I need to lug more hooks from the supply vehicle, and of course, how many more trailers before the day’s end.

            We work slowly, as Alex advises, our uniforms stained with perspiration, because the hooks are heavy as dumbbells, and because climbing up and down the trailers under the desert sun tests our agility. One day when we are painting red rectangles on yellow trailer fronts, the base commander pays a visit and asks us the kind of questions commanders ask: how's the work, how are the living conditions, how's the food (don’t ask, commander, I want to reply to the latter question¾but I hold my tongue). 

            The lieutenant colonel explains that every one of these vehicles was mobilized in early April after the Passover massacre in Netanya, when the army rolled into the West Bank in force.  Now the trucks and trailers need to be readied for service again.  This is work that needs doing, he says, and we thank you for doing it. 
            His words do not erase my skepticism, but after several days I notice that skepticism is not my dominant frame of mind.  Sar-El has taken 20 disparate individuals and formed them into a team¾Tamara, with her smile, her light touch, her knack for the right word deserves a lot of the credit¾and a group dynamic is taking hold.   We kid each other, we watch the soldiers watching us, we talk a bit about Israel's awful predicament, we fall into a sort of Tevye the milkman rhythm: sunrise, breakfast, a row of trucks, lunch, another row of trucks, sunset and then the evening air that soothes away all cares.

            While Tony and I toil in the sun, other volunteers take inventory in cavernous warehouses or assemble kitbags for reservists who are called up.  On the day that we are to see Ronnie and Frank in Ashdod, we have left off kitbags and truck parts.  Instead, we will work in a vast hangar commandeered by the army's emergency response and civil defense units. 

            There is an air of anticipation as we climb the steps of the bus at 7:30, ten minutes after finishing our breakfast of cottage cheese, Israeli salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, red peppers), hardboiled eggs and stale bread.  At MHN, the algorithm for removing bread from the cupboard is first in, first out, guaranteeing that a loaf that was fresh on Sunday is moldering when it finally makes it to the table on Tuesday.
            Mornings are cool and quiet in the desert; the sun has only recently climbed above the horizon to cast its pale light on the sere landscape of the desert. A wire fence that stretches forever encloses vast layered tracts of brown and beige, some of them recently shaped into huge parking lots near the base headquarters, lots that are meant to accommodate flotillas of earth-moving equipment.
            As we file down the aisle of the bus we notice two remarkable things.  First, the passengers already seated are speaking French.  Second, they are calling out "shalom," "boker tov," "good morning"—and smiling; 20 Frenchmen we've never seen before, smiling at us.  I take a seat in back and find myself in conversation with a kindly fellow of 71 who is unabashedly pro-American.  He'll never forget being 13 and living in Normandy when the Allies landed in June '44. "Have you seen the American cemetery there?" he asks me in his old-fashioned, courtly French. "Row after row of young Americans who died to liberate France—young kids, 18 and 19, who barely had an idea what Europe was, only that they had come to save it."

            Over the years I've spent a fair amount of time with the French: as a teacher in Ivory Coast, as a volunteer on kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, as a tourist in Paris. But this bus ride is the first time the French have ever smiled at me without ulterior motive and without gritting their teeth from the effort not to snicker at my accent.

            At the Ashdod warehouse, more surprises.  Nearly 100 volunteers have been mustered together from bases around the country, including Ronnie and Frank (but, we learn, not Bill), the French and a group of Russians. Before we begin work we're offered coffee and cake, nonexistent at our other base.  Then, when we divide ourselves into groups of 10, we are given clear explanations of what to do—and the right tools for doing it. Quite a change from the other base, where we're asked to clean tarps but not given detergent or mops—until we demand them—or told to touch up trucks with a paint brush that has seen more army service than the duty sergeant.          

            Today our job is to build a stockpile of gas masks to protect children against biological and chemical attack.   In the U.S., newspaper articles about the coming attack on Iraq and whether Iraq will respond with chemical and biological weapons have a certain remoteness to them: the crude missiles Sadam Hussein possesses will never reach New York or Washington.  But in Israel this is deadly serious: 39 Scud missiles landed here in 1991, and no one underestimates the potential devastation should weapons loaded with anthrax or sarin gas strike Tel Aviv. 
            The way to get people to do a job for which they have no experience in a country where most of them do not speak the language is to break the job into a series of idiot-proof steps. This is what Liat, the second lieutenant in charge, has done.  Each group of 10 is placed at a large table and then further divided into two teams of five.

            The workstations are simple: one volunteer to assemble new boxes, open the old kits and check that the masks are not outdated, another to do the same for the air filters, another to replace outdated syringes (loaded with atropine, a nerve gas antidote), a fourth to apply new stickers to the box, a fifth worker to seal it.  I'm the sealer, and am given a large roll of black tape and a small box cutter. It's a pleasant gig, easier on the wrists than typing into a computer, and with more opportunity to look around.  Stationed between the man with the stickers, John, and me, is Tamar, a soldier who checks the kits to make sure we've done it right.

            Tamar, a 19-year old Ethiopian with two months to go in the army, wears her hair in tight African braids, dyed henna color.  She can't sit still for more than a few minutes.  Her favorite distraction is to seize a roll of wide adhesive packing tape and wrap the sticky tape round and round the torso of the first sergeant, Tomer.  Tomer is a fine-featured 21-year old, also born in Ethiopia. With his handsome face and slender build, it is easy to see why the young female soldiers want to wrap him up and take him home.

            On our side of the assembly line the completed kits pile up, three, four, six, even eight at a time, while Tamar wanders around the hangar or sits atop a table with other soldiers, swinging her legs, sulking and laughing—until, in a burst of catching up, she vaults into her seat and checks them all, one after another, head bent, hands flying. 

            Opposite Tamar is another female soldier, Nomi, who checks the kits from the team across the table.  Nomi has a triangular-shaped face and long, copper-colored hair.  To make sure the volume is turned up as loud as possible, she makes periodic visits to the CD player located some 20 yards away, pumping world music techno pop into every corner of the hangar.

            It annoys me to see these soldiers frolicking and flirting while we labor; can’t they take their jobs seriously?  But of course, Tamar and Nomi aren’t saving Israel from danger the way we think we are, they’re merely serving out their time in the army like tens of thousands of other recruits.  They frolic to dispel the boredom and yes, the tension. 

            The tension is so much part of the fabric of daily life that Israelis never talk about it, except in offhand, often ironic asides.   During a work break, Liat and Tomer gather us in a circle for a Q&A.   Someone asks about the suicide bombings and now, finally, we get a glimpse of their feelings.  It must be the rare person here who has not gone to a funeral of a friend or relative killed in an attack; this is a small, close-knit country and 1000 Israelis killed in this latest war, the majority of them civilians going about daily life, are the equivalent of 50,000 in the U.S.—killed, if you can imagine, not in a hot and distant country but within our own borders.  It’s a number too staggering to contemplate.

            And Liat answers honestly: yes it hurts, it hurts a great deal to lose a friend, to get a one-day pass to go grieve at a funeral, and then come back to your job in the army the next day.  But we have no choice, she explains; this is what we do, this is how we live.

            At noon we break for lunch.  Along one side of the hangar, running from front to back, they've set up a buffet serving line; we collect our plastic plates and move along, piling on salad, bread, couscous, chicken, eggplant—­it feels like a big fat Moroccan wedding, so different from the normal lunch at our base.  There they plunk a large oval serving platter of the main dish—brisket, chicken or schnitzel, laden with cooking oil and surrounded by orange rice or potatoes—down on any free surface, which might be atop the napkin dispenser or the pitcher of bug juice. 

            After a few days, we joke that before we say farewell to the base we’ll have to buy the base cookbook, and for good measure, the video entitled "Cooking with Shimi."  Shimi, the sleepy-eyed cook and server during our first week— mercifully he is furloughed afterward—frequently sets the table with a key utensil missing. If the dessert is strawberry yogurt there are no spoons; if there is meat to cut there may be no knives.  When I charge into the kitchen to ask, "Shimi, efo ha sakinim?" (Where are the knives?), the answer is invariably, "Ein sakinim," there aren't any.  In the old days in Israel, which for me was 1969, good restaurants were in short supply; so were big cars, villas and U.S. dollars.  Now that all these things are available—at a price, everything at a price—it is the five-inch plastic utensil, weighing less than an ounce and costing a penny or two, which is mysteriously missing.                                                  Here in Ashdod there are plenty of utensils and plenty of food.  After a while, a tall man with a melancholy face and a gray-white beard asks for quiet.  He has a colonel’s stripes but there is something of the healer or pastor in his manner.  I can imagine him in a hospital room or on the bima of a synagogue.  This is Moshe Bitton, commander of Sar-El.  First in English, then in French (another soldier delivers the version in Russian), he thanks us gracefully for the important work we are engaged in. Then after a 10-minute break for mincha, the afternoon service—conducted in a corner of the warehouse—it is back to the assembly line.

            On a small base, mincha is the only service that regularly draws a minyan.  That's important for those in our group like Little Bob (Big Bob is another of my bunkmates), who needs to say kaddish to mourn his father’s recent death.  Our base is a commuter base; soldiers arrive by 8 and leave as early as 5, so a minyan for shachrit (morning) and ma'ariv (evening) is iffy.  But for mincha, right after lunch, someone can always corral the required complement of 10 Jewish men.

            Making the army religion-friendly is more important than ever in Israel, given the percentage of Orthodox 18-year olds who can opt out of service because they are studying fulltime in a yeshiva (an exclusion that greatly rankles secular Israelis).
            So the army goes to considerable lengths to accommodate Orthodox soldiers. Army kitchens are strictly kosher; meals are either meat (lunch) or dairy (breakfast and supper).  On Friday night those on duty get wine in order to make kiddush.  And every base has a synagogue.
            At MHN the synagogue, 30 feet to the right of the barracks entrance, is a pristine, plush oasis in the midst of desert heat and dust.  It has upholstered pews, an aron kodesh (ark) for the Torah scrolls, prayer books and books of psalms, as well as a powerful air conditioner that keeps everything cool. Often in late afternoon I wander in, dirty uniform and all, for a few minutes of meditation.  It makes a nice counterpoint to the hours in the sun spent slapping yellow paint onto the trailer fronts (in the process, drizzling it down my pant legs and onto the tops of my black boots).

            Among the faithful who daven there daily is one of the warrant officers, a short man with dark eyes the size of five-shekel pieces, a full black skullcap and a 5 o'clock shadow even after his morning shave.  I see him trotting out of the bet knesset at 7:45, a smile on his face as if he'd just eaten a crumpet with jam¾not likely in the chadar ochel, or dining hall, at the base¾or bet on a winning horse.  Sometimes he flings a few words of English in our direction, good morning, how are you. One morning I come out of the chadar ochel as he is hurrying along the walkway from the synagogue.  His smile widens; his face turns owlish.  He jabs a finger high in the air, pointing toward the heavens, and nodding energetically. "God," he says, winking. "Number one."

            I wonder what the non-Jews in our group make of the synagogue, so sparsely attended and yet so prominent.  Secure in their own faith, they keep their curiosity about Judaism under wraps; their questions are polite, never probing.  They are solid citizens with feet planted in the here and now: Manny, 76, a retired Navy pilot; John, 70, an ex-Marine pilot; Bernice, 74, who volunteered 13 years ago and is doing so again; Katie, 29, a teacher from Zimbabwe who has just spent nine months on a kibbutz. They watch, they learn, they follow instructions, all without complaint. After two weeks what stands out about these people is their innate decency, as firmly grounded as the limestone bedrock that underpins the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

            In all, there are five Christians out of 20 volunteers, an impressive number. And the question that keeps turning, turning in my mind is:  Is it their faith or something quirky, personal, unique that brings them here?  How to understand the phenomenon of these Christian men and women traveling to Israel at their own expense, willing to get their hands dirty, to sleep on thin mattresses and eat army food at such a dangerous time in Israel's history?  Dozens of Jewish organizations and youth groups have cancelled trips or pulled their children from summer programs but the Christians keep coming.

            I talk to these fellow volunteers about why they are here.  John, the ex-marine pilot, a Catholic, remembers reading about the liberation of the death camps at the end of World War II, and says the slogan, "Never again" took on a personal meaning for him. Manny, also Roman Catholic, visited Israel once before, in '92, and was struck then by the greenness of the fields in the midst of the desert, the energy of its cities. (Sometimes it seems the whole country is pulsing to the beat of the techno pop we hear in the Ashdod hangar.)  Israel is a wonderful country, he says, with no echo of the "but, but, but..." that even native-born Israelis voice. 

            Sharing the communal washroom with these new friends, eating, working, cracking jokes with them, I am struck by the ordinariness of conviction, or more accurately, of those with conviction.  What I mean is this: the face of decency, like its inexplicable opposite, the face of evil, is the face of your neighbor next door.  Most of the people in our group are the guys and gals next door, nothing extraordinary about them in appearance, brains, eloquence.  The first night when our group arrives at a hostel in Jaffa, prior to the bus trip down to the Negev, we are greeted by news of a car bombing near Hadera that blows out the inside of a bus, murdering 14.  No one flinches.  Ronnie, the Baptist from North Carolina, says, "Well, that's why we're here, isn't it?" 

            Frederica and I cap our two weeks with 24 hours in Jerusalem; after a day of meandering we find ourselves standing at the kotel, the Western Wall, as the first stars wink on overhead.  On the way back to the hotel, I think of my Peace Corps days in the Ivory Coast, some 38 years ago.  Every day under a fiery sun I used to walk to school along the pothole-dotted main street in Grand Bassam; every day I'd shake hands with my French colleagues, teach my classes and walk back along the same route to an empty house.

          No volunteer, however well briefed about the environment in which he will work, can ever appreciate fully how that environment will seize hold of his consciousness.  In my case that consciousness took the form of the insidious, cumulative, irreversible realization that nobody in Bassam cared in the least whether I stayed or left.  The arrival of another young white face had as much influence on West Africa as the introduction of a grain of salt has on the taste of a 50-gallon caldron of soup.  People don't change Africa; Africa changes people.

          Why should Israel be any different?  Even after two weeks at the base, contact with the soldiers is fleeting.  Most of the recruits, 18 and 19, can't figure out why we're here; neither can my cousins Daphna and Yoav, whom we visit that first weekend, though they welcome us warmly and install us in the best bed in the house.  We, in turn, can't appreciate how young the soldiers are.  It’s Ronnie who puts his finger on it: in the States when you read about a bus bombing that kills three soldiers, Ronnie says, they never tell you that the soldiers are 18-year-old girls who like to giggle about boyfriends and makeup.
          Nothing we did at the base changed the Israeli army; the more pertinent question is whether—and how—the Israeli army changed us.  Back in New York I call Pamela in Tel Aviv, Pamela who met us that wild, disorganized day at Ben-Gurion.  She's been on the job for Sar-El only two months; before that she volunteered with Sar-El nine times in five years, and ran the Chicago office that recruited volunteers from all over the Midwest. 

          She tells me of the words spoken to her and her comrades, the first time she volunteered, by Michael Allouche, the intense, charismatic deputy commander of Sar-El: Some people love Israel with their head, others with their heart, but for a few, the feeling is so strong that they love Israel with their gut.  "Those words made a big impression on me; I couldn't get them out of my head," she tells me.  In 2001 she sold her house in Chicago and made aliyah. 

          Love Israel with your gut: those words and her reaction reverberate in my skull, bringing to the surface an emotion that was tamped down when we were in Israel.  There’s not much room for emotion when you’re painting rectangles on trucks.  It’s only afterward that a chance remark or the mental image of a fellow volunteer clowning for a group photo or recalling the weather on a special night helps me see the experience for what it was: a time of inner peace in a country torn by war.

          Our last night at the base, the night we come back from the gas masks in Ashdod, is such a time.  It is a strange, exhilarating day: on the one hand the numbing routine of an assembly line, on the other, the feeling that here, at last, is work that could save a life. Many of us are restless that night.  Something in me isn’t ready to say goodbye in the morning.  In our bunkroom, the two Bobs, Jerry, a lawyer from Toronto, and I pack our bags, make cracks about each other's malodorous laundry, swap phone numbers—anything to avoid going to sleep.  Every night at MHN has been idyllic, the evening breeze soft and caressing, like April in Florida.  But tonight something is in the air.  At a quarter to 11 there is a crack in the sky, much louder than a rifle shot, and then a rustling in the shrubs outside.

          Can this be rain?  They get so little in the Negev, eight inches a year.  The rustling continues, grows stronger; sure enough those are raindrops coming through the screen.  I shut the window and without a word all of us clatter down the stairs to the front door of the barracks building.  Larry, who lived on a kibbutz barely 10 miles from here, is there, and Manny, Big Bob and Little Bob, Jerry and a few others. We watch the water sweep across the parking lot and feel the wind push it in our faces.  No one goes inside.  There's something miraculous about the rain here in the desert.  How can it be raining, we ask Larry; he lived on a kibbutz barely 10 miles from here; he has all the answers.
            The two Bobs have been going to synagogue regularly and Larry offers them a link between nature and liturgy.  "This is the season,” he says, reminding us that every day from the end of Sukkot in October until Passover in April, Jews pray for rain, a prayer that has its origins in the plea of farmers in parched Eretz Yisroel more than 2000 years ago.  "Mashiv ha ruach," he repeats from memory, "u-morid ha geshem."  The verse praises Ha Shem (also known to the dark­-eyed warrant officer as Number One), who brings the wind; who causes the rain to fall. 

          Like so many prayers, this one isn't as simple as it sounds.  Are we praying for rain, I wonder, or to be worthy of rain? And for those for whom prayers of supplication do not come easily, can a few weeks on a truck base (whose insignia is an elephant and whose motto is "tov li b'hovalah," it's great to be in transportation) take the place of prayer? 

          In any event, my perplexity about the purpose of our journey has ebbed.  Whether the army needed me or not, it’s clear why I came: because at such a time I couldn’t stay home. I can’t say whether the rest of the group had such doubts. If they questioned anything, it seemed to be whether they would measure up, physically, emotionally.  Those who passed the test¾frankly, one or two did not¾have drawn strength from an unlikely place, an Israel bloodied by bombings and beset by murderous enemies.  In Jerusalem I overhear a shopkeeper thank an American visitor for coming. “Your presence strengthens us,” she says, but in truth, it’s the other way around. It’s their bravery, the bravery of soldiers, policemen, nurses, bus drivers and ordinary Israelis, which strengthens and inspires us.

            The morning after the rain, the desert looks much the same, though with puddles here and there; the sun is up as we carry our things to the bus that will take us first to Jerusalem and thence to weekend travels—or home to the States.  As we depart, the soldiers are arriving for work. One of them is Alex, the Russian-born corporal who starts up the trucks, oversees the stenciling and husbands the paint, the turpentine and the large, much-used paintbrush. "Boker tov, Alex," I call, good morning, and then, “L’hitraot, anachnu yotzim," so long, we're leaving. "Boker tov," he says, nothing more, and without slowing his step he heads up the stone stairs to his trucks.

* Copyright 2006 by Efrem Sigel. A slightly different version of this article appeared in the May/June issue of Congress Monthly and is copyrighted by the American Jewish Congress.  This copyrighted version is reprinted by permission of the author and no further reproduction is authorized without such permission.  Efrem Sigel is a writer whose stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications.  He was a Sar-El volunteer in October 2002.