I served in the Yom Kippur War
in the IDF Rabbinate, in the Hevra Kadisha (burial society) unit of the Central Command. Every year at this time along with a myriad of others, always memories of those "terrible days" (Yamim Noraim or Days of Awe) return to me.
Here is one such memory:
I am in Sinai at Refidim field hospital Tonight will be Hoshana Rabbah, the last of the intermediate days of Sukkot.
A few of us are standing around waiting for others to join us for the minhah (afternoon prayer) service. A doctor (green outfit) is walking toward us. I wonder if he has come to pray, but something tells me that prayer is not for him.
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"You guys from the Rabbinate?"
"Hevrah Kadisha," I tell him.
"But you are from the Rabbinate?"
"Yes, I suppose we are."
"Could you come with me? We have a guy in the hospital who wants to pray, and he's asking for a rabbi."
I start off with him.
The doctor is a psychiatrist. He was called in to treat a young wounded officer who has been crying and sobbing uncontrollably since his operation. His gunner was killed, and he is inconsolable with grief. They cannot stop his weeping.
"He wants to say a prayer," says the psychiatrist.
"You don't need a rabbi for that," I tell him.
"I didn't know what to do."
"Watch me. Maybe you'll learn for next time."
He looks kind of skeptical as we approach the hospital. I can hear the crying and the sobbing.
"Yaakov! Where are you, Yaakov?"
"Yaakov was his gunner," says the psychiatrist.
How will I face him? I don't know. I pull out the siddur (prayer book) I brought and hold it up in front of me as if it could be a shield against this Jew's grief.
He looks up at me from his bed. "Are you a rabbi?"
"Yes."
He starts to sob again. "Yaakov is dead, my haver (friend) Yaakov. What will I tell his folks? Why am I alive?"
"Look here." I open the siddur and point to the blessing for those who have escaped danger or harm. "Say this blessing."
“I never saw this book before”, he says to me. I tell him, “Never mind, just read it.” He reads it and I repeat the traditional response.
"Now say this."
I show him some of the minhah prayers and Aleinu: "We must repair the world so it is worthy of God's kingship." He reads it perfectly.
He stops crying. "Thank you," he says to me, "Thank you." He puts his head back and falls asleep.
The psychiatrist blurts out “It’s a miracle.”
(Excerpt from: A Yom Kippur War Diary (Conservative Judaism, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, Summer, 1975))
Today we may not sense "miracles" of the Biblical kind such as God's direct intervention in men's affairs, but we do sense the "miraculous." Life is miraculous.
Persistent determination to combat evil is miraculous, the urge to ease suffering, to help others, to improve our world, to seek good for all living things, to plan benefits for generations and a future we shall never see, to note our mistakes, to repent them, and to try again. All these are miracles of a force some call the presence of God in the world.
Claude Montefiore wrote: "Hard as the world is to explain with God, it is harder yet without Him."
The Jewish people, miraculously and against all logic and all odds, keeps renewing itself. Awareness of the "miraculous" is developed and heightened by ritual and prayers. Where else could we declare what we do so fervently in our prayers at the synagogue without feeling foolish. Where else could we express our most daring and simplistic hopes and beliefs without fear of being called simple-minded.
May we add to the miraculous by our deeds in the year to come.
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