Training in a Religious Combat Unit with the IDF |
“Remember Hashem your God for it is He who gives you strength to fight…” ~Devarim 8:18
“Strive to be a warrior and a scholar. Be forged by fire and tempered by knowledge. If not, you will lack the courage to fight for your ideals, or lack ideals worth fighting for…” ~Benjamin Disraeli
As I sit here trying to put words to the past five to six months, I can’t help but take in what a journey it’s been. Not only with the training, but further back than that. Even though it’s been years, I still remember at age seventeen, driving through my hometown in Tennessee, full of my own personal inner conflict, knowing I had to be Jewish, Israeli, and even an Israeli soldier, but not really sure of how in the hell I would even convert, much less make the dream of being an Israeli who fought in the defense of his country–a country that Baruch Hashem, we were given after nearly two thousand years of being without one as a wandering nation.
It’s been a wild journey, and I know it’s not over. Still I wanted to sit down and share with anyone who is willing to check this out, my own personal experience of training in the IDF.
So what’s it been like to join the IDF for a guy like me?
For myself personally, I can say that it felt extremely fitting. Back in the US, I had been a police officer for a very short time, and then served as a corrections officer in Tennessee for about two and a half years before making Aliyah. Entering into what we call “Shlav Bet,” and joining into training as a combat reservist in a religious unit–prayer three times a day, and an hour of Torah learning in the midst of said combat training–was an amazing experience.
I believe that often in our lives there is a difficulty in trying to reconcile living in the “real world” to maintaining our devotion to a Torah-oriented life. Very often we find ourselves feeling like we either have to be like Yaakov the “dweller of tents” or Esav “the man of the field,” but oh so rarely do we have the strength or will to take a shot at combining the two in their........