Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  This state was not just a miracle: it was, in its essence, sacred. Flag, government, army: holy holy holy. The Jewish state was the instrument for the restoration of Israel’s glory, and so of God’s glory. The Mercaz sensibility was summed up by the prayer that students sang on Friday evening with particular devotion: “Arise, shake off the dust / wear your glorious garments, my people . . . Rouse yourself, rouse yourself, for your light has come.”

  Rabbi Zvi Yehudah practiced his father’s unconditional love for all Jews, especially the secular, who had a key role to play in the messianic process. Judaism and religion generally, Rabbi Kook the elder had taught, had become corrupted by small-minded religionists; and so, however painful, a rebellion was necessary to purify the faith. The return to Zion had to be led by the secular because religious Jews lacked the spiritual vitality to implement Judaism’s great dream. The Kookian dialectic: the spiritual failure of the religious provoked the rebellion of the secular who, however inadvertently, were preparing the way for the next, higher stage of religious evolution by restoring the holy people to the holy land.

  Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, keenly aware of their redemptive role, treated secularists not only with the love due to fellow Jews but with respect. He insisted that secular men visiting his home feel comfortable and remove the head covering they wore in his honor. He rebuked one visiting kibbutznik: Do you expect me to remove my kippah if I visit your kibbutz? Leaders of the League against Religious Coercion, who campaigned for separation of religion and state, sought him out, intrigued by the rabbi who respected their longing for freedom—even for freedom from religion—as a sign of spiritual vitality.

  Rabbi Zvi Yehudah especially loved the kibbutzniks. When a secular kibbutznik appeared at Mercaz, seeking to study Talmud, the rabbi treated him with the honor reserved in other yeshivas for a scholar; students vied for the privilege of being his study partner. Beneath their pork-eating, Yom Kippur–violating veneer, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah discerned in kibbutzniks holy Jews. They were working the land of Israel, defending the people of Israel. The kibbutz’s very utopianism negated its professed commitment to “normalizing” the Jewish people. What other nation had been founded by voluntary communes seeking to purify human nature of selfishness? The kibbutz confirmed Mercaz’s essential insight on secular Zionism: that the return to Zion was a utopian venture, masquerading as a mundane political movement.

  To support his radical Jewish ecumenism, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah cited the rabbinic comparison of the Jewish people to the “four species,” four plants that Jews bless on Sukkoth, the harvest-time Festival of Booths. Each of those four plants—citron, palm branch, myrtle, willow—is said to represent another kind of Jew: on one end of the spectrum the citron’s pleasing scent and taste represents the saint, whose inner life and deeds are equally pure; on the other end, the willow, without odor and inedible, represents the Jew bereft of redeeming qualities. But the blessing can only be recited if all four plants are bound together, the willow along with the citron. So too the Jewish people, said the rabbi, each of whose components has a unique role in redemption.

  Rabbi Zvi Yehudah could perhaps afford such magnanimity because he was, like his father, convinced that secular Zionism was a temporary aberration. Secularism was necessary to revitalize the nation after centuries of disembodied exile, but eventually it must yield to the longings of the Jewish soul for God. Rabbi Kook the father had compared secular pioneers to the workmen who built the ancient Temple: during the period of construction, they were permitted to enter the Holy of Holies at will; once the Temple was completed, though, only the high priest could enter that consecrated space, and then only on Yom Kippur. Secular Zionism was preparing the way for the rebuilt Temple, and for its own disappearance.

  UNLIKE THE OTHER students, who gathered around Rabbi Zvi Yehudah after morning prayers on their way to breakfast, Yoel observed him from a distance. How far should he go in entrusting himself to the rabbi’s guidance? Was he really a worthy successor to his father?

  Yoel was skeptical about the rabbi’s uncritical embrace of every Jew, no matter how far removed from the faith. Yes, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s father loved all Jews, but he’d also anguished over their religious violations. Yet Rabbi Zvi Yehudah seemed far more upset by the anti-Zionism of the ultra-Orthodox than by the heresies of the secular.

  Yoel attended a weekly class on the Torah reading in Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s apartment, which was so modest it lacked a telephone. Yoel was troubled to see, hanging on the wall of the rabbi’s study, a photograph of Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, beside photographs of venerable rabbis. It was one thing to appreciate Herzl’s contribution to Jewish national renewal, but to venerate him as a holy man?

  “K’vod harav”—honored rabbi—Yoel said after class, “I don’t understand what Herzl’s picture is doing there.”

  Rabbi Zvi Yehudah appeared bemused. He appreciated his clever student who challenged him in class and whom he affectionately called ha’akshan, the stubborn one.

  “Herzl was God’s emissary to save the Jewish people,” the rabbi replied.

  But why, persisted Yoel, did God allow antireligious leaders to preside over the Jewish state? Why had God allowed the central religious vision of the Jews, the return to Zion, to be co-opted by those who rejected religion?

  The rabbi responded with a question. “Is Ben-Gurion as evil as Ahab?” he asked, referring to the idolatrous king of ancient Israel.

  “No, Ben-Gurion is not as evil as Ahab,” replied Yoel.

  “Elijah ran before Ahab’s chariot,” the rabbi concluded.

  The prophet Elijah had honored Ahab because he was king of Israel, representative, however flawed, of God’s will on earth. Surely, then, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah could honor Herzl, who had initiated the restoration of Jewish sovereignty.

  Yoel wasn’t convinced. How could Rabbi Zvi Yehudah gloss over the secular assault on religion, the state’s history of secular coercion? Yoel’s father had had to fight the Mapai-led Haifa municipality for the right to establish a religious girls’ high school. As a Bnei Akiva activist, Yoel had gone into the immigrant camps around Haifa to convince parents to send their children to religious schools. One father told Yoel that he’d been warned by bureaucrats of the all-powerful Histadrut trade union that if he didn’t send his children to a secular school, he wouldn’t find work in the centralized economy. Yoel couldn’t forget the fear in the man’s eyes; what, then, was redemptive about secular rule?

  One day Yoel got up the courage to knock on the door of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s home. “May I walk the rabbi to the yeshiva?” Yoel asked. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, delighted to see “the stubborn one,” took Yoel by the arm and walked the streets of his ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, appropriately named Geulah, “Redemption.” Yoel walked slowly, in time with Rabbi Zvi Yehudah’s heavy steps.

  They came across a campaign rally for an ultra-Orthodox party. An activist was addressing a crowd of black-hatted men, whom he referred to as “the community of holy citrons.” By comparing the ultra-Orthodox to the citron among the “four species,” the speaker was in effect calling them the saints of the Jewish people. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah tightened his grip on Yoel’s arm. “The altar is not wrapped in citrons!” he said vehemently.

  “What?” said Yoel, uncomprehending. He bent closer to hear the rabbi’s words. Yoel had difficulty understanding Rabbi Zvi Yehudah, who often spoke in a hurried mumble as though to himself, and whose Yiddish-accented Hebrew was filled with fragments of biblical and rabbinic phrases that formed a private theological language.

  The rabbi’s pace quickened, energized by anger. He pulled at Yoel, as if to remove him from a place of sin. Yoel was surprised by the strength of the old man’s grip. “The altar is not wrapped in citrons,” he repeated to himself. “The altar is wrapped in willows!”

  Finally the rabbi explained: in the Jerusalem Temple, the altar on which sacrifices were offered was wreathed with willows, because Israel’s sacrifices would be acceptable to God onl
y if all parts of the Jewish people—and not just the saints, the citrons—were included. “There is no holy community of citrons!” Rabbi Zvi Yehudah repeated, outraged. “Only the holy community of Israel!”

  Yoel understood: there is no holiness for Israel without its flawed souls, the willows. Jewish unity wasn’t merely a political but a spiritual imperative: a holy people bringing the message of God’s oneness to the world must be in harmony with itself, must be whole.

  Yoel felt a love for Rabbi Zvi Yehudah that he had never felt, perhaps, for anyone before, and sensed that he had found his spiritual father.

  ROMANCE ON MOUNT GILBOA

  YOEL’S YEAR IN MERCAZ ended. Reluctantly he left the study hall, and in January 1965 he put on the khaki uniform of Nahal, which combined military service with agricultural work, and which settled remote areas, intending to found kibbutzim. Because it trained recruits in parachuting, Nahal was considered a paratrooper unit—though hardly as elite as the “real” paratroopers.

  Yoel did well enough in basic training. He had stamina for running up hills and marching long kilometers while carrying soldiers on stretchers. But he had discovered the point where Jewish history and cosmic intentionality intersect, and army life bored him. Sometimes on leave he went straight to Mercaz, rather than to his parents’ home.

  Following basic training, Yoel’s Nahal group—fifty male and female recruits from Bnei Akiva—was assigned to an outpost on Mount Gilboa, bordering the northern West Bank. They arrived just before the late spring festival of Shavuot. Five prefab buildings—including a synagogue and a library—clustered high above the valley, white boxes on a stony slope. There were no adults to supervise the recruits; the commanding officer, hardly older than his nineteen-year-old soldiers, had been sent to jail after his jeep overturned and military police discovered he had no driver’s license. Still, this was Bnei Akiva: even the couples that quickly formed maintained their modest ways.

  At night, Yoel and his friends sat around a campfire and gazed at the sporadic lights beyond the border. Samaria, the biblical northern kingdom, was so close. There wasn’t even a fence, only a stone marker placed by the Jordanian authorities. Members of a previous Nahal group had sometimes driven to the nearest Arab village on the Jordanian side. But such casual violation of the border was no longer possible: Yasser Arafat’s Al Fatah group had begun attacking Israeli targets from Jordan and the soldiers were now on permanent alert.

  The Nahal outpost was intended to eventually become part of a small network of religious kibbutzim, and so the soldiers not only guarded and patrolled but worked in chicken coops and fishponds. They woke with dawn and worked until the heat of midday.

  Manual labor bored Yoel. Friends considered him lazy. In an evaluation of group members prepared by an official of the religious kibbutz movement, this curt note appeared beside Yoel’s name: “A serious boy, but not for kibbutz.” Yoel would serve the Jewish people in his own way.

  In the absence of an army chaplain, Yoel volunteered to organize religious life on the mountain. He assembled prayer quorums three times a day and read from the Torah in his deep, melodic voice. But when he tried to insert Kookian ideas into his weekly Torah class, friends said to each other, There he goes again, drifting off into the clouds.

  The group was assigned the task of planting pine trees along the Gilboa, to mark the border and prevent encroachment by Jordanian villagers. The saplings required constant attention; only shrubs grew easily here. The ancient curse, group members said. King Saul and his son Jonathan had fallen in battle on Mount Gilboa; and David, in his eulogy, had damned the land: “Mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you.”

  Yoel didn’t think they should be planting at all, but not because of David’s curse. This is a shmitta year, he noted, the last year of the seven-year cycle during which the land of Israel must remain fallow. How, he asked, can we violate shmitta, a commandment from the Torah? Friends cited Rabbi Kook: Didn’t he permit planting during the shmitta year to prevent Zionist agriculture from collapsing? That lenient rule, countered Yoel, was meant for farmers, not for soldiers planting trees.

  Yoel took his argument to the government official in charge of the area’s forestation, a religious Jew whose daughter happened to be a member of the Nahal group. “There is no justification for planting trees during shmitta,” insisted Yoel.

  “We’re at war to protect our borders,” the forester retorted, annoyed. “Just as it is permitted to fight on Shabbat when necessary, it is permitted to plant here during the seventh year.”

  WHAT FIRST ATTRACTED Yoel to the forester’s daughter was that she wasn’t like the other girls in the group, didn’t laugh recklessly or gossip. Esther Raab was inward but not aloof. Warm, generous, above all serious: the qualities Yoel was hoping for in a wife. Esther, for her part, had become intrigued by Yoel when she heard about the Mercaz student who had come to the army with a suitcase filled with books. Yoel, like Esther, seemed incapable of frivolity.

  Yoel also happened to be deeply handsome. Beneath light brown curls was a face of gravitas. He spoke with quiet confidence, and Esther was drawn to his precocious capacity for wisdom.

  Esther had grown up in a town near Haifa. In the 1948 war, her father had been one of the defenders of religious Zionist settlements known as the Etzion Bloc in the Judean Hills outside of Jerusalem, and was taken prisoner by the Jordanians when the bloc fell, just before the state of Israel was declared.

  When the Nahal group gathered in the evening for folk dancing, Yoel and Esther slipped away. They walked for hours on the mountain, their footsteps the only sounds against the wind. They didn’t hold hands.

  Yoel told Esther he intended to devote his life to tikkun olam b’malchut Shaddai, repairing the world through the kingdom of God. I’m going to become an educator, he said, help to bring young Israelis closer to Judaism. Esther said she wanted to live in a kibbutz, but was concerned about collective child-rearing. Children belong with their parents, she said; it’s no wonder that so many kibbutz children run away from the children’s house.

  “How many children do you want?” Yoel asked.

  “Twelve,” she answered.

  Yoel laughed.

  IN MARCH 1967, on the eve of the holiday of Purim, Yoel’s Nahal service ended. Having participated in Nahal’s parachuting course, Yoel was assigned for future reserve duty to the 55th Paratroopers Brigade.

  But reserve duty was the last thing on his mind. After a brief stop at his parents’ home, he returned to Mercaz, where he was honored with the role of chanting the book of Esther—the ultimate Mercaz story, destruction reversed into redemption.

  The yeshiva was thriving. While Yoel was away, it had moved to a new building, and the student population had grown from barely forty students to nearly two hundred. Yoel noted that Rabbi Zvi Yehudah had begun to speak more clearly, his mumble replaced by an emphatic tone. Some said that the rabbi’s clarity, along with the yeshiva’s expansion, were portents: history was quickening, the messianic dénouement approaching, the Kookian worldview about to emerge from obscurity.

  Yoel settled into Mercaz’s new study hall, several times larger than the old one. He chose a new area of study: the talmudic tractate that deals with the priestly service in the Jerusalem Temple. Yoel craved knowledge of the ancient time when Jews had been intimate with God’s presence—when the purpose of the Jews, to bring heaven to earth, was manifest. Since the destruction of the Temple, Jews had studied its service in the hope for its eventual restoration. If Jewish sovereignty had been restored and the ingathering of the exiles begun, then even a rebuilt temple no longer seemed beyond the reach of dreams.

  “THEY DIVIDED MY LAND!”

  THE EVE OF Israel’s nineteenth Independence Day, May 14, 1967. In the Mercaz dining room, several hundred young men wearing white shirts and knitted skullcaps and black polyester pants and sandals with socks were crowded around long tables. Before them lay the remnants of a festi
ve meal, half-eaten challah rolls, empty bottles of malt beer.

  “This is the day that God made, we will rejoice in it,” read a banner on the wall, quoting Psalms. Independence Day was claimed by the secular and rejected by the ultra-Orthodox for the same reason: as a celebration of human effort rather than divine intervention. For Mercaz, though, this was one of the most sacred moments of the year: the founding of the state against impossible odds, immediately after the Holocaust, meant that the God of Israel could no longer bear the humiliation of His people.

  Rabbi Zvi Yehudah rose to speak. The young men stood, an honor guard. Though seventy-six years old, the rabbi moved with vigor.

  “We must make more of an effort and become accustomed to opening our eyes to discover the endless wonders of God’s deeds,” he said, his voice strong even without a microphone. Students crowded toward the front of the room, eager to hear every word.

  “There were times,” he continued, “in the early years of the state, when the celebration [of Independence Day] in the yeshiva had not yet been established, and I would wander for one, two, or three hours in the streets of Jerusalem. Needless to say we don’t want to encourage promiscuity in Jerusalem, but I felt obliged and commanded to be at one with the joy of our people, with the masses, with the boys and the girls.”

  Students looked at each other appreciatively: What other venerable Orthodox rabbi would celebrate with boys and girls together?

  The rabbi continued: “One matter, which borders on the desecration of God’s name, caused me deep sorrow. Where are the elders, the guides of the community, the great [ultra-Orthodox] rabbis, when our people are celebrating in the streets of Jerusalem?”