The Chronicle
Fall 2012
Page 17
and civilian personnel who had spent the whole
day trying to figure out what I was doing on
their mission.
I was lucky enough to travel on a more local
(
and uplifting) outing as the guest of a different
Seder
attendee, a Jewish female sergeant from
Texas, serving in a National Guard unit from
Georgia. Her mission was to oversee various
humanitarian aid projects around the capital,
and she invited me along to visit a school that
the U.S. was in the process of building. Guided by
our Afghan interpreter, who had been disfigured
when he stepped on an IED while assisting
Marines a few years ago, we drove out to the
neighborhood of Khair Khana, in northwest Kabul.
The school consisted of one main building, with
several adjacent tents, a playground, and an out-
house. Due to shortages of space and personnel,
the same group of teachers was responsible for
teaching every grade level, so students only
attended for a few hours each day. Improvements
in Afghanistan’s educational opportunities have
been a really positive story of our involvement
there over the last three years. According to
The
New York Times
, 5.2
million boys and, more sig-
nificantly, 3 million
girls
are now in school, up
from 3.9 and 2 million in 2009. As it happened,
we arrived just in time for my favorite class
(
recess) and I spent a good half-hour demonstrat-
ing to the children why there are still faculty
members at Yale who wonder how I was ever
admitted there. “Let us go into the wilderness,
that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God,”
Moses demands of Pharaoh, as the story of
our nationhood begins. I never really understood
that passage until this visit, but I have now
seen the face of true sacrifice in what is a
very frightening wilderness.
Shavuot
/
Memorial Day
My
Shavuot
prayers were answered with perfect
timing by The Jewish Welfare Board and
KosherTroops.com. These organizations sent
boxes of supplies including pocket-sized bibles,
informational
Shavuot
brochures and the most
important ritual item for this sacred occasion:
tiny, individual cheesecakes. We made
Havdalah,
davened ma’ariv
,
recited Psalm 23 from
Yizkor
,
studied Rabbi Harvey Fields’ summary of
Shavuot,
and read through the Ten Commandments.
On Memorial Day, the Command Chaplain up
at Camp Buehring, a northern installation about
thirty miles from the Iraqi border, invited me to
participate in an interfaith Service of Remem-
brance that he and his team were organizing for
that evening. There, the USO had partnered with
the Army to create a memorial of 6500 paper
lanterns arranged in rows across the ground like
a glowing cemetery – one lantern for each soldier,
sailor, airman, and marine killed in action since
September 11, 2001. Next to the memorial and
the podium, the faces of the fallen illuminated the
concrete surface of a t-wall in a slideshow, while
the mournful strains of The Calling’s
Wherever
You Will Go
and The Band Perry’s
If I Die Young
filled the silence.
The soldiers participating in the run earlier that
evening had been given colored glow-sticks
(
chem-lights, as they’re called in the Army). I
watched as they finished the final mile and came
into view of the memorial, and you could feel
them realize that they had unexpectedly come
upon a holy place. Sweaty and winded from
the run, visible only by the beams of color that
dangled from every part of their running clothes,
they explored the memorial. Groups of them
clumped together to watch the slideshow while
others wandered around the glowing cemetery,
silently communing with memories of the friends
they would never see again.
The service was conducted entirely in the dark,
illuminated only by the soldiers’ chem-lights, the
podium, and the slideshow; it felt more like a vigil
among friends and family than a formal service
in the military. We recited the 23rd Psalm, read
passages from the Prophets and the New Testa-
ment, and listened to a short memorial message
from the Installation Chaplain. A quartet of female
soldiers sang “Amazing Grace,” and I sang
El
Male Rachamim
,
after which an honor guard
fired memorial volleys and a bugler played
taps to conclude the program.
Then something happened that was truly as
magical as it was spontaneous. As the crowd
dispersed, a soldier walking among the rows of
white lanterns removed his chem-light and
placed it inside one of the paper bags, which now
glowed with color. Another soldier followed and
another and another. The whiteness of death and
loss literally started to dissolve in a rainbow of
memory and hope. “Like the appearance of the
bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so
was the appearance of the brightness all around,”
described the Prophet Ezekiel, in the
Haftarah
portion for
Shavuot
. “
Such was the appearance
of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”
Just as God’s covenant with us is manifest in the
creativity and innovation that have sustained this
single holiday of
Shavuot
and our entire religion in
times of great crisis, so is God’s covenant with all
of humanity manifest in the fact that, after ten
years of war, we can still have hope for a future of
peace. When Ruth’s eyes saw nothing but sorrow
and death in her family, her heart – inexplicably but
unmistakenly – could see a brighter future ahead.
Her embrace of Judaism was more a prayer for
what could be than a reaction to what already was.
Some prayers we create ourselves and some are
out there waiting to find us. I’m glad I was here on
Memorial Day for this one to find me.
ghanistan and Kuwait
5.
School visit, Provinicial District 11, Kabul.
6.
USAID tour flight to Kunar Province.
7.
Memorial Day at Camp Buehring.
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6
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