Crossroads

18 July 2007

Morning Prayer brings both a communication with God and a time of contemplation. One has to know and observe one’s self in order to be truthful in the presence of the Lord, and my own thoughts usually go back into the past at such times.

By 1983 I’d seen noise and smoke and dust and fire before, but nothing like what we’d gone through that day: Columns of smeared-black smoke oozing into a pale sky brushed with jet contrails, brown-red clouds of tank-dust where tractors had recently plowed fields of wheat and corn, burned bodies thrown in scatterings of battle refuse among the crop stubble and shell casings. War had come to the Bekaa, and the reaping was bitter for there would be weeping in hundreds of homes after this battle, most belonging to the enemy.

We had stopped for fuel and food at an intersection of farm trails, some abandoned town to the west along the side of the valley being pummeled by mobile artillery. The houses ringed a couple of minarets, the towers now jagged teeth where shells had broken them in destroying enemy spotters. Motorized infantry were already clearing the outskirts of Lebanese and Syrian stragglers as the artillery fire lifted, a few bursts from small arms popping across the distance like Chinese New Year’s firecrackers. If they had any real problems, we’d get the word to deploy into the town and use our heavier guns, but we knew the worst was over for the time being.

We watched the fuel truck slowly making its way along the column, a commandeered civilian vehicle loaded with several thousand gallons of diesel oil, its reserve drivers obviously anxious to point the rolling bull’s-eye back toward Israeli territory as soon as their dangerous cargo was pumped into the thirsty tanks along the trail. I didn’t blame them any, as they made a great target of us as well as themselves. No armor-man liked to sit still, where life depended upon fighting, eating and relieving oneself on the move. To stand still for as long as a few minutes was to invite death from a hidden gun or missile.

That’s when I saw a jeep barreling up the train of vehicles, stopping in a cloud of dust beside this tank or that personnel carrier, its two occupants shouting unintelligibly in exhaust-muffled Hebrew. They finally got to us, the driver sitting fatigued and covered with so much dirt that his uniform’s name-tag was just another part of the soil around us. I had no idea how he could see out of his goggles to steer. His passenger held up something boxy in his grimy hands, leather straps hanging down past his knees. It was hard to tell anything of what the man said, so tightly scarved was his bearded face, but my comrade nodded at his emphatic speech and smiled at me.

“He’s wanting to know if anybody on this track wishes to put on tefillin. He’s some kind of rabbi, orthodox I guess, can’t tell what kind with the uniform.”

My friend shouted something through his intercom, and the other two crew-members climbed out of the tank and jabbered anxiously with the rabbi. He instructed them on the arm-wrapping ritual of the phylacteries as I refueled our vehicle, seeming to bless the young men as they read from his prayer book with the little black boxes bobbing on their heads, then the jeep sped off up the trail, lost in the brown haze within moments. The whole thing was over in the time it would’ve taken to read the front page of a newspaper, and the boys’ faces were tear-stained as they climbed back into the tank. I’d never seen either of them utter a single prayer in the days we’d been together, which made it seem all the more strange and somehow moving.

The time finally comes when the process of learning and experience hits a crossroads, and you realize that your life must move beyond it in one direction or another no matter what the cost or consequence. You grasp that everything has led to this point, that you are about to step into a new role for yourself in life’s play, where nothing will be the same again. And you take that step because you have known what you were all along, and must face it here and now or turn away forever. Those young crewmen did this at a moment of peril, in a reaffirmation of their heritage and religion. Fear can be a great motivator, eh?

But despite the obvious fact that there is no such thing as an atheist in a fox hole, there is more to an epiphany than fear. Personal revelation is a life-changing experience, and those boys were indeed changed. One of them became a rabbi and the other a teacher after the war, a change in destiny that neither had expected or hoped for while I knew them.

As for myself, there have been many crossroads since then. As I've delved into history, particularly that of archery, I've seen a long series of choices that I've had to make which have led me back into the desert of contemplation. I've been on battlefields that have seen strife for thousands of years, and have fought the descendants of the same peoples that came against my own in biblical times. It gives one perspective and, oddly, comfort in moments of anxiety, because the travails of humanity have not changed.

"Your rod and staff both comfort me" says the psalm. The rod for punishment of both yourself and your enemy, the staff for support in both good times and bad, those words echo on the winds of history as a divine promise. For words are as solid as an arrow's shaft, creating new worlds as they strike others with truth as hard and unforgiving as a barbed head.

It is little wonder that the Hebrew for "law" is rooted in the word for "hit the mark", as the Law (Torah) to a Jew, like archery, is also a "path", a whole way of living. We practice and improve, hoping to sin (miss the mark) a little less each time when the moment of choice arrives, never quite achieving what we intended, but learning a bit more about ourselves and life each time we enter the competition. The true comfort is in knowing that everyone has to sign up for the shoot, that's it's always been that way.

In the end, I find it fascinating that I came to archery via history, and found that it is a metaphor for life's choices, and a connection to those in the past who came to life's personal crossroads as we all do. May we take the right road and hit the mark.
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"For I have drawn Judah taut and applied [My hand] to Ephraim as to a bow." Zech. 9:13
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