|
January
/ february 2006:
An
army of some
Jews in America's military
face great obstacles. Anti-Semitism, kosher rations,
days off for religious holidays, and that's just boot
camp. In the armed forces, to be different is no blessing.
Jewish soldiers, as much as anyone, have endured the
suffering that comes with that difference, but the story
of their service marches on.
Story by Bradford R. Pilcher | Photograph by Alex Martinez
It's a frigid winter morning at a condo construction site on the north end of Coney Island Avenue in one of those trendy sections of Brooklyn. The sun begins to peek through the trees above Prospect Park as Michael Kirschner stands alone in the management office, facing east. The reason a Jew faces east to pray is so his mind is focused on Jerusalem, but looking at Kirschner, who stands absolutely still in prayer, one has to wonder if his thoughts are in the Holy Land. Or are they perhaps a little further east, across the sands of Arabia somewhere, say, like Kuwait?
The 26-year-old Kirschner is up every morning before dawn and drives into the darkness from his Teaneck, New Jersey apartment to his job as an assistant project manager in Brooklyn. His workday lasts at least 12 hours (usually without a break for lunch) and when it's done, he gets back into his silver 2002 Honda Civic and begins the hour-and-a-half drive home through rush hour traffic. Often, he has to work Sundays to make up for time lost in bad weather. But a six-day week isn't new for Kirschner, nor is starting his day while most sane people are still smacking the snooze button. Two years ago Kirschner would rise before the sun as well, but instead of driving to Brooklyn, he trudged through sandy dunes to his post as a Marine in a guard tower just outside Camp Commando in Kuwait. No, Michael Kirschner doesn't mind the commute or the hours. He's just thankful to be back in America.
As he finishes the morning prayers, his reverie is interrupted by a sharp ringing. "Good morning sir," Kirschner answers his cell phone robustly, as if he's been up for hours. "The truck with the concrete planks for the fourth and fifth floors is still in Canada. It was supposed to be here this morning," he smiles and returns the phone to its place on his belt. "Looks like we're going to need a lot of Popsicle sticks," he says to a visitor. It's this kind of tongue-in-cheek humor that's characteristic of Kirschner, who admits he is sometimes chastised by friends and family for making light of serious situations. But ask his buddies from the 6th Communications Battalion and they'll tell you that it was this same brand of humor that lightened the mood during otherwise dark times.
Times Kirschner would rather forget.
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From day one in boot camp, it was just a mess," recalls Kirschner as he winds his car home after work through New York traffic and back into New Jersey. "I was always a Sabbath observant Jew, and when I first enlisted, the recruiter said I'd be able to keep that up in the Marine Corps.
"You just tell your instructor," Kirschner mimics the recruiter, "and you won't have any problems observing your religion.
Unfortunately for Kirschner, the recruiter's definition of observant wasn't well developed. Kosher food was "options other than pork." Observing the Sabbath meant Kirschner "wouldn't be forced to ride in vehicles." Virtually from the moment he arrived, the young soldier was faced with a "very, very different" world from what he was used to.
He wasn't a kid from Iowa with a G.E.D. in one hand and a beer in the other. He grew up in the affluent suburbs of Chicago to a nice Jewish family. He attended the University of Illinois at Chicago and got a degree in architecture. Hoping to gain discipline and a once-in-a-lifetime experience before starting law school, he enlisted in the Marines. Then came 9/11 and, all of a sudden, he was being activated for service in the Middle East.
"Everything was always copacetic, and there never really was a challenge to Judaism," Kirschner describes of his childhood. "It was just taken for granted, and once it was taken away from me, I began to appreciate it and all that it had to offer."
Boot camp became a religious awakening. Called "f***ing Jew" by drill instructors, the jovial Memphis native remembers the experience with a seriousness that belies his good nature. The environment was one of forced conformity. Black recruits were peppered with racial epithets and people were given flack for having divorced parents. To speak, you had to request permission, and everything had to be said in a full scream and at full attention. The first couple of weeks, all the recruits were taken to non-denominational services on Sunday, and while the mentions of God were general, Kirschner says it "definitely didn't feel Jewish, it was definitely towards the worshipping Jesus club."
What is the point of all this? Ask the military and they'll tell you it's meant to break down new recruits and turn them into hardened and homogenous killing machines.
Once the non-denominational services were done, Kirschner got the option of Sabbath services on Friday nights, but his drill instructors harassed him for going, and fellow recruits started pulling the Judaism card to get Friday nights off. That only sent more heat Kirschner's way. It didn't take long for him to realize he wouldn't be able to observe his religion the way he'd like.
"I couldn't be Orthodox," he says. "It would have made my life more than a living hell, so I prayed and did my own thing in my own private time."
After his initial training was complete, Kirschner finally got some measure of personal freedom and went back to a more observant lifestyle, though he did try to ease into the subject with his reserve unit. "It's unheard of to have Saturdays off and have special food," he explains between traffic lights. So the first few months he didn't make much of a fuss, but a couple months before shipping out, he finally broached the subject.
"You've made accommodations for people who have a wedding and can't come in on Saturday, and I'd like the same accommodations made for me," he requested. His commanders were irate, doing little to get him kosher Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). This only continued while at war, where his gunnery sergeant refused to schedule him off on Saturdays, giving him guard duty instead, and told him he couldn't attend religious services.
"I'm not letting you go, and there's nothing you can do," she told him.
Then there were the threats and hazing. A fellow Marine got drunk and tried to slit Kirschner's throat not the first knife fight he found himself in with other soldiers. One night on guard duty he was approached by a sergeant who raised his loaded nine millimeter pistol to Kirschner's chest. These events, one after the other, caused his battalion Colonel to stop talking to him entirely. "We'll just save it for the Congressional hearing," he remembers being told.
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Jewish soldiers have been a part of the U.S. armed forces as long as they've been a part of the U.S. But if ever there was a profession that tested American Jews more than any other, it would be the military. In the larger society, there were rednecks and ignorant Bible-thumpers, and there were the elites bent on keeping Jews out of the country clubs. But in the military, those particular demographics were magnified.
For a Jewish soldier, that means all the headaches of being a Jew, but twenty times worse.
Jewish psychology plays into this as well. Jewish mothers don't let their kids play football for fear of cracked ribs, so heavy weapons training and deadly force aren't exactly high on the list of desired careers. And if we're discussing Jewish neuroses, then we should mention Jewish politics which have largely been of the liberal, anti-war variety.
So you get anti-Semitic garbage from the soldiers who've never met a Jew, much less shared a foxhole with one. On top of that, your own community hasn't exactly got your back. People could be forgiven for thinking Jewish soldiers were a myth.
But when Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff, a decorated chaplain and Vietnam naval officer, delivered the prayer at the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, he found himself facing a litany of Jewish veterans.
"Somehow [they] made their way through the crowd of 200,000 people to find me and shake my hand," describes Resnicoff. "They said that many Americans had the misperception that Jews did not serve. It was important to them and important to me that we all understand that Jews were part of that war in every way."
Jews were a part of that war and plenty of others as well. Tibor Rubin, for example, recently received the Medal of Honor. At 76-years-old, the Holocaust survivor was belatedly honored for his service in Korea. The delay was due in large part to one anti-Semitic sergeant who refused orders to nominate Rubin for the award decades ago.
To get American citizenship (and attend the Army's butcher school), Rubin enlisted and found himself on the front lines of the Korean War. Routinely "volunteered" for dangerous patrols and assignments by that same anti-Semitic sergeant, Rubin's bravery on those missions earned him the respect of his fellow soldiers, but his courageous efforts as a prisoner-of-war is what ultimately earned him the coveted Medal of Honor.
A fellow POW remembers that many simply gave up in the face of bleak conditions, but Rubin would sneak out of the camp most nights to steal food for his fellow prisoners. Sgt. Leo Cormier spoke later of his time in the camp: "[Rubin] took care of us, nursed us, carried us to the latrine
He did many good deeds, which he told us were mitzvahs."
In the 1980s, Rubin's old compatriots began agitating for him to finally receive the award he had been denied for so long. Sen. John McCain introduced special legislation on Rubin's behalf and a slew of congressmen pressured the Pentagon, but it wasn't until the passage of the "Leonard Kravitz Jewish War Veterans Act" named for musician Lenny Kravitz's father mandating a review of selected Jewish veterans' war records that Rubin was finally reconsidered for the medal he deserved.
As the 15th Jewish recipient of the Medal of Honor, Rubin is now saluted by five-star generals upon entering a room. The president of the United States must stand as well. The war hero has previously said of his recognition, "I want the goyim to know that there were Jews over there
who fought for their beloved country."
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Kirschner is not a tall man, but his muscular build warns you to think twice before messing with the former Marine. His handshake reminds you that he could probably crush you, but it's his disarming smile and warm eyes that lead you to believe he might just hug you instead. And hug he does, because Kirschner's passion for life has been renewed since his time spent overseas.
He returned home after six months in Kuwait and Iraq, though he says the same gunnery sergeant who wouldn't give him time off for the Sabbath tried to "volunteer" him for service in Baghdad for another year. Citing his observance requirements, he wasn't signed up for another tour.
"I finished my reserve duty, and I'm done," he says definitively, though he later concedes he could've been ordered back. "Ultimately it was their choice. If they want you to go, they put you on the list. When I got back, they said, Forget him. He's not worth it.' They'd rather leave me home than have to deal with me," he laughs.
After his return, he put his good nature and warm demeanor to work. Kirschner traveled and spoke at Jewish schools and synagogues about his experience, popping up at his brother's school and traveling to cities like Chicago and Denver to speak. Then he stopped.
"I've turned down many, many speaking engagements," he says at the end of his work day. "I suffered over there, and I was pretty miserable, so I want to pull myself away from that." Public speaker no more, Kirschner still says he'll always make time for specific individuals. "If someone comes to me and says their son wants to join the Marine Corps, I'll step in and speak to them."
His distance from the public speaking circuit is also motivated by his professed desire to stay away from Marine-bashing. At one point, somewhere near the George Washington Bridge, he makes a request: "Don't put me down as saying the Marine Corps is bad, that it should be disbanded."
This particular request comes after a lengthy discussion of Marine Corps culture, which Kirschner describes as "a mess" and "very aggressive. They're killers." According to the 5'4" ex-soldier, the culture runs a little bit like this: "You get drunk, sleep with as many girls as you can. You wake up the next day, run ten miles, and then practice your killing skills. It's a different culture."
Nevertheless, "I'm not here to badmouth that culture," insists Kirschner. "I had a negative experience, but there was a lot of good too. I learned discipline and how to perservere."
And Kirschner learned a great deal more than that, he says, from being in the Marines. "On a daily basis, and in almost every single way, the Marine Corps has made me a better person," he maintains. "It made me appreciate things I didn't appreciate before. I was just a numb, cookie-cutter Jewish kid. I didn't appreciate the life God gave me."
But go ahead and ask him. Wasn't he attacked by a knife-wielding drunk? Didn't his superior officers make his life a living hell for being even a little bit different? What about the nightmares that must keep him up at night?
"Part of what made me better was being put through all that misery. The difficulty of the Marine Corps and the challenges of being a religious person just made me stronger. It's a good system," he insists one more time. "It just wasn't right for me."
Kirschner admits that prior to joining he was excited by spine-tingling stories of life in the Marines. "I wanted it rough. I wanted to be the biggest and the baddest. I wanted to be part of the best and be changed forever."
The sentiments of a Marine Corps that's beneficial, but just not for a nice Jewish boy, are echoed by Tech. Sergeant Mikhail Eshtut, who these days simply goes by Mike. A former Marine reservist himself, he served aboard a naval ship in the Persian Gulf during the first Gulf War. At Chanukah, though he wasn't observant at the time, he found himself moved to "do something Jewish." He fashioned a menorah out of a potato and some tin foil.
More than a decade later, in 2003, he was redeployed to Kuwait. The ensuing years had seen Eshtut's observance grow, and when Chanukah rolled around this time he found a nearby Army base where he and fourteen other Jewish soldiers got together for a holiday celebration. Nevertheless, he ultimately concluded that "I couldn't be in [the Marines] and keep Shabbat at the same time, not fully keep Shabbat."
So Eshtut, who cared deeply about serving his country, quit the Corps. He was able to switch to the Air Force for service as a Chaplain's assistant. In his new role, he provides administrative and logistical support for the religious clergy, allowing him a greater freedom to observe his faith, though some issues still come up.
"Keeping kosher overseas is a challenge," he says. There's also the issue of being prominently Jewish in an Arab country not known for its friendliness to Jews. "I definitely didn't wear my yarmulke when I was in Kuwait or Iraq, just not to present myself as a target," admits Eshtut. "What's interesting is that another chaplain who spent a year in Iraq traveling around did wear his yarmulke, and he wore a bright blue one that didn't even blend with his uniform. He really stood out, and I thought, This guy has some balls.'"
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The 5th Pennsylvania Cavalry was either ignorant or defiant when they chose Michael Allen to be their regiment's chaplain. It was 1861 and a bill to allow rabbis to serve as chaplains had been defeated, preserving the legal discrimination that had existed as long as the nation itself. Allen was a liquor dealer, and on the side he was a Hebrew teacher and wannabe rabbi. When a YMCA worker showed up to discover that, horror of horrors, the chaplain wasn't a Christian, he raised the issue with the military.
Though Allen was forced to resign, the unit flouted the law again by nominating ordained rabbi Arnold Fischel. It took a year of lobbying, but by mid-1862 Congress finally changed the law to allow members of a "religious denomination" rather than a "Christian denomination" to serve as chaplains. Thus began a long and rabble-rousing tradition of Jewish spiritual leaders in the military.
Take Ferdinand Leopold Samer, a native of Germany, who was commissioned as chaplain of the 54th New York Volunteer Regiment in 1863, mainly because most of the soldiers were German-speaking. He became the first Jewish chaplain to be wounded and the first one to go AWOL.
Severely wounded at Gettysburg, Rabbi Samer found himself hospitalized and awaiting his formal discharge papers. Samer decided he felt better. Absent the actual paperwork, he left the hospital and went home.
Perhaps the most famously controversial rabbi to ever serve as chaplain was Roland Gittelsohn. Assigned to the 5th Marine Division at Iwo Jima during World War II, Gittelsohn found himself in the trenches of one of the war's bloodiest battles. As 70,000 American Marines fought relentlessly with deeply entrenched Japanese forces, the rabbi shuffled from one soldier to another, ministering to those of all faiths. His efforts won him three service ribbons.
Following the fighting, the division chaplain, himself a Protestant minister, requested Gittelsohn deliver a memorial sermon at the dedication of the Marine cemetery for Iwo Jima's fallen. Unfortunately, religious prejudice (alongside racial divisions) tore the plans to pieces. A majority of Protestant chaplains protested a rabbi preaching over predominantly Christian graves, while Catholic clergy kept with church doctrine by opposing any joint services altogether.
The division chaplain refused to back down, but Gittelsohn withdrew in deference to the complaints of others. Three separate services took place, and what happened next is still referenced by military leaders to this day. With about 70 in attendance, Gittelsohn delivered the following words at the Jewish service:
"Here lie officers and men of all colors. Rich men and poor men together. Here are Protestants, Catholics, Jews all together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith, or despises a man because of his color. Here there are no quotas: how many of each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudice. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy.
"Any among us, the living, who fail to understand that, will thereby betray those who lie here. Whoever lifts a hand in hate against a brother, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in a minority, makes of their sacrifice an empty and hollow mockery. Thus, do we consecrate ourselves, the living, to carry on the struggle that they began. Too much blood has gone into this soil for us to let it lie barren."
Three Protestant ministers, incensed by their fellow clergy, boycotted their own services to attend. Unknown to the rabbi, one of them borrowed the text of his sermon and circulated it among the regiment. Soldiers included portions in letters home. Time magazine published excerpts, the full text was entered into the Congressional Record, and the Army released it for broadcast to troops around the globe. Amidst the prejudice of his Protestant colleagues, Gittelsohn's words took on added resonance and have continued to echo in speeches and commemorations for more than half a century.
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It was Resnicoff, the Vietnam veteran and Jewish chaplain, who found his words being quoted in an unlikely place. One doesn't imagine a convention hosted by religious right leader Rev. Jerry Falwell as the place most likely to include rabbinic involvement. Nevertheless, at "Baptist Fundamentalism 84" President Ronald Reagan delivered a keynote address in which he included the text of a letter Resnicoff had written.
When a terrorist attack leveled a Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, Resnicoff happened to be next door. It was a fluke, the result of his Jewish faith. Resnicoff tells the story this way: "It is true that I went to Beirut on [that Friday] to hold a memorial service for Alan Soifert, a Jewish Marine killed by sniper fire. The Marines were ready to send me back to Italy (the homeport for the 6th Fleet, where I was assigned) on Saturday but I said I did not travel on my Sabbath, my Shabbat. For that reason, I was still there on Sunday when the suicide truck bomb attack occurred."
The blast went off at 6:22 in the morning. There had been a USO show the night before, and most of the Marines were still asleep. Resnicoff was brushing his teeth when he heard and felt the blast equal to 12,000 pounds of TNT. It turned a four-story barracks into a mass of rubble that crushed more than 200 Marines while they slept. The cloud of dirt and dust kicked up made it hard to see, and harder to breathe. Smoke from still smoldering flames only exacerbated the problem. Hell couldn't have seemed very different from that gruesome scene. In the end, 241 Americans were killed, making that morning the bloodiest in Marine history since Iwo Jima.
Rushing out to help in whatever way he could, Resnicoff describes tearing his uniform to shreds in order to use the cloth as bandages for his wounded comrades. "I had used my kippah to wipe blood and dirt from a wounded Marine's face," recalls Resnicoff.
In the chaos, the chaplain's head covering was lost. "The Catholic chaplain there Father George Pucciarelli cut a new kippah for me from his camouflage uniform. He said that he wanted every Marine there in Beirut, where it seemed that every religion was gunning for every other religion, to know that we Americans were different, that our chaplains reached out to all in need."
The story of the "Camouflage Kippah" found its way into the press and ended up on the floor of Congress, where a bill to allow soldiers to wear kippot with their uniforms had failed two years running. The stirring account, along with strong lobbying from members of the military, helped pass the law. It was the beginning in a number of sweeping reforms to the military's policy on religious accommodation. They would later add kosher (and even kosher for Passover) MREs, for example.
But what brought Resnicoff, or at least his words, to a convention of Christian fundamentalists was a report requested by then Vice President George Bush. Leading up the team that visited the site of the attack, Bush met Resnicoff and requested he draft the story of his experience as a chaplain on that day. The report was to be sent directly to the White House. A year later, when Reagan appeared at the Baptist convention, he read the report as part of his speech.
"There was a sense of God's presence that day in the small miracles of life which we encountered in each body that, despite all odds, still had a breath within," wrote Resnicoff. "There was humanity at its best that day and a reminder not to give up the hope and dreams of what the world could be in the tears that could still be shed by these [soldiers], regardless of how much they might have seen before."
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Today, years after Beirut and after having retired from active duty, Resnicoff has been pressed back into service. This past June, he was appointed as Special Assistant for Vision and Values to help the Air Force clean up a controversy at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
Then again, controversy may be putting it politely.
"I'm at war right now, and Jews that read your magazine need to wake the f*** up and realize we're at war."
These are the harsh words of Mikey Weinstein as I speak to him from his New Mexico home. Talking to him, you definitely get a sense of a man who's been fighting a battle, and intends with every bone in his body to keep right on fighting it. His tone is strident, and he doesn't hesitate to make definitive statements about everything from hardcore evangelical Christians to Resnicoff himself. ("To me he is Rabbi Speed Bump for the evangelical juggernaut.")
"If I'm sounding too militant, I'm sorry," he offers at one point in the conversation.
It's not that Weinstein is a particularly militant kind of guy. Nor is he a dyed in the wool liberal God-hater with an axe to grind against Christianity. No, Mikey Weinstein is a registered Republican. He worked for Ronald Reagan in the White House Counsel's office. His family has a long military history, producing three generations of military officers who've seen combat in every war since World War I.
Still not convinced? His wife's maiden name is, believe it or not, Christian she converted when she married him. So what exactly prompted this Republican, lawyer for Reagan, military vet to sue the United States Air Force?
Mel Gibson.
Well, not Gibson exactly. It wasn't even Gibson's controversial film The Passion of the Christ, per se, that drew Weinstein's ire. It was what happened at the Air Force Academy when the film was released.
"It should have been named the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre," deadpans Weinstein. "I found it to be a horribly anti-Semitic thing, and I was contacted not by my kids [who attend the Academy], but by Christian members of the chaplaincy at the Air Force Academy."
They told Weinstein that posters, thousands of them, had blanketed the campus. Each one pushed cadets to see the movie. Intrigued, the alumnus began digging deeper. What he found horrified him. Commanders and instructors were professing their Christianity and encouraging cadets to evangelize their fellow cadets. Jewish cadets, like Weinstein's sons, were being told the Holocaust was revenge for Jesus' death. And "officially sponsored" brown bag lunches stood as fronts for outside evangelist groups.
"One flyer had a data point saying, Do not take this flyer down. This is an officially sponsored Academy event,'" says Weinstein, citing one such lunch. "Do you know what the topic was? It was, Why we cannot let you have your God while we have ours.' This is not Oral Roberts University or Bob Jones University. This is the Air Force Academy!"
Weinstein's voice rises as he talks, and he repeatedly makes sure you're sitting down before he hits you with each zinger. It doesn't take him long to make the connection from current events to historical "bloodbaths" either.
"Every single time a radical version of Christianity has engaged the machinery of the state we have ended up not with little streams or puddles, but with oceans and oceans of blood," says Weinstein without the faintest sense of overstatement. "If people don't want to accept it, fine, but this is what is happening, and this is our last time to stop it."
Weinstein took up his concerns with commanders at the Academy and at the Pentagon, but he says he was thwarted and shrugged off. Meanwhile, more critics of the Academy's religious bias came out of the woodwork. Melinda Morton, a Lutheran minister and chaplain at the Academy spoke out publicly about the Academy's inaction in the face of religious intolerance. For her efforts, she was reassigned to Okinawa, Japan and resigned her commission.
Kristen Leslie, a professor at the Yale Divinity School took a group of her students and spent a week at the Academy in the summer of 2004. She depicted "stridently evangelical themes," including one chaplain exhorting cadets to evangelize other non-Christian cadets by saying "[those] not born again will burn in the fires of hell." Though some reports downplayed the incident, the chaplain in question turned out to be the reigning Chaplain of the Year.
When a Jewish cadet came forward to report his experience with religious intolerance, a JAG officer asked him why he spoke out. "It's the Constitution, sir," answered the cadet. In four words, he provided a simple maxim for critics of the Academy.
In their defense, the Air Force did release interim guidelines in August discouraging public prayer at official functions and reminding commanders to have more sensitivity for individual religious beliefs. Two months earlier, the Air Force had issued a report on the religious climate at the Academy. It found no overt discrimination, just an ignorance and lack of sensitivity on the part of some personnel and cadets.
Still, Weinstein calls the guidelines "dead on arrival," pointing to remarks by Brig. Gen. Cecil Richardson, the Air Force deputy chief of chaplains. In a New York Times article in July, a month after the Air Force report was released, Richardson was quoted saying, "We will not proselytize, but we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched."
"What good do [the guidelines] do if they reserve the right to evangelize," asks Weinstein.
Frustrated with delays and inaction, Weinstein filed suit in federal court on October 6, 2005, demanding the Air Force prohibit its members and chaplains from attempting to "involuntarily convert, pressure, exhort or persuade a fellow member of the USAF to accept their own religious beliefs while on duty." The lawsuit is still pending.
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A multi-faith military has inherent difficulties. How do you respect the religious needs of all soldiers when some soldiers believe it is their religious obligation to convert other soldiers? This question is less an issue for the religious majority, but Jewish soldiers have faced the challenge of overzealous evangelizers in their ranks, to say nothing of the needs of Jewish observance.
Mikey Weinstein's solution is simple, if absolute: no proselytizing allowed while on duty. To those who seek anything less, he argues the time has passed for compromise. "We can't work with these people anymore. We're so far apart in this country, that if we were a hundred times better, only then would we be two ships passing in the night. Right now, we're two ships passing on opposite sides of the universe."
That bleak approach flies in the face of active duty chaplains, including Jewish ones, who Weinstein says "aren't seeing the forest for the trees" "Why every rabbi in the Department of Defense didn't rise up when they said they reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched, I don't know."
Melinda Zalma certainly didn't see herself as a "speed bump" rabbi when she flew from her full-time job with the Jewish Outreach Institute in New York to Guantanomo Bay, Cuba. It was the High Holidays this past year, and Jewish military personnel needed a rabbi, even the ones stationed on the tiny military base at the tip of Cuba. Rabbi Zalma, a reserve chaplain, came to help them.
"The group of Jews who came to services that I spoke to," remembers Zalma during a break at a recent JOI conference in Atlanta, "they were amazing, really thoughtful people."
The knit kippah perched precariously on her chin-length brown hair looked like it might fly off at any moment, but it didn't slow her down as we walked. The difficulties facing Jewish sailors (Zalma is in the Navy) didn't interfere with her perpetual smile either.
"What I think I've found is that you need to be flexible," explains Zalma when asked how a Jew can fit their religion into military life. "You have to have a minyan. Some say in the Navy, three is a minyan, because you have so few chances for people to come together and worship as a community.
"It definitely takes some sacrifices. For me the challenge was how do I bend Jewish law a bit, how do I balance Jewish law and enable the service personnel to have a full Jewish experience."
Those sentiments were shared by Rabbi Resnicoff. "It will be very difficult to maintain observance in the military," says Resnicoff, though he doesn't think it's impossible. Like several other chaplains and soldiers interviewed for this story, he indicated he wouldn't advise very observant Jews to join the military. "I would advise them to seek other ways to serve their country, because there are many ways," says Resnicoff.
Despite the reservations, Resnicoff, Zalma and other Jewish chaplains continue to insist that their role in the military is a positive one, and their experiences are just as positive. That puts them at odds with the likes of Weinstein, who advocates a more vocal and aggressive stance on the part of Jewish military personnel.
For his part, Resnicoff cited the military's progress and its positive role on civil rights: "When I went to Vietnam it was a time of racism
the military made the decision to do something about it
[and] led the way for the nation at large."
"When I used to visit rabbinical schools," says Resnicoff, "I used to say we needed Jewish chaplains even if there was not one single Jewish man or woman in the military. When our leaders struggle with issues of right and wrong
I want a Jewish voice at the table. I think Judaism does not exist for Jews; it is a witness to the possibility of keeping faith even during terrible times."
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Kirschner doesn't go out of his way to discuss his brief, bitter military career. Back in his construction site office on yet another morning as the sun rises, he insists his eyes are fixed on the future. The regrets could be overwhelming otherwise.
"I always think, Wow, I could've been working for more than four years now. I could be much further along in my career,'" says the burly former Marine. He also recalls the worries of his friends and family. "People I've never met before came up and said, I was so worried about you.' I don't even know who they are, but they were worried."
Kirschner pauses in the low light. "I'm so sorry. I feel bad about all the people I made worry, because this was something I did of my own free will."
The regret, thankfully, doesn't overwhelm Kirschner. Even in those serious moments the big teddy bear side of him peeks through. A smile cuts across his face as he adds, "My mother says it's her job to worry."
So the one-time-soldier goes about his life. There are no more public speaking engagements. No more trips to schools in other cities clutter up his schedule. A career, one that doesn't involve heavy weapons and anti-Semitic superiors, lies ahead of him. Marriage and children are there too, eventually.
Still people do sometimes discover. They might whisper, "Michael was in the Marines." Sooner or later they start asking questions.
"One of the first questions is always, Man, did you kill somebody?' I always say, Thank God, I never had to fire my weapon in combat,'" says Kirschner. Eventually, he says, the conversation turns away from gunfights and towards Jewish rituals. They ask him, "How hard was it to keep the mitzvot?"
Kirschner likes to leave them with these words.
"It's the little things, those are the things that define my time in the Marine Corps," he says. "It's those little things that I'd build upon. There was always something small that I could do still uttering a short evening prayer at the end of a long day, ritually washing my hands before I would eat bread. I made a personal vow to myself never to eat bread without washing my hands, to always keep that one small law to perfection, even if it would sometimes mean I would have to wait hours to eat.
"Those extra little things that I did, they do so much for you," he says. "Especially in times of adversity when it's that much tougher, it makes it that much more rewarding. And when it's that much tougher, it feels that much better."
You have to wonder if Kirschner understands how his statement says as much about all Jews in the military as it does about his own experience. Jews have always been there in uniform, but in contrast to the civilian world, they've faced a little more adversity. In response, they've done a little bit extra, and like in the larger world, it's done so much for them, and it's made it that much more rewarding.
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