 
Simply Extraordinary
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By Larry Gordon
Published on Thursday, December 10, 2009 -
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Sometimes a column that contains a few ideas serves as a catalyst for a number of additional ideas and suggestions from readers. Such was the case last week with an article that appeared in this space about the director of a yeshiva in the Golan Heights who had served in an IDF special-forces unit that captured terrorist leader Marwan Barghouti in Shechem (Nablus) about seven years ago.
The essence of the story was not just about this one unsung hero of Israel, but a myriad of such personalities who are now involved in any number of mundane pursuits that are so much a part of everyday life. And they are not limited only to the visitors who frequent our office in Cedarhurst to collect funds for themselves or the institutions they represent.
After last week’s article appeared, a few people contacted me with similar situations they had encountered—stories of everyday people who had been involved in something miraculous. One of those examples was called to my attention by Rabbi Zev Friedman, the rosh yeshiva of Rambam Mesivta, who told me that he read last week’s article online (he was in Israel last week for a Shabbaton with Rambam alumni) and that he’d had a similar experience in Jerusalem that very day.
He was in a taxi, talking with the driver, who told him that he had fought in three of Israel’s wars. He was a solder in 1967 and in a reserve force in the Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War. In addition to that, he was among the special-forces troops that participated in the rescue mission to Entebbe in July 1976.
Many consider the raid in Entebbe to be one of modern Israel’s proudest moments. The midnight raid, with hundreds of crack troops traveling over a thousand miles beneath the radar of some Arab countries and landing on an airfield in the middle of Africa, taught the world about how much of a bloody nose Israelis and indeed Jews everywhere were willing to take.
Terrorists were holding over 100 Jews hostage in the Ugandan airport at Entebbe. A combination of great heroism along with a host of miracles made the rescue operation successful. Israeli forces that day suffered one fatality, that of their leader, Yoni Netanyahu, older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Then, over Shabbos, I met Rabbi Avraham Liss, who is on the Vaad Hatzedaka of the Five Towns and Far Rockaway. He is on the committee that issues permits to people who come to town, more or less vouching for the veracity and integrity of those who go from door to door and from shul to shul collecting for whatever their cause is. The Vaad issues permits so that residents and businesspeople know that those strangers knocking at their door or walking into their stores or offices have been at least minimally screened.
Rabbi Liss told me last Shabbos about a man from Jerusalem who recently came to him for just such a permit. The man was a young soldier in 1967, he said, and talked in vivid terms about being on the force that captured the Har HaBayis and the Kotel. The commotion and the excitement must have been intense, as we can hear in the famous recording of an army radio transmission by General Moshe Dayan calling to headquarters, amidst great radio static, with the emotional and historic words “HaKotel b’yadeinu”—The Western Wall is in our hands.
The afternoon of the liberation of these holy places featured a shofar being blown by then-chief rabbi of the IDF, Rabbi Shlomo Goren. Once nighttime set in on that first night and the dignitaries and officers had left, this man who had visited Rabbi Liss remained with his unit. He told the rabbi that he davened Ma’ariv with a minyan at the Kotel that night, and that he is certain that it was the first minyan at the Kotel in many years.
He also told Rabbi Liss that he is a kohein, and the next morning, while the religious soldiers in the unit davened Shacharis, he was the first kohein to offer the Priestly Blessing at the Western Wall after its liberation from Jordanian occupation. The stories of these people’s lives run the gamut. I think it was about three years ago that there was a problem with El Al Airlines and a flight took off from Israel for Europe on Shabbos. An edict came down from leading rabbis not to patronize the airline under any circumstances. It was around that time that I had a visit from a man who told me that he resides in Bnei Brak and that he works as a driver for a leading rabbinical sage in Israel.
He arrived in my office one day to announce that he had a double-edged problem. The first was that the rabbi told him to come to the U.S. because his daughter had become engaged and he needed to purchase things for her so that she could set up a proper home. This is frequently the case with those traveling from Israel to the U.S. Their children are growing up and getting married, few have the wherewithal to generate any income, and the parents have no other option but to come to the U.S. to try to put together the money needed.
Sometimes it’s interesting to discuss with these guests the fact that at present there is—to an extent—a new economic climate and attitude in the U.S. They grimace or perhaps smile lightly, but for the most part they are not buying the story. They forge right ahead with discussing how many daughters they have, their ages, and the fact that they only make a meager wage and cannot afford to do what is expected of them. That Israel’s economy is one of the strongest in the world today has simply passed them by.
Anyway, this particular individual claimed that he was stuck in the U.S. Yes, he was here to collect funds for his daughter’s home furnishings prior to her wedding, but now he could not use his return ticket because there was a quasi-boycott of the airline he was scheduled to be on. So now he had two projects that required his urgent attention. The first was what he had come here for, his daughter’s wedding and related expenses; and the second was procuring sufficient funds for an airline ticket on another carrier back to Israel.
These tidbits of information are about the little guys. They arrive here with very little fanfare and often a great deal of desperation. There’s probably a fascinating sociological study that could be done to explain the relationship between the people who travel here and the reception that we accord them in our homes and offices.
It’s interesting how we determine which one of these visitors will be satisfied with a single dollar and which one will give the dollar back as if insulted. The point is that behind the personalities and stereotypes we assign to our visitors are stories like some of the above; these are people who would not resort to this type of undertaking unless it was necessary. I know we don’t always have time for them, or they just show up unannounced, expecting that we set aside whatever we are involved in to give them our full and possibly even well-deserved attention. For my part, I’m hopeful that I will be able to heed my own admonition.
Comments for Larry Gordon are welcome at editor@5tjt.com. ♦
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