Memory Loss

I will always remember that Shivah Asar B’Tammuz. It was 1974, the summer after the Yom Kippur War, and I’d been called up to serve in the IDF reserves. Despite the fast, our commander wouldn’t let me skip the training exercises we were doing that day. A dry heat wave made conditions intolerable for all the soldiers — the exercises were under the blazing sun — but it was far worse for me, the only one who was fasting. There were rules about when and how much to drink, but the rest of my platoon was ignoring them and drinking freely from their canteens, while I didn’t taste a drop of water all day.

The commanding officer, a young man from a principled chiloni kibbutz, was unbending, even when several nonreligious soldiers took pity on me and appealed to him to exempt me from the exercises. His reason, he claimed, was ideological. It irritated him that I was fasting because of “some event” that took place thousands of years ago (namely, the siege of Yerushalayim). “I have no problem with you wanting to remember that loss,” he said, “but to fast all day over it, thousands of years later? That’s taking things to a ridiculous extreme.”

So that Shivah Asar B’Tammuz, I paid full price for being frum. I suffered in silence all day. But after I went home and took a short rest, I wrote a letter to my commanding officer:

“Dear Corporal M.,

“Now that I’ve broken my fast and rested a bit after a grueling day of training exercises, I feel I ought to show you how I succeeded today and how you failed.