One Soldier’s Unforgettable Shabbat
This Shabbat we hosted a soldier who is very dear to our hearts. He’s spent 170 days in Gaza serving in an elite commando unit.
Right before Shabbat I posted a clip of soldiers getting ready for Shabbat in Gaza, with special food set out and singing Shabbat songs.
With this in mind, over lunch I asked our guest what Shabbat is like in Gaza. The experience in his unit was very different than the one of the soldiers in the clip:
“In Gaza, for my unit, there’s no Shabbat. We’re fighting most of the time. And we lose track of the days of the week. But late Friday afternoon, the army sends us a roll with a tough chicken schnitzel inside. And that’s how we know it’s almost Shabbat.
“One week this summer, it was incredibly hot. We were in an abandoned apartment dripping with sweat. Imagine an entire week, in the same clothing, no showers, no running water. We knew that we were there as backup for some important operation that was about to take place. But waiting and waiting in that relentless heat. It was nearly unbearable.
And then the 3 soldiers I was with and I received a special delivery: a roll with a tough chicken schnitzel inside.
Aside from that sandwich, there was no sign of Shabbat anywhere. No shower. No change of clothing. No candles. No smell of my mother’s chicken soup on the plata. Just us sweating in the same uniforms we’d worn the whole week, hiding in an apartment with a carpet over the windows so the snipers wouldn’t know we were there. So we could stay alive another day.
But then my friends and I, without saying a word, looked at each other and those hard chicken schnitzel sandwiches, and we started laughing. And we danced around the room singing one Shabbat song after another. We knew we had to choose at that moment whether to laugh or cry. So instead of wallowing in our misery, we decided to laugh and welcome Shabbat into that corner of Hell we’d found ourselves.
The next morning, we found out that the the big operation we were part of was the rescue of Noa Argamani and 3 other hostages, and that they had been returned safely back home.
So that Shabbat, in the infernal heat of Gaza, we danced round and round again. Feeling the blessing rain down upon us and the entire Jewish people.
