By request over from BTQ, I'd like to talk a little bit about my teacher/guard on my high school experience in Israel. Summer after my senior year of high school, I went to to Israel for 3 months. The program I went with was pretty darn cool. It was designed as a 3 month course on Jewish and Israeli history, but with active learning. That is, you'd study about an important archaeological site or an important battle, and then you'd actually go to the site itself. Granted, I was 18 and was even more easily suggestible than I am now, but It was quite powerful and moving. On multiple occasions, classmates were weeping.
Our madreech or teacher was a man named David. One of the most interesting people I have ever met, David was also my brother's teacher when he went on the same program a few years earlier than I. David pretty much looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln, and sported the same kind of beard. He couldn't have been much more than 5'10", maybe 190-200 lbs. He was 53 when I was there. Born and raised in Brooklyn, David still had a thick Brooklyn accent (picture Abe Lincoln sounding like Joe Namath and you get the idea).
He had become very active in Jewish/Israeli nationalism in his youth in the late 50s/early 60s, and had organized some paramilitary groups in the U.S., who, he implied, were involved in smuggling arms into Israel from the U.S. Eventually, the U.S. go'mment (as it's said in Texas) got annoyed, and basically told David that if he liked Israel so much, he should move there, and not come back.
So he did. David moved to Israel in the early to mid 1960s, and almost immediately joined Tzahal, the Israeli Army. He was an infantryman during the Six-Day-War, a member of some of the advance guards that won Jerusalem from Jordanian control (though not one of the first few soldiers into the Old City).
After the war, and though he said he could not talk much about it, he joined Mossad, of which he said that the entrance requirements were the most difficult physical experience of his life (involving, among others, being kidnapped in the middle of the night, beaten up, drugged, thrown onto a plane, and waking up 8 hrs later in an unidentified European country, with no money, no passport or any other ID, and 5-6 Mossad agents trying to catch you before you make it back to Israel).
When we pressed him for details, he would give few, but would press his lips together, and would say only that he had a hand in making sure that some former Nazis disappeared from the light of the world.
I know all this sounds fanciful -- it sounds so to me and I knew the guy -- but if you'd met him, he would have made a believer out of you.
He taught us how to kill someone with a newspaper:
You take the main section, and you fold it in a certain way about fifty times. You end up with a rectangle, probably about 12x6.
The method of folding somehow puts almost all of the paper on each of the four corners, and it becomes really thick; each corner is literally harder than brick. Drive that into someones's forehead, and you'll easily split their skull.
One morning, it was time to climb Masada. For those who don't know, Masada is one of the enduring symbols of modern Israel. The slogan of Tzahal is "Masada shall not fall again."
The idea is to be on top to watch the sun rise. To do so, you've got to take a relatively difficult hike up to the top. Winding, quite steep in some places, it takes a little over an hour to get to the top. It was really quite difficult, especially when beginning in the dark at 3:45 in the morning. Some people were pausing to vomit on the way up. I hiked next to David the entire time, just chatting, and, after about 20 minutes, I noticed I constant beeping noise coming from David's person.
"What's that noise," I asked.
"My pulse monitor," he replied.
It did not change at all on the entire climb.
On another hike, near the end of the summer, I noticed David wasn't using his right arm to swing himself up, and I asked him if his arm was ok, and he replied that his bicep muscle was torn. I asked him when he had torn it, and he said he had torn it months prior. So he was hiking all over the place with basically one arm (he had surgery later).
He carried a Magnum in a hip holster whenever we went on tiyulim, or field trips. He was not just our teacher; he was also our guard. He constantly told us that the Hebrews were the knife fighters of the ancient world, and were renowned for centuries for their skill with a blade. One time, to make some point that I cannot recall the substance of, he brought with him a bunch of knives, and demonstrated his proficiency in throwing them. Staggering, deadly.
(Sidebar: to this day, Israelis are some of the finest knife fighters in the world. Filipino culture has been a blade culture for many centuries, and Filipino martial arts are generally regarded as the most advanced and most efficient blade disciplines in the world, but the modern Israelis have really taken some FMA principles, and added and subtracted some of their own techniques to create ITK, Israeli Tactical Knifefighting, which is really the heart of the F.I.G.H.T./Haganah system that I primarily train in. Master Kanarek, the Chief Instructor of F.I.G.H.T., is one of the world's foremost experts when it comes to modern blade combat).
David had a Master's degree in history from Bar-Ilan University, which has traditionally been regarded as a stronghold for right-wing thinkers and theorists in Israel. David was both extremely Likud and, like many Israelis, extremely secular. Interestingly, he had once been extremely religious for some time, but as a student of history and a soldier, he had grown disgusted with the behavior of religious Eastern European Jews in the late 19th, early 20th centurries, let alone the tensions between secular and nonsecular Jews in Israel today.
He observed, correctly, IMO, that had it not been for the secular Zionists in the early 20th century, Israel as a modern political Jewish state would probably not exist today.
Nevertheless, he was undergoing a bit of a spiritual rebirth of his own, and was starting to become observant again by the end of the summer.
The last thing he ever said to me is burned indelibly in my mind.
"[TP], whatever you decide to do with your life, please consider giving yourself to and using your intelligence and your gifts for Israel and the Jewish people. Both are in desperate need of you."
I will never forget this request. Never.
