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Sept. 13, 2013
Seniority and responsibility
Pazam: thoughts for the new year learned from an Israeli soldier.
EMILY SINGER
This week’s Isra-slang instalment is pazam. If you look in a regular Hebrew dictionary, you will find it means “to hum,” but this is not the pazam to which I am referring. I mean the pazam that separates the Israelis from the foreigners, the natives from the new immigrants, and the Zionists from the ultra-religious. Why? Because pazam is army slang.
Pazam refers to a soldier’s seniority in the army. If a person has been serving for two years, they have clout over someone who has been in for only 12 months. A month of service buys you authority over someone who has served merely three weeks. And so on. Since we learned the term, we have adopted it into the family. My daughter, being the oldest, has the most pazam in the family, which buys her both her own room and priority in the front seat of the car.
I have to admit, I am a bit under-qualified to be teaching about Israeli army slang. I have never been in the army, nor has any of my family. Our combined military experience consists of one week when Ross came to Israel as a teenager to do Gadna, a simulation of basic training.
But army service is an essential part of Israeli life, not surprising considering the tenuous security in the region. Most citizens are required to serve, and those who are exempt suffer consequences, as army service helps you find a job, improves your salary, and gets you a discount on mortgages and at falafel stands. The army will be an integral part of our lives sooner than I would like, in a few years, when our children will be drafted.
Our kids’ school boasts the record for the most graduates who serve in military combat units. At first, I didn’t understand what was the big deal about volunteering for combat. I mean, everyone serves their country in some way, right? Someone has to cook and entertain the troops. What’s so special about combat? After living with kibbutzniks for three years, I now get it.
Kibbutzniks are very into communal responsibility. They are always helping each other, whether preparing meals for new moms or running errands for each other in town. The other day, I couldn’t carry all my groceries home from the store, and my son happened to walk in with his two friends. I asked if they would help. They hesitated, until the storeowner said, “What is this? Of course you’ll help her! Yalla! [Let’s go!]”
The students at school do most of the setting up and taking down for events, and they are eager to help others. On their days off, they work in the fields and dairy farms. When it comes to the army, someone has to be in combat, to defend our country with their lives, so “Yalla! Let’s go!”
Most of what we know about the army is from the latest addition to our family – our “adopted” daughter Danna, a 21-year-old soldier from New Jersey. She spends Shabbat with us when she is not in the army and, when she is, we try to visit her on her base. The new family joke is that, despite being our oldest daughter, Danna has spent the least time in our family, so she has the least pazam. She is at the bottom of the privilege totem pole. In truth, being the only person to have served in the army, she actually has a great deal of respect and many privileges. Also, because we adore her.
A year ago, our kibbutz decided to host a garin tzabar, a unit of young immigrants who came to Israel to serve in the army and make their lives here. Danna was part of that group, full of energy and ideology, and eager to serve the Jewish people. They said, someone has to go defend the state of Israel and make their homes there, so “Yalla! Let’s go!”
Danna spent her first few months in ulpan, working on her Hebrew and getting to know her fellow soldiers and kibbutzniks. When the time came, the whole group went down to the Bakum, the army registration centre. Danna came back disappointed. She had wanted a job in communication; instead, she was put in the air force, with her actual position undetermined, and she continued to wait.
Shortly before she was supposed to receive her final orders, Danna received an invitation to work in Matpash, a unit that specializes in communication with Palestinians. They oversee travel in and out of Israel on our borders, and they help ensure fair treatment of Palestinians in tense situations.
Danna had a dilemma, which she brought to our Shabbat table. On the one hand, she had wanted to work in communication. This new option seemed ideal. Her English made her well suited to the job. On the other hand, as she articulated, she came to Israel to defend Jews. She didn’t know that she wanted to spend her army service protecting the rights of Palestinians.
Ross and I listened to Danna’s concerns. We heard her dilemma, but we shared our opinion that helping Palestinians is an integral part of helping Israel. What could possibly be more important for the peace and security of the region and its citizens?
Danna considered and reconsidered for days before deciding to take the job. I don’t know how much our input affected her decision, but hopefully not much, given her less than positive experiences in Matpash so far.
Danna’s army career began in basic training – never a walk in the park, but hers had its own special challenges. Here she was, having left behind her family and friends, everything she knew and two and a half years of irretrievable college credit, to come to Israel to serve her people, side by side with what seemed to be the laziest bunch of ne’er do wells in Israeli society. Many of her colleagues had criminal records. They would do anything to get out of work. Kids would intentionally contract contagious diseases to earn sick leave. When they went home for Shabbat, they would rub their hair in their sister’s lice or drink from the cups of anyone with a fever. If someone wanted time off badly enough, they would wrap their arm in potatoes, which sucks out the calcium from the bone, and then break it with a tap against the table. When told to run a kilometre, one girl tried to argue to her commander that she couldn’t because she’s too fat.
Periodically, the officer would ask for volunteers. Danna’s hand would go flying high over the heads of the other girls, who were busy scampering to hide behind each other. Inevitably, the task would be to clean the bathrooms, which Danna would do alone because she eagerly flew 9,000 kilometres to serve her people.
Basic training came and went, and it was time for Danna to receive her job. She would be interviewing Palestinians who wanted to travel from the West Bank into Israel. In her first week, she was met by a cute little Palestinian boy. She smiled as she processed his family’s request and ushered them through. Then, she thought to herself that she hoped she had left him with a positive impression of an Israeli soldier. On Shabbat, she told us that she sees the importance of her work.
As the months went by, the job turned out to be mostly boring bureaucracy. Lots of passing papers. Every once in awhile, she would meet someone interesting, but mostly she was thinking again that she would like to be doing something more important in the defence of our country. She wanted a transfer to a different base.
Sub-moral of this story: be careful for what you wish.
One day, an officer informed her that he was assigned to do a home visit. The army likes to check out the apartments of lone soldiers to make sure their living arrangements are acceptable. He gave her a ride back to the kibbutz, but he did more than that. In the long car ride, he told her about his wife and his girlfriend and more than she would ever want to know about what they do together. He then proceeded to ask her intimate details about her private life. By the time they got to the apartment, Danna was badly shaken.
After making a few inquiries and speaking with the army social worker, Danna discovered that she was not alone. This officer had harassed several other women, some more than verbally. He had already been indicted once. Danna now faced a much bigger dilemma than which army unit to choose. Should she press charges? Would this ruin her career? Would it ruin his career? Would it put her in danger? She did the understandable second-guessing – was she remembering things correctly? Maybe what he did wasn’t so bad? In the end, she gathered her strength and pressed charges.
To the army’s credit, they were very supportive. They supplied her with emotional support and walked her through the process. And, to Danna’s credit, though she was frightened (he knows where she lives!), she stuck it through to the end.
When my mother-in-law heard the story, she was shocked that such a thing would happen in the Israeli army. Weren’t they the feminist army that had included women since its inception? I wasn’t shocked, only because there is sexual harassment everywhere in the world. The test is what an organization does about it. I was heartened to know that Danna had so much support. Most importantly, I was happy to know that the army has a soldier as brave as Danna, with the courage to confront the system and do the right thing. She has set a tremendous precedent to help ensure the safety and security of our soldiers.
Danna has been moved to a new base. It’s closer to our house, which is fun. We can visit her when she is stuck there for Shabbat, and when we are passing through on our way to Jerusalem.
The work is not always exciting – letting people into Israel from Jordan. More paperwork. More bureaucracy. Half the time, she is stationed in a tiny box outside of Jericho, where she can sit for 12 hours at a time at a little window exchanging IDs for passes with Palestinian bus drivers. She demonstrated the ease of the task when she put our seven-year-old son to work for a few minutes. He got lots of smiles from the drivers.
I can see what she’s thinking when she’s there: How exactly am I helping the Jewish people? But we know the truth. She has already served the country immeasurably by making the army a safer place for soldiers. Will she also make steps towards humanizing relations between Jews and Palestinians?
The other day, she was getting ice cream on the trendy Emek Refaim in Jerusalem. She saw a young man who looked familiar, but she told her friend that she couldn’t place from where.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“Yes!” he replied eagerly. “You let me across the Allenby Bridge last night. You said it would take 10 minutes, but it took two hours!”
“Oh gosh, I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry,” smiled the young Arab from Norway. “You were the nicest person there.”
So, yes, I think our latest progeny has a lot to offer to the state of Israel and to humanity at large. I have learned so much from her in the year since she entered our family – about humility and bravery and kindness. We are even considering giving her an upgrade in her family pazam.
May we all bring a bit more humility, bravery and kindness with us into the new year. Chag samayach!
Emily Singer is a teacher, social worker and freelance writer. Singer and her husband, Ross, were rebbetzin and rabbi of Vancouver’s Shaarey Tefilah congregation until 2004. The Singers spent two years in Jerusalem and then moved to Baltimore, Md., where Ross was rabbi at Congregation Beth Tfiloh and Emily taught Judaic studies at Beth Tfiloh High School, until they moved to Israel in 2010. They have four children.
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