Love the Stranger; Insight from an Israeli reserve captain | Passover haggadah by Cynthia Janower

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Email from an Israeli Reserve Captain during the 2014 Gaza war

Yesterday I had the great privilege of accompanying Major General (Ret.) Avigdor Kahalani to an artillery battalion, somewhere in the war zone. General Kahalani is one of Israel’s greatest war heroes, a veteran of the Six Day War, The Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War... [edited for brevity]... At the end of his military career, General Kahalani entered politics, was elected to Israel’s Parliament, served as an inner circle cabinet minister, and participated in some of the Israeli government’s most critical debates and decisions. After retiring from the political arena Kahalani became the Chairmen of AWIS, the Association for the Welfare of Israel’s soldiers.

It was in that capacity that he went out to meet with the soldiers serving, under fire, in the field. For those young soldiers it was a chance to meet a living legend, as close as Israel has to Patton or MacArthur. I thought he was going to give them a sort of pep talk, though their spirits didn’t need any rallying.

I’ve been in the Israel Defense Forces for forty years, and I’ve never seen morale so high, and never seen the country so united behind it’s soldiers. The other day I was in a restaurant at a crossroad just before the Gaza border. It’s sort of the last place to get a good meal before you hit the border into no man’s land. I was hungry as your basic honey badger, and had ordered a huge meal, knowing it would probably be the only chance I’d have to eat that day. When I went to pay the bill the waitress said it had already been taken care of.

“Somebody bought me lunch?", I asked, wanting to thank my benefactor.

“No," she said, “Somebody picked up the bill for every soldier here.” There were easily fifty soldiers eating lunch there. "It happens like that every day now,” she said and smiled.

I’ve had total strangers take me in, offer me a bathrobe while they washed my uniform, feed me, literally offer me their beds to sleep in and their bathrooms to shower in. Amazing… amazing.

So the troops didn’t need a pep talk.

But what Kahalani told them, I found extraordinary.

He spoke quietly.

So quietly the young soldiers leaned forward to catch every word and when he spoke it was with a conviction that came straight from his heart and went straight into the herts of all of those who heard him.

“We never taught you to hate.” He said, "Not this army, not the Israel Defense Forces. We never taught you to hate. And there are armies in the world who do that. And I don’t know, maybe it works to a degree, maybe by hating the enemy, you are a fiercer fighter. I don’t know. But we never taught you that. And I’ll tell you why. If we teach you to hate, you can’t undo that. You’ll come back from the war and it won’t be the 'enemy,' it will be your brother in law, or your neighbor or your former friend. Once you teach people to hate, they’ll find someone to hate. So we never taught you that."

Suddenly he was speaking not like a General, but like a loving father to his much loved sons and daughters.

"We never taught you that. You know why you’re here. It’s not to hate anybody. It’s to defend your people, your homes and your families. Each of you has to feel as if the whole fate of the whole people of Israel is on you shoulders. Each of you holds that fate in your hands. But it’s not about hatred. And now you’ve inherited that tradition from my generation, and you’ll be the ones to continue it. But those who inherit have a responsibility. I know you won’t disappoint me.”

That was the pep talk from Israel’s Patton during a cruel and vicious war that was forced upon us by an equally cruel and vicious adversary, Hamas. The pep talk was: Don’t hate. Do what you need to do to defend your homes, your families and your people. But don’t hate.

haggadah Section: -- Ten Plagues