Letters From Iraq

While Benjamin Preston, a staff writer for The Santa Barbara Independent, was embedded with an Army unit in Iraq, he traded e-mails with Heeb about his quest to find a rabbi. He had to wade through ample amounts of paperwork (not to mention survive in a war zone) to find the holy woman, but find her he did. Read more about Preston’s quest below.

Dear Heeb,

When you’re in Baghdad working as an embedded journalist with a U.S. Army civil affairs unit, one of the last things that pops into your mind (in that most Islamic of places) is Judaism. Even on days when we were surrounded by the sound of deadly explosions— an occurrence that can cause one’s mind to wander toward things religious—I seldom thought about anything other than the immediate surreal physicality of the peculiar world in which I found myself living. That all changed one day when I noticed the pork warning labels in a U.S. Army mess hall. As I reached for a dish, one of the Pakistani food servers shot me a concerned glance and said, "Sir, did you know there’s pork in that?" Apparently, the man thought I was a Muslim (maybe my thick beard confused him), but his warning still got me thinking about the U.S. service members who choose to keep kosher. Where do they go for a spiritual and cultural connection? There’s no shortage of Christian chaplains, but holy men and woman of the Jewish variety seem harder to find. It took a bit of digging, but eventually I tracked down Captain Sarah Schecter at an Air Force base 40 miles north of Baghdad. She was the only Jewish Chaplain in the U.S. military’s Iraq Theater of Operations.

The daughter of an Air Force rabbi, Schecter is the first woman to hold that post. And although she always wanted to be a rabbi, the September 11th attacks, which occurred when she was in rabbinical school, persuaded Schecter to follow in her father’s footsteps and join the Air Force. She usually serves as a chaplain for Air Force recruits at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, but she volunteered to come to Iraq to be around for Hanukah, Purim and Passover. As Joint Base Balad’s flight line chaplain, however, she provides counseling and spiritual resource guidance for all airmen on the base.

And the guys at Balad seem grateful to have Schecter’s services available. One Saturday, singing the prayers in a strong, clear alto reminiscent of Joni Mitchell, Captain Schecter leads her congregation through the morning service before getting into the more intricate workings of Torah study. Dissecting verse and squeezing every drop of meaning they can out of the words they read, the small group pushes their camouflage yarmulkes back as they scrunch up their brows in deep concentration. "I don’t really know too much about what all that means, but, you know, I want to be the best Jew that I can be," a dark-skinned young man tells me, in an earnest voice tinged with an unmistakably Southern accent. Poring over a chapter of Exodus, the soldiers, airmen and their rabbi attach special significance to the description of the portable tabernacle they are studying—a poignant passage for a group of people constantly on the move. As they talk, I almost forget where I am. Then an F-16 roars overhead and I notice the stack of M16 rifles propped in the corner.

Considering that Iraq kicked out its entire Jewish population in the 1950s, seeing Jews there at all is a pretty unique experience these days. A few of the folks at Saturday services that day reflect upon the religious significance of being in Iraq as a Jew. "This is the birthplace of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Literally, this is the birthplace of Judaism," says a young soldier who asks to be referred to simply as “Avraham.” In Iraq, as in other corners of the world where Jews make up the minority, Schecter’s congregation faces the challenges inherent in being different from the mainstream crowd — such as having to explain yourself to those who aren’t familiar with what you’re about. "I never tell people ‘what I am,’ which, when the question is asked, is an American way of asking about race or ethnicity," said Avraham, who by his looks could be Middle Eastern, African or Hispanic. "I always answer flatly, ‘I am a Jew.’"

At any rate, my experience with Captain Schecter and her worshipers distracted me from the contemporary realities of Iraq—in which infrastructure problems, insurgent attacks and a divided populace are a daily concern—and brought me closer to a past which makes this region of the world so unique, giving me part of the broader perspective I needed to better understand it.

Cheers,

Benjamin Preston

Staff Writer

The Santa Barbara Independent

Want to read more about Preston’s journey? Check out his blog:

independent.com/blogs/inside-iraq-santa-barbara-warzone.com

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