They come from a yeshiva to a massive camp not far from the Jordanian border. These bookworms are shoring up the Israel Defense Forces.

Photo by Martin Hoffman

Evening phone call from my son to my wife: “Hey, Mom, guess what? I threw my first hand grenade today!”

Our 18-year-old yeshiva boy in battle dress is tossing live grenades under the blistering Israeli sun, firing an automatic, rolling and tumbling in the hot dust, training for combat. What is he doing there? Aren’t yeshiva boys supposed to be anemic bookworms whose only exercise comes from shuckling in front of an open Talmud? And where did the yeshiva go, that secure fluorescent-lit womb filled with prayer and learning and dreams of redemption?

“You’re not going into a combat unit!” my wife insists about 200 times. “The army we had in ’67 is gone! Get yourself a safe job.” But Noam is adamant. “What do you expect?” says Meir, my other son. “That’s the education you gave him.”

“I gave him?” I say.

“Who sent him to Beit Orot?”

A hesder yeshiva on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus with a breathtaking view of the Temple Mount, Beit Orot is housed in a building once owned by a wealthy Armenian. It was purchased by an idealistic American for, they say, $10 million, so the Jewish people would have a toehold in an area overflowing with Arabs. The building, resting on a wooded slope, occupies the core of a spiritual and political vortex. The Temple Mount, glowing in the night, tugs incessantly at the heart, a majestic, mournful monument to bygone spiritual ecstasies.

“And you expected him to be a clerk in the army?” Meir asks.

The hesder program offers one solution to the volatile religious-military turmoil. Yeshiva boys have a longstanding exemption from the army, which infuriates secular Israelis.

Straddling both worlds, the hesder program allows these boys a year and a half of study followed by a year or so of army duty, and then they return to the yeshiva for another year, instead of three straight years of army service. I naively expected Noam to spend his army time in some religious context—kashering army kitchens, leading prayer services. I was totally unaware that many hesder rabbis were gung-ho army, one of them with 10 kids had volunteered for combat duty in Lebanon.

“I’m going to be a paratrooper,” Noam announces.

“A what?!”

Quick call to a friend whose son had been a paratrooper for three years, who made hairy night jumps, and weird commando attacks in Lebanon. “How do you sleep at night?” I ask his father.

“Not much,” he says.

Next, a conversation with my wife’s nephew, a bespectacled assistant principal of a religious school who had been, once, a paratrooper. “What’s it like to jump out of an airplane?” I ask, trying to imagine the door popping open at 10,000 feet with an invitation to step outside.

“They throw you out,” he says, “because you’re frozen with fear.”

“Is that what you have to do,” I say to Noam, “to express your love of Eretz Yisrael?”

In the end, he and a bunch of his yeshiva buddies join the combat infantry. “At least he’s got both feet on the ground,” I say to my wife, who’s back on cigarettes after a 10-year abstinence.

The day comes to take him to Tel Hashomer, a camp that looks like some factory town, where my son will get processed, then sent off to the Golani brigade.

My God, I wonder, startled by this reality. Where did the years go? I remember taking Noam once to a sand-covered playground, where the shouting children scooted from slide to swings to monkey bars. And watching them, I had this uncanny flash: I could already see them as soldiers, rolling and tumbling down sand-banks in some arid desert; the years compressed, the endless wars insidiously penetrating that cacophony of childhood joy.

At Tel Hashomer, a jumble of cars jams the entrance. A sea of multicolored yarmulkes, like polka dots, spreads out across the land. The yeshivas have cast out their children.

Hundreds of mothers and fathers are now at the gates with their sons for a last-minute touch, a joke, a hug.

How different from my own encounter with the United States Army. Ordered to take a physical at Manchester, New Hampshire, I joined a crowd of muscular farm boys, staunch believers in America. Myself, saturated with the 60’s antimilitary litany, I steered a clear, venomous course into the doctors’ waiting hands: Peeling off my clothes, I displayed my precious flesh scraped razor-clean of all hair from head to crotch. “Get that damn pervert out of here!” one of the examiners shrieked. Beside the straight-laced farm boys, I am completely deranged, classification: I-Y—“to be drafted only in a national emergency.”

Years later, nothing can deter my son from joining the Golani, with its long tradition of fierce encounters. In 1948, when Arab armies invaded northern Israel, it was the Golani brigade, with severely depleted ranks and arms shortages, using Molotov cocktails and face-to-face combat, that stopped the Syrian columns of armor and infantry. In the Jordan Valley, they halted Iraqi forces. They combined guerrilla tactics with their commander’s experience in the British army.

Yet in those early years, the brigade included new immigrants, demoralized by social and economic problems in the transit camps and by their pitiful equipment. Their Czech rifles had only five rounds; their Sten guns were cheap throwaways designed for British paratroopers to use until their “real weapons” were finally dropped. Each battalion’s transport rarely exceeded one station wagon, a tender van and a single truck.

All this I pick up on the Internet. Yet one item in particular holds me: One company, annoyed by the battalion commanding officer’s indifference to their problems, showed him how their boots were tied with string to keep the soles from dropping off. The C.O. canceled their leave.

Was that the Golani reaction to personal problems? Or was it just some whacked-out officer? I had heard about a certain hard-core macho element. My mind, riddled with imagery of exhausting combat maneuvers, gives me no rest. I must see for myself what goes on there. But how? The basic training camps, rife with invasions of overprotective Jewish mothers, are nearly impossible to breach.

A brainstorm: I call the Israeli army spokesman. “I’m a journalist and I’d like to do a story on my son.” I am all wound up with my pitch: Show the American Jews that these 18-year-old bookworms are shoring up the Israel Defense Forces. Not going to college; not traipsing about Europe; but cleaning those M-16’s and dragging themselves on all-night marches. My kid, your kid, the neighbor’s son sweating in some desert trench.

After a month-long wait, they give me the green light. My son Meir takes the wheel; a carton tossed in the truck is filled with Noam’s favorite junk food. We roar south toward the Dead Sea, then north along the Jordanian border. The stony alleyways of Jerusalem vanish into dunams of date palms and blistering heat.

The camp is in a wadi not far from the Jordanian border, at the end of a bumpy concrete road. The land glows, warm and inviting, and the camp nestles between the dry hills.

We arrive as the recruits are taking a break. Sprawled out on their beds are a score of yeshiva boys in rumpled fatigues; Noam and his buddies, immersed in weaponry, in the ordered tents and the concrete turf, in the demanding obstacle course and the formations and lingo of the military.

I take a perch in the center of the tent. An IDF spokesman sent over to guide and monitor me, parks himself in the midst of the yeshiva boys.

Perhaps because they are bored, or tired, or because I’m the father of one of their buddies, or maybe even because what I’m asking actually activates thoughts and feelings buried beneath the new layerings of army life, they show me something of themselves—their radiant youth, their näiveté, their surprising belief in this difficult land and the stiff-necked people they have chosen to defend.

Noam takes me around the camp, a tiny, functional microcosm the flip side of the one on Mount Scopus from which he had come. The subtle logistics of Jewish law, the persistent passage from page to page, the sing-song rhythm of study have all vanished. I peer at him to see how he is holding up. Any chinks in the boy’s spirit? Any hints of an abusive macho creed?

A few weeks later I would see him and his buddies finishing up an 18-hour, 50-mile march, each packing a full load, covered with dust and sweat, marching limp and ragged those last few yards—like so many others in the prime of life, paying so heavily to sustain this precious, turbulent land. Myself, as I watch, filled with a bittersweet wash of pride and pain, the army of Israel here before me, in which I have invested my own flesh and blood: historic, mystic, imbued with spectacular shadings of Judah Maccabee, yet endlessly twisted awry by the nefarious global political dealings of the day.

The tour of the camp ends and we go to the firing range. The roar of the weapons is horrific. Noam firing his M-16 with his buddies, then learning methods of attack. One of the officers tells me: “Yeshiva boys? They’re very good. They take it seriously and give it their best.” And watching them, I think of a young Jewish boy who, with his sling and a single stone, brought down the iron-clad Goliath.

In English, Beit Orot means “House of Light.” As I stand on the firing range, I sense that these greenhorn soldiers, touched by that light, have brought a vital portion of it into this camp. The long hours of learning, sealed silently in their bones, will sustain them, my heart tells me, as they now learn the vicious art of war.