My Kibbutz and the Army

I got onto the best ulpan kibbutz program in Israel. If anyone reading this has tried to get onto a kibbutz ulpan program through Masa or the Jewish Agency, it really won't be difficult to figure out which kibbutz I'm on, because I'm on the kibbutz that will almost definitely be your first choice barring exceptional circumstances. Nearly everyone has a story, including myself, about how they had to fight to get a spot here. How spots got taken away and they had to ascend the chain of command and tell someone "look, idiot, you promised me a spot months ago, and now it got taken away." The registration closes the day that it opens. When I told the IDF representative at the consulate in Manhattan what kibbutz I'd got on, he went wide-eyed for a brief second and I actually felt like for a second there he didn't consider an object of his profession but he actually looked at me and said, "It's one of the most beautiful kibbutz in all of Israel. If you go on this kibbutz, your Hebrew will be fine when it's time to go to the army."

One of the great things about our program is that the people who work in our ulpan office, notably the director, has a lot of friends and contacts that come in and help the olim hadashim making Aliyah. Today someone came in to speak to us about the army. What it'll be like to serve, factually speaking, I have committed to memory. I can recite it back to you like the ABCs. The subjective aspects of it, however, are always new and fresh and never entirely the same from person to person. So here is this seasoned IDF veteran, a commander in the paratroopers, telling us what to expect. He gave the type of insight that the officials can't tell you when you call them cause it'd be unprofessional. He was there as a friend, he told us that if we ever have problems we can call him. He has adopted several "lone soldiers" and gave off an aura of genuineness that cannot be faked. His advice and information was invaluable.

For example, there's the "motivation test." How the hell do you measure someone's motivation in a standardized test? Well, he explained it today. First they exhaust you for four or five hours. I missed the specifics of how they do this, whether it's through physical exercise or non-stop tests or what, but you can be sure that the IDF knows how to exhaust people. Plus, those first five hours are bull shit. After that, you sit down for an interview, probably with some cute girl, and she'll just start asking you stupid questions.

"What club did you go to on Friday? What did you drink? What are the names of your drinking buddies?"

This guy emphasized that all you have to do is be polite, sit with good posture, enunciate your words, and he repeated over and over that you NEVER tell the person interviewing you "none of your business." Fail.

The interview lasts for all of ten minutes. Another thing is the "gibush." Gibushim are tryouts and there's a different one for each unit. They are basically meant to break you and test you not physically, but mentally. Being in unbelievable physical shape, "C-Kosher," is basically a check-off. Like a person applying to Harvard having a 4.0 GPA. It's simply expected. Now what are your extra-curricular activities? In a gibush, no matter how fit you are, they WILL drain of every last ounce of energy in your body until you are aching and begging for death. Then they will give everyone a sandbag, say hold this over your head, and have you run up and sand dunes for thirty minutes in the blistering August heat. It last for about seventy-two hours and in those seventy-two hours you might sleep six hours, if that. Fifty-percent drop out in the first few hours. The people who can use their mind to continue to function after their body has totally shut down, those are the people they want.

Or another example that someone I spoke to at the kibbutz coffee house regaled to me. At one point the commanders in his gibush had everyone get into formation. Then one of the commanders took out a can of Coca-Cola. "Anyone want this?" he asked insidiously. "Seriously, is anyone thirsty, they can have this coke if they like." And some poor shmuck accepted. He was called to the front of the formation. At this point in the story I was expecting how he was told to do one-hundred push-ups with a weight on his back, or how everyone had to run sprints while he drank the coke and watched. Nope. He drank the coke and then the commander just told him to leave. He was finished. No arguments or yelling or punishments. They just told him to take his shit and get out. Special forces weren't for him.

And also, there's moral integrity. That is the other major aspect. If you are told to do seventy-five push-ups and you do seventy-four and try to cheat, that's all it takes. It doesn't matter if you can run two kilometers in eight minutes. You're done. To use an example from a great book called Brotherhood of Warriors, if you are asked to carry a bucket of water back and forth sixteen times, no matter how ridiculous and inane that sounds, will you do it even if the commanders aren't watching (or so you think)? That's what they want more than physical ability. To know if you're honest.