Yeshiva Training Pays Off at the Range

Got an interesting email today from Aaron. A cc of an email to Kim du Toit. According to The Jerusalem Post, former yeshiva students in Israel are turning out to be fine snipers, and the credit probably goes to their years of disciplined study.

From the photos of targets I posted recently, it should be obvious that I don't know a hell of a lot about long-distance shooting. Apparently there is math involved, when you get up to a certain range. Bullets have curved trajectories under the best of circumstances, and you have to account for wind. So real snipers have to be able to deal with certain equations in order to get the bullets where they're supposed to go. Yeshiva students don't typically exert themselves learning higher math, but they have distinguished themselves as snipers anyway, because the discipline required to study the Bible and the Talmud works just fine when you apply it to numbers. Small N. Awful pun not intended.

I can see the atheists scratching their heads. "Forget this. Back to Fark."

Might as well point out, once again, that ignorance of math is far from universal among Orthodox Jews. A number of the finest physics texts begin with a funny little Hebrew inscription, giving the credit to God. One of my favorite texts is Classical Mechanics, by Herbert Goldstein, a religious Jew (who attended Aaron's wedding, as I did, long before I knew who he was). It was written so well, it is quite literally a thing of beauty and a pleasure to read. I kept it even though I gave up on physics. There is also a wonderful text on basic quantum mechanics, with the same inscription, written by a scholar named Liboff.

I was talking to Aaron the other night about Jews who take their giant Talmud brains out of the yeshiva and wander off into math and science. I wondered if they were "jazz singers" of a sort, lured away from religion by logic instead of cigarette smoke and bathtub gin. But he said that religious Jews consider math and science "parve," which is the word which describes things that are dietetically neutral. Neither milk nor meat, therefore harmless.

Aaron was also telling me how disgusted he was with Bush and Rice over the concessions they've pushed Israel to make. My natural tendency is to defend Bush. I think he genuinely supports Israel, and my best guess is that he is not venal enough to abandon Israel over oil. We are engaged in a war with Islamist enemies, and I think Bush has to walk a tightrope every day, because we need Muslim cooperation in order to prevail. They give us intelligence and so on. I've always assumed Bush was doing as much for Israel as he could, without abandoning the war on terror. I figured getting rid of the West Bank settlements and establishing Gaza as an independent entity were unavoidable compromises we would simply have to swallow.

Now I'm not so sure. Aaron mentioned a bit from the book of Deuteronomy, and I dug up this passage from the seventh chapter:

1 When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you- 2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. [a] Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles [b] and burn their idols in the fire. 6 For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

"Make no treaty." Seems fairly clear.

In the past, I thought Aaron was wrong when he said the Israelis should refuse to give up this territory or that territory. I thought maintaining the "moral high ground" was worth a few bits of land. But so far, he has always been right and I have always been wrong, not just from a Biblical standpoint, but from a practical one. If there is a difference. Israel should have kept the Sinai. They should take back Gaza, from which they are bombarded almost every day. They should take over the West Bank and put a giant wall around the OUTSIDE, and they should settle the daylights out of the Golan Heights and fill it with missile installations. The UN is openly anti-Israel and inwardly anti-Semitic, they will never be satisfied with any sacrifice Israel makes, and there is no point in giving back land bought with Israeli blood. They will simply have to re-take it eventually, because their barbaric neighbors will use it to kill them.

Israel would be criticized all over the world if it did all these things. So what? They're criticized just as much when they give in. If you're going to take the heat, you might as well get the spoils.

I still think Bush is doing what he thinks is right, but he is a political leader, not a religious one. That distinction, applied to one person or another, has been a source of misery to Israel for thousands of years. I think it's much harder for a secular leader to take things like prophecy into account, regardless of what he believes in his heart.

Aaron points out that America's fortunes have crumbled since we started reversing the trend toward the completion of Biblical Israel. It's hard to know how strong the relation is. A nation that causes problems for Israel will suffer; of that I have no doubt. But it's never clear what the schedule is. The Germans and Austrians damaged Israel more than anyone in modern history, and their countries seem to have fared pretty well for the last half-century. And we have a lot of other things to answer for. More and more, the US is starting to look like the collection of freaks who ridiculed John Huston's Noah in The Bible. Like extras from Mad Max. Tattooed, self-mutilated, full of VD (and lionizing the victims), disrespectful to parents, caught up in bizarre, evil religions, obsessed with sex, materialistic, cruel, convinced abortion is a mitzvah. There are so many reasons we should suffer, is it possible to isolate our recent treatment of Israel is the proximate cause? It always freaks me out to see how much we are coming to resemble prison inmates. Sociopaths. The scum of the earth. We've adopted their nasty little chin beards. Their black gothic-script tattoos. Their shaved heads. Their threatening language and gestures. These days a mall food court could be mistaken for the exercise yard at Folsom Prison. And sooner or later, you are likely to become what you persistently imitate.

I don't know why we want to look like the biggest losers in society. People who have no friends, no families, and no future. People who get beaten and sodomized more or less routinely. Why did we decide bad was cool? Bad people are generally miserable and perpetually defeated, are they not? I guess I'm missing something.

I'll say this. If we're betraying Israel mainly to protect our oil supply, the result has been somewhat ironic. Oil costs a hundred and seven dollars a barrel. We now have a situation where hippies, Arabs, and greedy oil executives agree: let's avoid drilling and building refineries and keep the supply tight. If that isn't evidence of a curse, what is?

Some people think America was created and made powerful mainly to protect Israel. I don't know if that's true, but I know that Israel's enemies are God's enemies, and frankly, I have no respect whatsoever for secular opinions on this issue.

It may be too late for America. Sometimes I think 911 symbolized the official withdrawal of God's favor. Or at the very least, a warning that it was time to shape up. Which we have ignored.

I wish I could have done more for Israel in my youth than simply picking grapefruit. When the final accounting is made, I want to be sure I'm on the right side, in a big way. I'll tell you what. If I ever learn to shoot, and Israel needs fat old Gentiles to back up the yeshiva snipers, I'll be checking out plane fares.

Meanwhile, you can always contribute to the IFCJ. Feed poor Jews in other countries. Help oppressed Jews move to Israel. Finance the fight against anti-Israel journalism. If you can't stand on the wall, you can at least stand behind it and load rifles, right? Maybe the freaks and punks will succeed in bringing America down, but you don't have to go down with them.