For God and Country: How the U.S. Military Made Me a Better Jew

In the entire U.S. military there are perhaps 150 Orthodox Jews – and I am one of them. Why am I telling you this? Before I answer that question, I should tell you my story.

I was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and in 1976, when I was five, my parents, my sister and I immigrated to Seattle. When we arrived, Jewish Family Services sent my sister and me to the Seattle Hebrew Academy, an Orthodox day school. I didn’t speak any English so the first few weeks of school were a bit traumatic. I learned quickly, however, that your mom could not pack you a bologna and cheese sandwich for lunch.

My sister and I went to that school for three and a half years until they decided it was time for us to start paying tuition. We could not afford it so we had to transfer to public schools. After that my Jewish involvement waned.

Our family still maintained some connection to Judaism through Chabad. On occasion we would go to Seattle’s Chabad House during the holidays (mostly, I suspect, for the free food and ample vodka). During our early years in Seattle, Chabad did a lot of outreach to our family and helped give me the foundation of my Jewish pride.

For a few years I also attended Chabad day camp during the summers. I think the seeds of my military career were actually planted at that camp, whose theme was that we were young soldiers in the Rebbe’s Army of Hashem.

At twelve I was too old for the camp, but I still continued my education as a mensch. I enlisted myself in the Boy Scouts. I remember lighting Chanukah candles during a Boy Scout winter outing. We were camping for a few days in a cabin in an old mining town, in the north Cascade mountains. I improvised a menorah and insisted on lighting candles in the cabin window to show the other boys that I was Jewish and did not celebrate Christmas.

I was also proud and thankful to be an American. I wanted to serve my country. Specifically, I wanted to join the U.S. military. I read a lot of military and history books, played with toy soldiers and toy guns, and imagined myself a soldier. I also wanted travel and adventure. I decided that as soon as I graduated high school I would enlist.

By nature I was always machmir (strict) and never did anything half-hearted, so joining the regular army was just too easy. I would join the best fighting force in the world, the United States Marines.

The typical Jewish reaction was: “What’s a nice Jewish boy doing in the Marines?” Everyone, especially my parents, thought I was crazy. My parents had escaped the USSR to give me a better life and to avoid my having to serve in the brutal Soviet military.

On February 8, 1989, four days after my eighteenth birthday, I shipped off to Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego.

On the third day of boot camp, we were sitting in formation when a mean drill instructor (they are all mean) approached the platoon and barked, “All my Jews, stand up.” I thought to myself, “Here we go, the persecution of the Jews is about to begin.” Out of 87 recruits, I was the only one to stand up. He ordered me to report to a major standing off in the distance, which I nervously did.

I saluted and said, “Sir, Private Ekshtut reporting as ordered, Sir!” He introduced himself as Major Goldberg and explained that only one in a thousand Marines is Jewish. He invited me to attend Friday night services at the nearby Navy chapel.

Going to Shabbat services was quite an enjoyable experience. I was getting special treatment. Friday evenings I was taken to the adjacent Navel Training Center. After services I was given soda and cookies for kiddush. These goodies were considered contraband and a big “no-no” in boot camp. Best of all, I got to escape from my drill instructors for a few hours.

Plus, on Sunday mornings, when most of the other recruits were in church, I had extra time and sink space to do my laundry – which we did the old-fashioned way, by hand!

After twelve weeks of grueling physical and mental basic training, I accomplished my life goal. I became one of “the few, the proud” – a United States Marine.

When I first enlisted, I wanted to be a combat engineer, one of the guys who build and blow stuff up, but the military’s needs come first and they send the smarter kids to do the smarter jobs. So, given my “Yiddishe kop,” they told me I was going to be an artillery meteorologist. “What the heck is an artillery meteorologist?” I asked. I soon found out.

I was sent to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for a four-month course. I learned how to survey weather conditions in order to precisely adjust artillery fire for accuracy up to ranges of 10 miles or more.

After my schooling and a few weeks’ home leave, I was sent overseas for my desired travel and adventure. I spent the next year in Okinaw, Japan. I also got to travel to other exotic locations like Korea, the Philippines, and Bangladesh. During the first Gulf War, I was deployed for seven months on a Navy ship to the less exotic Arab Middle East. That winter, I again lit Chanukah candles, but this time in the middle of the Persian Gulf.

When the ground war started we disembarked in a port in Saudi Arabia. That first evening, craving more adventure, I decided to go explore the port by myself. The Saudi soldiers on guard duty stopped me. Upon seeing that I was an American Marine, they invited me into their guard-house for tea. We tried to communicate in their broken English and sign language and I sat there grinning and enjoying their hospitality. The whole time I kept thinking to myself, “If they knew I was Jewish, would they be as hospitable?’’ The irony made me grin even more.

After the war and four years of active duty service, I returned to Seattle and went to college. Being a civilian wasn’t the same. I missed the camaraderie of the Corps, so I came back in to serve one weekend a month and two weeks a year in the Marine Reserves, this time as a combat engineer.

In March 1998 I accomplished my next life goal, graduating from the University of Washington as a civil engineer. After college I spent a few months in Israel – my fourth visit. It was on that trip, and after reading Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, that I decided I needed to learn more about what it meant to be a Jew. I was always proud of my “Jewishness,” but so what? How was I going to pass on that pride to my future children?

My rabbi, Daniel Lapin, once told me: “In order to be Jewish, you have to do Jewish.” How do you “do” Jewish? I had to know what to do and how to do it. So I enrolled myself in a two-year program of basic Judaism classes for adults and started reading religious books.

“Coincidentally,” one of my teachers in this program was Rabbi Yechezkel Kornfeld – the director of the Chabad day camp I had attended as a kid and the one responsible for the Jewish outreach our family was given when we were fresh off the boat.

This Jewish outreach continued. I was invited to Shabbat services, where I was greeted and treated with great warmth and made to feel welcome. People asked me to their homes for meals. I was even invited to weddings of people I barely knew. I was treated like family.

The Marines also are a family. We are known as a “band of brothers” because wherever you go in the world, if you meet another Marine you instantly become the best of friends. It doesn’t matter if you are twenty years apart in age.

I saw that observant Jews are the same way. They see the kippa on your head and instantly you are like family. They barely know your name, but they invite you home for dinner and give you a place to stay the night, as if you were cousin Moishe from Flatbush.

This familiarity comes from having the same values and from sharing the same life experiences. The more I learned about Judaism and Torah, the more I desired to share these Jewish experiences with my future family. The Torah’s values are what I want to pass on to my future children.

Incidentally, several years before I started on my journey, my sister returned to Judaism via being invited to a Shabbat dinner. She and her husband and their five children are now Breslover chassidim, living in Jerusalem. I danced at their wedding in my U.S. Marine Corps dress uniform – topped by a shtreimel a yeshiva student had placed on my head.

I am not a chassid, but for me, becoming an observant Jew was also a straightforward transition. Nothing else would suffice. After several years of learning and growing, I was going to synagogue every Shabbat, putting on tefillin every morning, and keeping kosher. The only time I could not keep Shabbat the way I wished was when I was doing my monthly weekend duty in the Reserves.

I lit candles and made kiddush in the barracks on Friday night, and my buddies would even do the “labors” that were prohibited for me on the Sabbath. Nonetheless, I still could not fully keep Shabbat as prescribed in the Torah. If I were back on active duty, I could have. They would have just let me off for the Sabbath. But in the Reserves it was different. The only time we trained was on the weekend, and Saturday was the main training day.

It was time for me to make a decision: leave my beloved Marine Corps or stay in the Marines and not be so machmir one weekend a month. My desire to serve to God overcame my desire to serve in the Corps. So, after 13 years of service, I left the Marines to keep Shabbat.

As it turned out, though, my military service was not yet over. Just two months after finally leaving the Corps, a new opportunity presented itself.

Rabbi Brett Oxman and his family were visiting our synagogue for Sukkot. He is a friend and former student of my current rabbi, the aforementioned Daniel Lapin. We met in the Lapins’ sukkah. I discovered that Rabbi Oxman is a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and an active duty chaplain stationed at McChord Air Force Base, near Seattle. He suggested that I look into becoming a chaplain assistant in the Air Force Reserves.

He said that they would love to have an Orthodox Jew on their staff and indicated they would accommodate my religious needs and work with me around my Sabbath schedule.

The idea of going from the Marines to the Air Force at first seemed very unorthodox, but I contacted the Reserve Chaplains at McChord and set up an interview. At the end of the interview they were ready to hire me on the spot. In March 2002 I joined the U.S. Air Force as a chaplain assistant. Now I can do both, keep the Sabbath and continue to serve part time in the military.

Perhaps best of all, as a chaplain assistant, I am now the one who helps provide for the religious and spiritual needs of my fellow Jews and all the personnel of the other religions within the U.S. military.

Today, I continue to learn and grow as a Jew. I’m even on the board of my synagogue now. I ask myself, would I want my son, when one day God grants me one, to join the military? In good Jewish and military tradition, I will cross that bridge when I get to it. (My more immediate objective is to find a wife, my soulmate).

The fact is, a lot of what I learned in the Marines has made me a better Jew. Jewish observance is similar to military training, except you don’t have to shvitz (sweat) as much or crawl in the mud.

Being a Marine taught me self-discipline and responsibility, pride and self-esteem, how to answer to a “higher authority,” and the value of teamwork, family and community.

In being charged by the G-d of Israel, the real Commander-in-Chief, to wake up early to go to morning prayes -- in fact to pray three times a day -- and to keep kosher and live in a Jewish community, we acquire some of the same qualities the military teaches. Wearing a yarmulke and tzitzit (ritual fringes)is a lot like wearing a uniform – they designate you as a member of a branch of “service.”

I do know that if my future son does serve in the military, he’ll be a better man and a better servant of God because of it.

Mikhail Ekshtut is a civil engineer in Seattle and a chaplain assistant in the Air Force Reserve.

Thanx for the ping, what a great story. It was great in basic training being Jewish, getting the goodies, and I was allowed to have a friend visit (a fellow Jew who happened to live in San Antionio, where Air Force basic training takes place, and happened to be a beautiful red head girl) when everyone else was complaining about missing their friends and family. Our lay leader (we didn't have a Rabbi) was a Chief Master Sergeant (E-9) who was about to retire.
When I first arrived, they didn't ask who was Jewish, only who was Catholic or Protestant, so I tagged along with the Protestant services just to get out of the barracks for a couple of hours. Later, when the word got out that there were Jewish services, the Chief was furious that nobody had told me about them. He called my Drill Sgt (a Technical Sgt, E-6), and had him quivering! We heard the TSgt on the phone saying "Yes, Chief", "I'm sorry, Chief", "It'll never happen again, Chief". All the recruits sat around saying, "Wow, wonder what happened? Somebody must be in trouble. If he calls any names, they're done for." Well, as soon as he hung up we all scurry to look like we're busy. Then, in his loudest voice ever, he calls my name -- "Airman Rosenthal! Report!" My heart sank, I thought it was the end. He calls me in, shuts the door, and asks if anyone had told me about the Jewish services. I said no. He said why didn't you say something, I said I did, I asked and nobody knew about them. He said that I have a Constitutional Right to my religion, and the military cannot get in the way of that, I could take the matter up in legal proceedings that I was denied my Constitutional right. I said no, I just want to go to service, it was an honest mistake. And, just as I was dismissed, I was told that he (my Drill Sgt) didn't appreciate being ripped a new one by a Chief Master Sgt, so please, don't miss service again.

So it only took the kid a few weeks to learn English sufficiently well to communicate. A hard worker, obviously. That fact, of course, flies in the face of liberals who want to shove "bilingual education" down our throats as a remedy for Latinos' lack of educational success (as a whole). It would force them to ponder a truth too difficult to swallow.

That's the best evaluation of "bilingual education" that I have ever read.

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