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“So what happened?” the rav asked.

Shin took a deep breath as he thought about the… uncomfortable part of his story. He practiced saying the words in head, and pictured himself looking all knowing and wise. Well, there I was, in this woman’s house, my shirt off and taking care of my wounds when she… No, that would not work. He avoided the rabbi’s eyes.“Well, it was bad. I hadn’t taken a beating like that in a while. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to work in groups with other heroes- someone to watch your back….” The rabbi motioned for him to continue. He’d already heard about the adventure with Lockbox and Thrillseeker.  “Anyway, I was really in my own world at that moment, thinking about the motorcycle gang still waiting for me, licking their wounds; planning something, I was sure and… and that had nothing to do with it. It just…it isn’t fair, okay? I do so much! So much, and He never makes it any easier on me!”Shin jumped up and started pacing in the small warm office of the head of the Unity City Yeshiva. All the trappings of American comfort wrapped in old world tradition: his scuffed black shoes strode comfortably over the soft, dark red carpet that went, not wall to wall, but bookshelf to bookshelf. Every inch of the room was covered with sefarim, volumes of the large books commenting and explaining the Holy Scriptures that were studied and explored here in the yeshiva. Shin stopped and pretended to examine the spine of one of the books, but he knew, as he was sure the Rabbi knew, that he was greatly lacking in this department.Shin had welcomed the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle with wide, open arms, and had quickly mastered the “ruchnius,” the spirituality that drove it. It was spirituality that had been lacking in his weeks and months following the completion of his service in the Israeli army, a deep emptiness that had pushed him to join his teammates in the expected trip to the Far East after their army service. He and his closest friends from his team in Sayeret Golani had left all the fighting and losses behind as they hiked and camped their way from Northern India, in the party city of Mumbai, to the South.

The entire trip, all the team could talk about was Goa; you’ll have a religious experience, they’d laughed. Many guys on the team had older siblings that had taken the very route they were taking, and all of them had raved about Goa, drug capital of India. Pot, LSD, mushrooms, and ecstasy were consumed like humus over there, and Shin was as ready as anyone to lean back and forget the last few years. In the end, it had turned out to be a religious experience, literally. Somehow, someone on the team had been sober enough to rouse the rest, and drag them to the five thousand-man Pesach seder, hosted every year by Chabad, a world-wide religious sect and charity organization.

Throughout his three years in the army, he’d had almost nothing to do with the ultra-Orthodox in Israel. As a member of a commando unit, he kept far away from civilian life and his lack of Hebrew had kept him oblivious of all the negativity in the newspapers. As a matter of fact, in his mind, Charedim were people who handed out free jelly doughnuts during Chanuka. He’d certainly never had any connection to them growing up as a non-religious Jew in Chicago. He’d never even thought about being Jewish ’til he found out he was eligible for a free Birthright trip to Israel, and he’d only gone on that to avoid trouble with the law.

But at the seder in Goa, it had been like nothing he had ever seen or felt. All those ultra-Orthodox men, running around serving thousands of guests, pouring wine, talking, chatting, and making them feel at home. The service ended close to 3am, but Shin had stayed up ’til sunrise. Long after his friends had gone to sleep, he remained, talking to someone whose name he didn’t even know, about God, philosophy, and life.

He had pushed forward and continued on the planned journey with his team but the “damage” had been done. Sometime in early June, just as the heat leveled off for the summer, Shin boarded a plane for the US and hooked up with a big yeshiva near his home. The rest was history.

Shin blinked himself back into the present and laughed to himself, the rest was history my ass… my….my… damn it, he hated that he still hadn’t stopped cursing. Shin looked down at his hands and noted the rough skin and numerous scars. Every bruise beneath his freshly laundered black suit was a reminder that he couldn’t leave his past behind him, he couldn’t put down his guns, so to speak.

“Shin, what has happened, what has upset you so much?” The Rosh Yeshiva, who wore a faded black coat that always smelled like lemon tea, was sitting in a large black chair, behind an enormous hard wood desk, covered with holy books and bank statements, letters from parents, and official city documents. Here was a  man who was up before dawn to daven Vatikin, a tradition to begin prayer at sunrise, and who went to sleep well after midnight every night, either because he spent time with his students, or simply learning by himself. So what was he doing wasting his time on Shin? Shin, who would never be a great Torah scholar? Shin, who didn’t even have enough decency to keep his shirt on!

“Rabbi Turin, you have to understand, I find myself in many uncomfortable situations. Imagine it, a month ago I spent the better part of a night hanging off the roof of an old church, complete with steeples and gargoyles. There I was, a pashuta Yid, haunting a Christian house of worship because some criminal, some doped up criminals were using it as a hideaway, with two hostages- members of the clergy.”

Shin collapsed onto the large couch the rabbi kept in the room for heart to hearts with the students. A second later he was up on his feet, pacing in tight circles. “I was practically a gargoyle myself, hanging from one of the bars of a large cross on the high roof.”  A member of the SWAT team had almost shot him when the wind had blown his “bekesha” up around him. At those heights, Shin had held tightly to the cross with one hand and used his other to hold onto his hat. “A Yid on a cross, that’s original.”

“Is this connected to what happened in Iron City?” Rabbi Turin watched the pacing with a calm demeanor; Shin couldn’t tell if the rav was truly interested in what he had to say. This man was so important, not just to him but to the entire Jewish community in the area, why was he wasting his precious time on a man who would never bring a tikun to the Jewish people? If anything, Shin had always felt that the rabbi pandered to the crazy ba’al tshuva with delusions of grandeur in super heroism to make sure he wouldn’t hurt anyone else in the community. But even if that were the case, who else did Shin have to talk to, who else could he unload on?

“Yes and no. I mean, it isn’t directly connected but the idea is the same.” Knuckles white on the Rabbi’s desk, Shin planted himself right before his spiritual mentor. “What happened in Iron City was something that Jews should go out of their way to avoid. How many Jews do you know that hang out on church rooftops? How many Jews do you know that dismantle air ducts in eighteen seconds, crawl through them and can drop over thirty feet and land in a crouch without hurting themselves?”

“Well I don’t know about that last one, but there are Jewish doctors and policemen who…”

“Save lives yes, but Jews… I don’t know.” A loud inhalation covered his uncertain pause. “How many of those Jews are Charedi? One of our goals in life is to keep ourselves spiritually clean – not the easiest thing to do when you spend your time with rapists and drug dealers. I know what you’re going to say. I do good work. I save lives, and that’s true. I did save the lives of the clergyman who lived in the church and the pregnant heroin junkie who was stashing smack in there, but I had to beat three men brutally to do it. How do you keep pure thoughts in your head when driving a fist into an eye socket?”

Shin looked over the rabbi’s desk and picked up a worn number two pencil the rabbi used to make notations in his Gemara and snapped it in two. “Something our commander taught us was that in order to cause destruction, to hurt something or someone, you needed hatred in your heart. I needed anger in me just to break that pencil, something so small and unimportant.” He placed the two halves in front of his rabbi. “Our mefaked used to tell us that we needed hatred of the unjust to do our jobs in Gaza; we needed to hate those that would hurt us. In that church, my heart was full of hate- hatred for those drugged out dealers of death. Enough hatred to plow through them like death, swiftly making my way between bursts of gun fire, taking apart their guns with carefully placed movements and using those dismantled pieces as weapons against their former owners!”

Flashes of the fight blurred his vision, as his old fire fights in the army had in those months after his discharge. “Rabbi, it was in this office that you helped me come to the decision to continue this lifestyle, and I think it’s time to revisit the decision. We agreed that one Jew, fighting for all Jews, regardless of their philosophies, could bring Am Yisrael together. We also said that I could do all that without putting my spiritual self at risk! In that church, using broken pieces of a pew as a stake, it wasn’t a joy in God I was feeling, it was blood lust, pure and simple. How can I find peace and love in Hakodesh Baruch Hu when I spend my days and nights doing these things? I have no one to help me improve my learning skills! Instead I spend my all my time fighting teyvas, my inner demons. Forget about the marit ayin when I have to go into a bar or strip club; dedicating my life to this is destructive! You teach us to avoid temptation, and I’m drowning in it!”

Rabbi Turin was now holding the two broken bits of the number 2 pencil, one in each hand. Beneath the large, ashen white beard, his paper thin lips were taut and flat, his brow creased in what might have been concern or worry, Shin was not sure. “Shin, please, what happened in Iron City?”

“What happened in Iron City? Fine, I’ll tell you.” He took his soft, immaculately clean black hat in his hands for comfort, and drifted back to Tennessee.

To Be Continued…