In 2024, shortly before the commemorative events for Israel’s Day of Independence, I re-read Adjusting Sights by author Haim Sabato. Published in 1999 it chronicles Sabato’s role as an Israeli soldier. The work won the Israeli Sapir Prize for Literature in 2002. I re-read the book one more time last night. Its factual account about two Israeli soldiers resonates once more when Israel is fighting a war for its very existence.
There are many indelible representations of war. Spanish artist Goya expresses the barbarism of war in eighty-two etchings, images of battles and their “fatal consequences”. Picasso’s painting, Guernica, provides an indelible depiction of war’s atrocities. Many musical masterworks convey war’s inhumanity, its devastating consequence but few parallel the emotional wallop as does the touching story of two yeshiva boys, who served in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
The story is simple and brief. Haim Sabato and his close friend Dov learned at a yeshiva in Jerusalem. Both trained in the same tank at the Negev Base-- Haim a gunner and Dov a loader. On October 07, 1973, Judaism’s holiest day ended joyously for both, with blessings of the moon, sins forgiven and a positive outlook for the coming year. However, everything came to a jarring halt with the outbreak of the unexpected war. Haim and Dov are immediately conscripted to serve in a tank battalion on the Golan Heights. On arrival, they split up. Dov volunteers for one tank and Haim assigned to another. Haim never sees Dov again.
The book’s original Hebrew title Tiyum Kavanot contains far greater meaning than its English equivalent. Kavanah incorporates a heartfelt devotion to a task, an undistracted state of mind, a purpose that aligns with prayer. Sabato blends the confusion, the chaos, the fear of survival with his unshakable faith. He quotes the Talmud, rabbinical works and recalls Maimonides inspired phrase, “He who embarks on the path of war…let him risk what he must with no fear, clear of mind of all thoughts but those of war". He describes the frightening conditions of his battalion’s encounter with a Syrian tank force, eight times the size of the IDFs recalling the panic and confusion when Gidi, their commander, yells, “we’re hit, abandon tank!”
Buttressed by his faith, praying daily, Sabato expresses the personal trauma on the death of a driver who was trapped inside a blazing tank, the incertitude during the initial days of the war, the bedlam and horrific ambush by the Syrian army at Nafah quarry. And his singular “purity of intent” to defeat the enemy. It is at this point that I imagined our soldiers today.
Sabato admits it was tough to tell his war story, “everything coming out twisted and exaggerated.” He struggled to refashion his life without his best friend Dov, “his phylacteries found in the loader’s compartment”. As Sabato adjusted his sights in tank battles he clarified his own life becoming head of a Yeshiva in Israel.
