Adjusting Sights has a different theme but the same sensibility. It is an account of how the Israelis were surprised and God forbid almost overcome by the Syrians in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The narrator a member of a tank crew lost his closest friend Dov in the chaos. Rav Sabato captures the confusion of war the lack of preparedness in the Israeli army and government (the second led to the first as the soldiers realized) even to the point of the narrator not having the proper instruments to adjust the sights of his gun before firing.
The gunner uses terms from the Tanach and the siddur; he and his friends are innocents from the beit midrash abroad on the battlefield. Here they and men from different backgrounds must draw together to adjust their sights from thinking the battle will be a quick victory on the order of the Six Day War to the harsh reality of a well-prepared enemy enjoying the advantage of a surprise attack.
Because Rav Sabato is a descendant of a distinguished rabbinic family one might assume that the first novel is based on his family’s history and the second is a product of his imagination. But acquaintances who were with him in the army report that the details are exactly right. A nephew who served in Lebanon gave this book to my sister-in-law with the comment He captures what we experienced too.
When translating Adjusting Sights (Ti’um Kavanot in Hebrew) Hillel Halkin observes that the adjustment of the gun sight of a tank optical device to bring the necessary coordinates into focus is only one meaning of the term; kavanot are the spiritual intentions one has when praying and here a major adjustment to give proper focus occurs.
Prayers that we say by heart but occasionally without the involvement of our hearts are illuminated when the narrator shares his experience of them. At a moment of extreme danger he finds in his pocket a small book of Tehillim that his mother had given him before he left for the front. He recalls his mother saying Psalm 23 on Shabbat after Minhah and his father’s pleasant melody for the same poem: God is my shepherd; I shall not want. He always thought how appropriate the Psalm was to the special tranquility of the Sabbath. But now another verse in the Psalm is relevant: Even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you are with me.
He writes: It was as though David had written it just for me. What was it that made you feel that all his Psalms were about you like a portrait whose eyes stay focused on you from every angle?
I had always attributed the appeal of Tehillim to their universality: every person can find in them what he or she wants. Sabato attributes this appeal to their particularity: as much as the reader searches for the Psalm the Psalm searches out the reader. Even if we pray in the comfort of home or synagogue not worrying as the narrator must about whether the Syrians will find him and his comrades who have escaped from burning tanks Sabato’s books deepen our attentiveness. We realize that all our lives unfold in the valley of the same shadow so that mortal is another name for a human being.
Whether one reads Aleppo Tales in Hebrew or in Philip Simpson’s English translation (Toby Press 2004) and Adjusting Sights in the original or in Hillel Halkin’s translation (Toby Press 2003) one’s praying changes. Verses from our tradition suffuse the narrator’s consciousness and become the medium for experiencing life. Rav Sabato translates human experience into the written word and the Written Word of the Torh into human experience.
