‘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 G-d 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.
Serving Hashem and America
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.
