Hayal Boded
With Rosh Hashanah approaching, we gather to receive our gifts. We are the Hayalim Bodedim, deemed worthy of special salutation – not to mention snacks and free supermarket coupons. But who are we really? Some are like me: olim who have left their families thousands of miles away. Others are soldiers from broken homes of various shades, those who have to work outside of army hours in order to survive. These are our heroes.
Lone soldiers receive special benefits – a bit more money here and there, additional time off – all in all just that bit more leeway. Various bigwigs line up to applaud us for our service, leaving us feeling suitably inspired, although within a day one of these bigwigs would be shouting at me for not keeping the front gate of the base clean while I am on duty. But the bark is worse than the bite; I was more scared by my mum’s intimidations when I failed to tidy my room.
But Boded doesn’t just mean lone, it means lonely. It is a designation which conjures up the image of an impoverished soldier returning every weekend from the front to an empty, friendless room. In my case, I live in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv, and even have one or two friends. I need the army’s financial assistance to pay the rent, but can just about survive apart from that (breaking your key in the lock doesn’t help matters, but that’s another story).
However – proud man that I am – I still think my status is important. I deserve to be acknowledged. I could have got out of the army, and I certainly didn’t need to sign on for an extra six months. More than the perks of the job, then, I guess I crave that occasional recognition, the understanding that spending two hours every Thursday morning doing manual labour isn’t what most of my contemporaries are doing, that being shouted at for not shaving will never make sense to me, no matter how many times you tell me “that’s the army for you.”
But those that do understand simply think I’m mad for being here, that I should have followed in the footsteps of my peers. What they perhaps don’t realise is that I’m taking more than I could ever give back (especially when it takes me over four hours to translate a mere eleven pages of text!) – a shortcut to being absorbed into Israeli society, and the best Ulpan there is. For this, I’ll happily suffer the indignities and the humiliations, the authoritarianism and the manual labour. And this is something it’s simply impossible to see from the outside, which is why do many from my world will choose the margins. However comfortable those margins might be, right here right now, I wouldn’t swap my life in the army for anything else in the land. Things done changed.
