all over the place

I finished my first full week working for the Rabbinate. I am still not sure what will be happening, but as of now I am helping out a captain with the religious needs of the base, such as Kashering food, preparing for religious events etc. (I spent a large chunk of the week preparing a seder Tu B’Shvat for a bunch of lieutenants.) I will probably be in a course to be a religious counselor, once the course begins, and I may be taught how to check and fix mezuzahs in order to fix up what is needed in the base.

I am meeting a lot of people who do nothing in the army. No, I am not talking about lazy people, I mean people who actually have a job of doing nothing. These is a guy who works in my department and actually has an office and seems to do nothing. After working with him for a week and a half I asked him, “Eli, what is your job here?” He shrugged his shoulders and told me that he is “just there” in case someone needs something, but in the mean time he has a TV in his office to kill time. And this isn’t a case of a solider without a job, he actually signed up for a job in the army (he is in his thirties) and the army usually only does that if they want the person to stay one.

There are a group of guys who show up every day to get a paper or something. They were waiting when I first arrived a week or so ago and told me that they have been waiting outside the office for a month. I thought they were joking, but it has now been almost two weeks and they just show up every day, wait and go home.

I met a lot of people around the base over the past week. Everyone is fascinated by Americans. I usually get two different kinds stages of responses. First they tell me how noble I am for moving to the country and volunteering for the army, then they ask me why I would possibly volunteer my time into such a crazy army.