Looking Back
For chaplain who served in Iraq, a different calculus
of peace and war.
CHANAN TI GAY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
New York
M
JN
11/26
2004
60
ilitary men typically take the measure of a
battle in stark tallies of dead and injured
men, miles between enemy positions,
numbers of insurgent holdouts and the like.
But Cmdr. Irving Elson — a Conservative rabbi
who for the first eight months of Operation Iraqi
Freedom, and again for the High Holidays this fall,
was the only Jewish chaplain serving with Marines in
Iraq — uses a different battle calculus.
For Rabbi Elson, 44, an affable man who keeps
his graying hair neatly buzzed to about the same
length as his mustache, the battle count looks some-
thing like this: five days of Rosh Hashanah. Six
Passover seders in Baghdad. Seven Shabbat services in
one night. Seventeen High Holiday services.
"In the military, especially in times of combat, you
can't say, 'Well, Rosh Hashanah's today so today we're
going to do Rosh Hashanah services,"' Rabbi Elson
told JTA earlier this month, just before addressing a
group at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary,
where he was ordained in 1987.
"I did like five days of Rosh Hashanah. You're in
one place for makriv and shacharit," he said, using
the Hebrew terms for the evening and morning
prayer services, "and then you go to the next place,
and then you go to the next place, and then you go
to the next place, and Rosh Hashanah's over but, hey,
you still have another eight or nine places to go to."
And that's not eight or nine safe, comfortable syn-
agogues. Rabbi Elson led Yom Kippur services in Iraq
under mortar fire; tripped over an M-50 machine
gun while carrying a small Torah at the Al Asad air
base; and was forced to bury 100 copies of the Scroll
of Esther in the Kuwaiti desert when the books
wouldn't fit into his equipment-stuffed Humvee.
Still, he said, "These services were some of the
most meaningful times in my life."
Of 40,000 troops with the Marine Expeditionary
Force in Iraq, Rabbi Elson said, about 400 are Jews,
spanning the spectrum of religious engagement from
secular to Orthodox. Many of the Jews he guided in
Iraq were combat soldiers, coming to grips with their
own mortality, said Rabbi Elson, a Navy chaplain
who served in Iraq with the 1st Battalion, 11th
Marine Regiment.
"You're dealing with a very young population, 18-
to 21-year-olds," he said. "Spiritually they're at real
formative years. That's when they're on their own for
the first time and they're getting to ask the big ques-
tions in life, and I get to be there as a rabbi saying,
`Hey, this is what Judaism has to offer.' It's a great
job."
Rabbi Elson doesn't perform religious rites for
non-Jewish soldiers, but he
does provide spiritual succor
and guidance for troops of
any faith. "We minister to
our own, we provide for
others and we care for all,"
he said.
Rabbi Joseph Brodie, vice
president for student affairs
at JTS, said his former stu-
dent is particularly well suit-
ed for military chaplaincy.
"He's got a very good ear
to listen," Rabbi Brodie
said. "I think he's non-judg-
mental. He will service not
just Jews of all stripes but
people of all faiths. He's
committed to interfaith
work."
Military chaplaincy is a
unique sort of rabbinate,
said Rabbi Nathan
Landman, deputy director
of the JWB Jewish
Chaplains Council, the primary agency that recruits
and serves military chaplains.
"One of the most fulfilling aspects is that most
people in the American military come not from the
large cities of great Jewish concentrations, but from
more rural areas," said Rabbi Landman, who served
as a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force.
"A rabbi in uniform has an opportunity to create a
positive attitude toward Jews among those who have
never encountered them before, on a large scale," he
said.
Rabbi Elson had just such an opportunity in Iraq.
Military chaplains do not carry weapons. Instead,
they are assigned "chaplain's assistants," soldiers who
shadow them constantly as bodyguards. Rabbi Elson's
assistant was a southern Baptist.
"He said, 'I recognize you're one of God's Chosen
People, and I'm going to take care of you,"' Elson
recalled. 'And that he did."
Shortly after the war began, after securing the
Ramallah oil field in Iraq, rabbi Elson's regiment
fought its way through a gauntlet of Iraqi soldiers in
the town of Nasariyah, taking heavy enemy fire and
casualties.
When they finally emerged on the northern side
of the city, they were ambushed by units of Iraq's
Special Republican Guards. An intense firefight
erupted.
"It was there that, for the first of three times," the
chaplain's assistant "literally covered me with his
body and returned fire," Rabbi Elson said. "He was
awarded the Navy Marine Corps bronze star for his
Rabbi Irving Elson, left,
and a fellow soldier hold
a Ten Commandments
flag in Iraq.
0
0
cr0
bravery that day.
"When this firefight was all over and we had the
chance to comfort the wounded and take care of our
dead, I sat in the Humvee almost in a daze," Rabbi
Rabbi Elson said.
"I was scared and I was wet. It had rained and
hailed all day and all night," he continued. "For 24
hours there was hail, there was rain, there was a sand-
storm. I actually remember going to my battalion
commander and saying, 'Look, we have the hail, the
dust. If I see locusts I know we're in real trouble.'"
Now finishing his eighteenth year in the U.S. mil-
itary, Rabbi Elson was awarded the Meritorious
Service Medal for his service in Operation Iraqi
Freedom.
Rabbi Elson, who is married with three young
children, also has served in Okinawa; Charleston,
S.C.; Naples; Newport, R.I.; Albany; and at the
Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He now is sta-
tioned in California.
As he addressed the JTS audience, the Marines
with whom Rabbi Elson served — "my guys," he
called them — were taking part in the battle for
Falluja, a hotbed of the Iraqi insurgency.
It's "horrible" sitting back in the United States
wondering about the fate of his minions in the
Marines, Rabbi Elson said, but it has given him time
to reflect on his Iraq experience.
"It's changed me. It's made me realize the wealth
Judaism has and that, in almost any situation, there's
something that Judaism has to offer," he said. "I felt
very rabbi-ish in Iraq. Both this trip and the last