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Court – a system any healthy society needs, but no one really wants to visit. Just like a judge: someone you want as a friend, but not someone you want to meet at work all too often. A date in court is not something most people look forward to, and the feelings such a visit generates range from frustration and trepidation, all the way to outright fear and terror.
The army has its own system of courts and judges, and military court, like any other court in the world, it is not somewhere you really want to be. In the field, it is most often the office of the commander, and, depending on the issue involved, it is usually the batallion commander who deals with the more serious issues.
When I was in the regular army, I was in the 195th batallion of the 500th armored division, and our battalion commander, a legend in his own right, gave new meaning to the fear of ‘going to court’. His name was Shimon Ben Maimon, though he was known by his nickname (the acronym of his name) “Shabam’, and a court martial with him was known as a ‘Mishpat Shabam’ (a Shabam trial or sentence).
All of us thought he was a little bit mad, though he was as loved as he was feared, and his men would have followed him anywhere.
In the Lebanon war, when the 195th got stuck trying to cross the Awali river, he jumped out of his tank, under fire, and waded into the river yelling to his tank driver to follow, leading the tanks to the right crossing, while seemingly oblivious to the heavy fire he was under. This, along with various other stories earned him the reputation of being fearless, as well as being ‘off his rocker’.
He had a colorful reputation, to say the least, and his court-martials were no exception. Every Thursday night, the soldiers who had committed some offense, whether real or imagined, waited outside his office through the night as he ‘held court’ to determine guilt or innocence and handed out sentences. This experience, known as lailah lavan (or ‘white night’, because you stayed up all night), was unique to the 195th.
More than often than not, the offenders were cooks or mechanics who had snuck home or gone awol for a few days hoping to get away with it. Shabam had no patience for the normal system of confinement to base, days in the brig, or hard labor around the base, and often he conducted what we liked to call a ‘mishpat mahir’ or ‘quick sentencing’. He would excuse everyone else from the office save the offender, and you could hear his screams and shouts out in the courtyard which more often than not ended with a loud bang or thump, after which the offenders would exit the office limping, or nursing a black eye. (He knew an official verdict would go on the soldier’s record, and even delay their release from the army, so he would close the issue with a more direct system). Rare was the man who repeated the offense and risked ending up back in his office a second time.
This ‘system’ probably wouldn’t fly in today’s army, but the men actually admired it in a perverse sort of way, and proudly boasted of it when meeting men from other battalions. I still remember the raw fear you would see on a soldier’s face when he was out there waiting for his trial, listening the shouting and banging coming from inside the office while those before him were ‘tried’.
To this day, I am convinced that Shabam left his window open on purpose, and had a clever system to make sure the more serious offenders waited outside for longer, to heighten the fearful experience. I can still recall the one time I was forced, while still a Private, to experience a ‘Mishpat Shabam’, for the heinous crime of leaving my post on guard duty for a moment, in order to relieve myself. The screams and the yelling, and his face up close to mine, demanding an explanation as to why I felt my own needs to be greater than the entire base, the brigade, the Israeli army, and the entire Jewish people, is something I still recall with total clarity. And I wonder sometimes, how different society and life would be if everyone had the same fear of ‘the judge’ that the men of the 195th carried for the ‘mishpat Shabam’.
All of which leaves one wondering: is this the feeling we are meant to have as we approach Rosh Hashanah, the ‘Day of Judgement’?
This week we celebrated