Adjusting Sights

Field training of Israeli tanks in the Golan Heights, 2009
(photo: Rose Schneiderman)



The Israeli film Adjusting Sights - based on the book with the same title by rabbi Haim Sabato - describes the battles of Yom Kippur War (Day of Atonemet War) in the Golan Heights from the perspective of a religious gunner who had lost his best friend in the war.  In Hebrew, the term adjusting sights (TEUM KAVANOT) has double meaning: the material action of coordinating the tank cannon intentions – which is a modern meaning, and the spiritual notion of intent in prayer - which is the traditional meaning.

Although it is an understatement and non-frenzy film, with subdued and quiet acting and soft like a coo background music - Adjusting Sights sweep its viewers precisely because it doesn't fall into the abyss of depression on the one hand and doesn't rise up to the heights of ecstasy on the other hand. Just as Maimonides, who is constantly  quoted by the protagonist, recommended: One should choose the golden mean - not to be rolled down to depression on the one hand and not to be carried away to euphoria on the other hand.

photo: www.tobypress.com

In the transition from book to film, the director Eyal Halfon well  used the opportunity to express subtle differences between secular and religious Israelis by different body language and diction - beyond the differences in the content of their associations, which literature can express no less delicately than cinema. When the documentation officer and his assistant arrive to the camp to investigate and interview the soldiers, each soldier has his own manner to sit down, start speaking and spell his guts, but when the religious soldier opens his words with the verse "My Lord, open my lips that my mouth may declare your glory" (Psalms, 51, 17) and in the background the assistant's typewriter is ticking – the army tent is filled with the special religious respect to the written word.



It is accepted that written literature has more emotional and intellectual potency than cinema – due to the deeper penetration of the verbal tool to the characters' souls and minds and due to the force the written medium put upon the reader to stimulate his imagination in completing visual details and take an active role in the artistic experience. Still, there is also and advantage of the movie over the book: In this movie, all along, we share with the characters the gap between the vitality of memory - the re-experienced experience while being reconstructed in the mind – and the dryness of things being documented, typewritten in a typewriter, and by the documentation officer are well dated and adapted to the military documentation rules. In the book, made of merely written words, these two layers unite in one but in the film they run a constant dialogue between them.

The cinematic clothing of Adjusting Sights is of special importance with regard to the view of life of young secular Israelis, since it might dim a bit the image of the young religious warrior whom they usually encounter. Things written by a young participant of one of the book discussion groups in the Hebrew internet might testify for that:

"Last week I found the book Adjusting Sights by Haim Sabato at the Hebrew Book Week fair… It seemed to me appropriate to read it on Yom Kippur…. Yom Kippur has not yet come but I have already read the whole book... The uniqueness of the book is the biography of its author as a yeshiva student, so the text is full of quotations from the Prayer Book and from the Talmud, and the daily atmosphere being depicted is therefore religious. Perhaps a radical heretic person would be revolted by the book, but I prefer to look at this aspect of the book from the human perspective rather than from the religious one. The author, for example, tells about his strictness and piety in putting on tefillin, every day of his life. During the war, when leaving a damaged tank, his small bag of tefillin was left there. Towards evening time his battalion team is returning to the tank, and our protagonist finds his tefillin and quickly put them on before sunset. To me, more than it is a religious act it is an act of holding tightly on the blessed routine in the chaos of war, the author's own way to maintain sanity".