Tzav Rishon

Today might have been the longest day of my entire life. At dinner last night, each member of my Garin got a single shot of limoncello under the pretense of toasting our arrival at the first step in our army experience - our tzav rishon. The real reason behind the alcohol, we quickly found out, was to knock us out in preparation for our 5:30 AM wake-up. It worked. By 6:15 AM, we were all neatly piled onto the bus and heading up to Tiberias for a full day of testing.

The tzav rishon is the first call to order for soldiers and the first step in the drafting process, according to the IDF website. But that's not what it really is. Imagine a day in which you wait in all the lines for rides at Disney World, only instead of a fun ride at the end, you have to stand mostly naked in front of an aged Russian man for 15 minutes. Or take an hour-long, SAT-like IQ test. And that's what tzav rishon is.

We arrived at 7:30 in the morning and didn't leave until 4:00 in the afternoon. We had a medical test, a more thorough medical test, a Hebrew test, an IQ test, and a meeting with a mashakit tash (army social worker). Of all those things, only the IQ test took an hour, everything else took 30 minutes or less. If you do the math, that's approximately 2.5 hours of important stuff and 6 hours of literally nothing. And somehow, it was still absolutely exhausting. The worst part is that we don't get any results back for at least 2 weeks, so I have nothing to show for today except an incredibly high score in Temple Run and an incredibly low tolerance for people who think that it's ok to talk to me while I'm listening to music.

Despite the feeling that this was all extraordinarily inefficient, it was definitely a cool reality check. Now that the army knows about me - has a file on me - it's finally all starting to feel real.

I'm going to go to sleep now (at 7:45) because I'm practically falling over. There are only a couple weeks left until Rosh Hashana, so shana tovah u'metukah!