I’m no
stranger to getting out of bed early. Time
and again, during my years of military service, duties would interrupt my
sleep. No more so than during the years
when I was on aircrew status. Our
missions often launched as early as six-thirty in the morning. Since we had to be at the office for our
pre-mission duties two hours before launch, that meant I would be en route to work
at a bit after four AM. If the mission
was on a Sunday morning, then I would be driving to work through the streets of
Athens whilst the locals were still partying at the local tavernas, drinking to
excess, breaking plates, and generally having fun on a Saturday night.
When I was a chaplain, the early
mornings were often because I was duty chaplain that week. A nocturnal call could come from a First
Sergeant, wanting me to mediate a fight between one of his troops and their
spouse. Or it would be a notification that
an aircraft bearing war wounded was inbound and I was needed to be part of the
greeting party.
So I’m no stranger to waking very early. But that doesn’t mean that I like it
when I have to!
I’m guessing that almost everybody in
this room, even if they never served in the military or worked odd hours, can
relate to the concept of awaking before dawn.
How many times were your children fussy in the middle of the night? How many times did you have to get up “ridiculously”
early to catch a plane to some faraway place?
There are lots of pithy sayings
regarding getting up early in the morning, and surely you have heard some of
them. How about: Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man
healthy, wealthy, and wise? I doubt
I’m being overly cynical in saying that early to bed, early to rise, makes you
perpetually tired and antisocial. And
how about: You’d have to get up
pretty early in the morning to fool me? If
I got up pretty early in the morning, I wouldn’t be able to fool you very much. My thinking would be far too muddled from
tiredness.
And yet, getting up early is taken as
a sign of devotion. We’re all familiar
with the Torah reading for Rosh Hashanah, from the 22nd chapter of
Genesis: Then Abraham got up early in the morning, and saddled up his ass,
and took his two servant-boys and his son Yitzhak. The understanding of the import of (he)
got up early in the morning, is that he was in a hurry to do God’s will. This, despite that what God had told him to do
was extremely distasteful, to say the least.
So from this and so many other sources we understand that getting out of
bed early in the morning is a symbol of devotion. Our Shabbat and Festival morning services at
Temple Shalom always start at a very leisurely 10.00AM. But throughout the Jewish world, the devoted
go to shule sometimes as early as six in the morning for the weekday morning
prayers.
So that’s what I thought about the
prospect of getting myself to Southport at 5.00AM for the Dawn Service commemorating
ANZAC Day. Apart from the aesthetics of
a solemn assembly whilst the sun rises, I thought the timing of the service was
a matter of devotion. If it is
important to do, then why wait until later in the day? My bubble was burst, although really not
that much, when I found out that the reason for the early hour is actually to
commemorate that the Gallipoli landing kicked off at sunrise. It was at sunrise, that the disaster began to
unfold. That the first ranks of the youth
of Australia and New Zealand stepped into the inferno that would be their
testing ground – and for many, their final resting place – over the next
months.
So I awoke shortly after four, and
drove through the city’s deserted streets.
And there I found thousands of citizens, aroused from their comfortable
beds like me, assembled in the place to pay honour to those who died in a
campaign that took place 99 years ago. And
it was not just crusty old veterans who showed up; there plenty of young
adults, including legions of parents with sleepy children in tow. The parents of Australia, making their
children understand the importance of arising early to do something important. And I knew that this assembly of thousands,
was being duplicated at that very moment in numerous other locations on the
Gold Coast. And elsewhere on Australia’s
East Coast. To be followed later by
communities farther west. And even later
for the ‘citizens’ services’ that would take place at a more commodious hour.
So perhaps Australia’s finest hour was
when the her youth stepped off those boats onto Turkish soil 99 years ago,
ready to lay down their lives for the cause of world peace. But it was also a fine hour at five this
morning, when thousands upon thousands of Australians who were not alive then,
stood at attention at the Cenotaphs across the country to honour the sacrifice
made by those young men, so long ago.
This devotion represents the epitome
of what’s good about Australia. And we
should keep it in mind, when opportunities arise to perform acts of devotion. Even ones of the more prosaic kind. They’ll all important. They all add to the goodness of our country. Collectively, they provide a counterweight to
the acts of selfishness that we’ve unfortunately come to see as emblematic of
our place and time. Shabbat shalom.
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