Navy chaplain’s twisty path leaves him ambivalent to war

Rabbi Jay Heyman is in an understandable quandary over the war in Iraq.

A newcomer to San Francisco, Heyman spoke out years ago against the Vietnam War and later took an uncharted career path to become a Navy chaplain. Now he's got a grown son who he thinks is probably in Iraq with the Army's 4th Infantry Division.

"It's very, very frightening," said Heyman, who is in a training program at UCSF to become a hospital chaplain. "I'm terrified of what's going on over there, and then to have your kid in harm's way is even more poignant."

The situation for the 59-year-old Arkansas native is one he never would have imagined for himself a few decades ago.

"I grew up in a different era," said Heyman, a Reform rabbi whose varied career includes a just-concluded stint at a tiny congregation on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.

"I never would have believed 30, 35 years ago, that I would have a kid participating in a war in the Middle East, and that I wouldn't be out demonstrating in the streets against it.

"I'm very ambivalent about this, and as a result, I find it difficult to have any absolute conviction about what we're doing here."

Heyman's son, Jason, is a 29-year-old computer engineer from Cincinnati. He attended college on an ROTC scholarship and was recently recalled to active duty. "I'm just feeling horribly ambivalent, and he is very much committed," said the rabbi.

Jason Heyman got married a week before being sent to Fort Hood, Texas. A captain, he is a computer specialist who directs and monitors the movements and operations of platoons. His father thinks he was deployed to Iraq last week.

Before the war broke out, Jay Heyman participated in a peace march in San Francisco. He hasn't attended one since, saying, "I'm just really offended by the positions that many of the organizations are taking on the Israel-Palestinian issue."

Heyman and his wife, Kanit, moved to San Francisco six months ago so he could attend the yearlong hospital-training program. They plan to stay in the area afterward.

"I was ready to do another career modification," jokes Heyman, whose life has included plenty of them.

Assigned to two medical units at UCSF, Heyman says his workweek is typically 55 hours long. While he describes the program as gratifying, it's also psychologically and spiritually demanding.

Though his current schedule gives him little surplus time, Heyman also offers his services at lifecycle events and plans to provide couples counseling and spiritual-growth workshops. His Web site is http://home.

earthlink.net/~rebjay/

Heyman grew up in a "very assimilated" Reform household in Little Rock, Ark., and as a youth, got involved in the civil rights movement. He participated in sit-in protests at local department store lunch counters and helped produce a newsletter for the Southern Federation of Temple Youth.

A member of a Jewish family whose roots in Arkansas stretch back five generations, Heyman said, "before I knew it, I was on the road to becoming a Reform rabbi."

He attended Hebrew Union College's Cincinnati campus and while there, participated in demonstrations and rallies against the Vietnam War.

Following his graduation in 1971, Heyman worked as a congregational rabbi in Texas, Georgia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. While in Texas in the early 1970s, he also worked part-time as a chaplain for the Texas Department of Corrections.

In 1991, he decided to become a Navy chaplain and set out on a new course that sent him for the next seven years to military bases throughout the Far East. He once performed two Friday Shabbat services on consecutive evenings aboard separate ships that crossed the International Date Line.

Persuaded by a friend to give the military a try, "more than anything else, I liked the idea of working in an interfaith and nondenominational setting," he said, saying he was attracted by the Navy's "team approach to ministry."

"We're all just this bundle of self contradictions," he said. "I would have never dreamt it. In 1968, it was impossible to conceive of having anything to do with the military."

After leaving the Navy, he returned to congregational work in Washington state and then in St. Thomas.

And now, working in San Francisco, Heyman finds himself torn by the war.

"I feel like it's horrible for anyone to have to be involved in this [war]," he said. "I'm just not convinced that we exhausted all the other options, but I fully support [the troops'] welfare and the outcome of what they're doing."