Draft haredim to serve during their breaks from yeshiva - opinion

• Published date: 16 March 2024
• Author: DAVID M. WEINBERG
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Everybody knows that the rapidly growing and politically muscular ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel can no longer altogether avoid military and/or national service. But haredi leaders will not relinquish their rigid communal structure of full-time and lifetime-long Torah study

Every type of solution for this long-running deep ideological and societal crisis has been attempted over the past 30 years – and failed. This runs from massive government support for haredi integration in higher education and the workforce as a pathway to eventual military service, to choking off nearly all government support for haredi institutions. From persuasion to coercion. From backing to bludgeoning.

There was the Tal Committee outline and Shaked Committee strategy (both of which were legislated in law), the Plesner, Peri, and Stern plans– based on wise commissions that deliberated for years and promulgated visions of change in this matter.

These grand attempts at social engineering and compromise were cut short by impatient judges and politicians, or ignored from the outset by implacable haredi leaders. They failed because narrow and short-term interests trumped long-term thinking and any sense of overarching national unity.

Intra-religious dialogue between Religious Zionist rabbinical leadership (which encourages military and national service) and ultra-Orthodox rabbinic leadership (which discourages and even emphatically fights against this) has been attempted too – to no avail.

One group of rabbis learnedly quotes impeccable religious texts about the importance of combining national service with Torah study (or, in a similar fashion, gainful employment with Torah study), while the other group of rabbis refutes them with proof texts about the paramount value of Torah study alone and the desirability of standing aloof from secular society and the Zionist state.

Even now, as the most impressive, deeply Religious Zionist young men have been sacrificing themselves on military battlefields in numbers and proportions as never before, and their inspiring, agonizing, heroic stories pierce the hearts of haredi Jews in even the most closed ultra-Orthodox communities – haredi leadership is not budging.

'We haredi Jews will abandon the State of Israel and move abroad if anybody dares attempt to draft us into the military' – snarled the Sephardic chief rabbi Yitzhak Yosef this week.

(Yosef should be forced to watch the YouTube response to his outrageous remarks by Tel Aviv...