It might do well to start by drafting an estimated 8,300 current “full-time Torah students” who, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, are nothing of the kind — who, in a despicable scam, are not in fact genuinely studying in the institutions where they are registered and state-subsidized.

 

Evading national service in the Jewish state is the opposite of authentic Judaism

 

Belatedly outlawed by the High Court, the norm under which the Haredi community is excluded from its responsibilities is an indefensible aberration and a betrayal of Jewish values

 

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Police disperse ultra-Orthodox Jews blocking a highway during a protest against the military draft, in the central city of Bnei Brak, on June 20, 2024.

“There is no power in the world that can cut off the people of Israel from studying the Torah, and anyone who has tried this in the past has failed miserably. No high-handed ruling will abolish the community of scholars in the land of Israel, which is the branch on which we all sit.”

Thus spoke Knesset member Aryeh Deri, chairman of the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox Shas party and veteran former government minister, immediately after nine High Court judges had unanimously ruled on Tuesday that decades of blanket exclusion from military service for tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men is Zionistically untenable, unequal, unfair and illegal, and has to end.

For all Deri’s ostensibly righteous — but actually blasphemous — indignation, nobody, but nobody, on the court or anywhere else in the Israeli leadership or public, is seeking to “cut off the people of Israel from studying the Torah” or “abolish the community of scholars in the land of Israel.” (The Shnorrers' Big Ugly Lie)

Indeed, few Israeli Jews doubt the centrality of Judaism to Israel’s very legitimacy: This is the only ancient and modern homeland of the Jewish people, who were sustained in exile for millennia by fealty to their faith, which has itself been maintained and rejuvenated by the constant study and contemporaneous interpretation and reexamination of its guiding texts.

Nobody needs Aryeh Deri, a recidivist criminal who is an insult to the precepts of Judaism, to tell them this.

Shas chair Aryeh Deri, right, and United Torah Judaism chair Yitzchak Goldknopf

What the nine High Court judges, secular and Orthodox alike, were actually seeking to do is to return the esteemed practice of Torah study to its genuine, traditional framework — as a core element, alongside a broad education and honest employment, in a rich and fulfilling life for all Jews who seek to pursue it, helping to guide its scholars in making their productive contributions to a robust and just society.

In contrast to centuries of Orthodox Jewish tradition, and in contrast to the abiding norm in Jewish communities around the world, only in Israel, and only in the past half-century, has full-time Torah study for the young male Haredi masses become the norm — an aberration indulged by secular politicians in exchange for alliances with the leadership of the growing ultra-Orthodox community, and exploited by the likes of Deri and his Ashkenazi counterpart Yitzchak Goldknopf to accrue power and influence, while condemning their constituents to blinkered, narrowly educated and impoverished lives.

That ultra-Orthodox rabbis have partnered their political representatives in this deviation — insisting that their publics must not share in the practical burden of the defense of our homeland, indeed must not perform any form of national service, and must be subsidized in their isolationism by those who do serve and who do pursue gainful employment and who do pay taxes — constitutes a terrible vote of no-confidence in their approach to Judaism:

Is Israel’s energized and diverse society so compelling, and their separationist approach to the faith so fragile, that to permit their constituents to integrate into the military and the workforce — tolerant and welcoming environments, widely respectful of a multitude of different approaches to life — would be so devastating and so destructive as to necessitate hysterical opposition at any and all cost?

Worse still, by insisting that all young ultra-Orthodox men be subsidized by the state to which they feel such ambivalence if not outright derisive hostility, and that all young ultra-Orthodox men be exempted from any kind of national service, they are undermining the other millennia-old Orthodox tradition in which the very best and brightest of scholars are subsidized by the rest of the community, so as to be able to devote all their time and exceptional skills to the advancement of Torah study.

That tradition was respected at the foundation of the modern state by its first prime minister David Ben Gurion, who exempted what he understood to be 400 yeshiva students from military service, conscious of the decimation of the world of Torah study as a consequence of the Holocaust. Twenty years later, there were still only 800 such exemptions. But in 1977, the government of Menachem Begin lifted the restrictions, and today there are some 63,000 eligible ultra-Orthodox men of military age who are not serving.

A man holds a sign reading ‘It would be better for our children to be killed than to become secular’ during a protest by ultra-Orthodox men against IDF conscription, outside the city of Bnei Brak

Never in the modern history of Israel has there been a greater need for all elements of society to pull their weight in the defense of the nation. Israel is fighting wars or bracing for wars on multiple fronts — against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, terrorists in the West Bank, militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis… The standing army is at full stretch. Tens of thousands of reservists have been at the front for months — separated from their families, away from their jobs. So acute is the strain that the government is busy legislating to demand still more reserve duty to still later an age.

And yet the ultra-Orthodox leadership maintains its refusal to negotiate an arrangement with the government to ensure that the community plays its role in the practical protection of the Jewish state and maintains the pursuit of Jewish scholarship.

Police disperse ultra-Orthodox Jews blocking a highway during a protest against the military draft, in the central city of Bnei Brak

Such an arrangement would, of course, benefit all parties interested in the well-being of this precious country, most emphatically including the ultra-Orthodox community itself — taking an appreciated, constructive role in the vibrant functioning of this extraordinary, and currently extraordinarily threatened nation.

The army is not capable of tomorrow absorbing the tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men who are now, in light of Tuesday’s ruling, required to play their role in the defense of Israel. It might do well to start by drafting an estimated 8,300 current “full-time Torah students” who, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, are nothing of the kind — who, in a despicable scam (Hebrew link), are not in fact genuinely studying in the institutions where they are registered and state-subsidized.

Shaarei Yitzhak yeshiva students on a 2023 skiing trip to Bulgaria

But ultimately all of Haredi society — – 13 percent of the populace and rising fast — and, indeed, all of Israeli society must be obligated to fulfill its responsibilities to the protection of the nation.

After decades of cat-and-mouse games with the politicians, the High Court belatedly on Tuesday took a stand in favor of both authentic Judaism and the survival and flourishing of our imperiled state.

Aryeh Deri and his ilk are not only on the wrong side of Zionist tenability, equality, fairness and legality; they are on the wrong side of authentic Judaism. Of course they are. Because authentic Judaism, as opposed to their self-serving distorted version, stands for precisely such values.

כמה משלמת המדינה כדי שחרדים יישארו בישיבות

https://www.mako.co.il/news-channel12?

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