Question

Hello, regarding drafting the Haredim: I also understand that the Haredi public is an extreme camp that radicalizes the importance of Torah study and commitment to Jewish law to the maximum. Still, like many rabbis from Religious Zionism, I think this camp is necessary in order to provide a counterbalance to the progressivism within the Jewish people. More than that, I think that everyone needs to have some small Haredi dimension within himself in order to neutralize the progressivism inside him. Of course, everything has to be in the right balance. But it is clear to all of us that if the Haredi public is drafted, it will automatically be emptied out from within, because there will no longer be control over that public, and it will certainly fall apart once people have other options from the outset besides going to yeshiva. Then only isolated Torah scholars will remain—relatively speaking, as in Religious Zionism, where that is not its central stream. So the question is whether it is worth paying the price of lowering the balance of Israeli society, when on the one hand you have progressivism that is only getting stronger, and if we eliminate Haredi-ness, the balance collapses.