Q&A: Your Claims About Drafting Haredim
Your Claims About Drafting Haredim
Question
How many times have you repeated the claim that spiritual decline is not an excuse to evade the draft, since the army by its very nature is a place of risk, and just as one risks the body, so too one must risk the soul.
I think this argument doesn’t hold water for two reasons:
A. An overwhelming majority of soldiers would not enlist if there were a 30% risk of death and another 30% risk of disability. From a Torah perspective, becoming secular is worse than death, and spiritual decline is worse than disability, so there is no logic in enlisting under such conditions. These are proven facts, so there is no point trying to deny what is known. The fact that in the eyes of a substantial part of the Religious Zionist public, becoming secular and spiritual decline are not such a serious problem is a grave indictment of them, not of the Haredim.
B. The Haredim do not believe that the value of living in Israel is worth significant risk, neither physical nor spiritual. From their perspective, it is worth living in the country only as long as there are others willing to do the work; if they had no choice and were required to take risks, they would prefer to live abroad. I know this greatly angers those who enlist and feel like suckers, but this is a calculation every rational person makes: he is happy to receive things for free, but not to pay a price for them that, from his point of view, is not worth it.
If this situation is unbearable from the perspective of the general public, all they have to do is inform the Haredim that they are stopping their protection and denying them civil rights. The Haredim will have to choose between managing autonomously or emigrating abroad. (In principle, emigration is preferable—if it is technically possible—because then it will be clear that there is no connection at all between the State of Israel and Judaism, a claim the Haredim have been making for a long time already. Besides, the future of the state is not clear at all. The chances of a state surviving long-term in a region of hundreds of millions of enemies from within and without seem rather slim.)
Answer
A. Nonsense. Even if there were a 70% risk, they would still have to enlist, because the alternative is 100% death.
B. Then let them live abroad. I keep hearing over and over what they prefer (see, for example, the idiot Yitzhak Yosef), but these are empty words. Excuses for their pathetic draft-dodging. It is indeed true that I too expect the public to present this condition to the Haredim. Unfortunately, the political constellation does not allow this for the time being. I hope that changes.
This kind of bizarre and morally twisted argument just joins the collection of examples in Column 609. There are, of course, many more like it here on the site and in general.
Discussion on Answer
Layabouts.
I would appreciate it if commenters could respond substantively to the issue itself. Words like “layabouts” lower your standing, dear people of Religious Zionism.
I’ll try to be brief.
I served 6 years in the army; I was an officer in the Air Force (secular). Today, thank God, I belong to a small community within the Lithuanian Haredi public. During my military service, I saw with my own eyes friends from Religious Zionism fall all the way into outright heresy. I can’t even describe the words that came out of their mouths toward the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Torah.
In the system of 613 commandments that we received, there is something called discretion. And therefore, in every halakhic / of Jewish law and/or value-based decision, we exercise discretion according to rules—“saving a life overrides the Sabbath,” “with a Torah-level doubt one is stringent, with a rabbinic-level doubt one is lenient,” “It is a time to act for the Lord; they have voided Your Torah,” tefillin should really be worn all day, but because of one consideration or another we refrain from doing so, and so on and so on.
Our eyes see how much the IDF, and especially the IDF leadership, proudly raise the banner of heresy in God and denial of the Torah of Moses. This seeps through the entire military system down to the last soldier, whether they are kept in religious frameworks or less religious ones. This terrible influence exists. Therefore, when we place on the scales the fulfillment of a great commandment like an obligatory war, against a future in which our children and we ourselves will not only fail to keep even a single commandment, but will become wicked heretics, God forbid, discretion obligates us to oppose this destruction and, to our sorrow, not to fulfill the commandment of “obligatory war,” despite all our desire to fulfill the word of God.
We very much want to contribute and fight the enemies of God, and we are already waiting for the day when the wicked government falls from the earth and our army will be a Torah army under the leadership of Torah scholars like Joshua and David. But for now we refrain because of a system of discretion.
As for you, dear people of Religious Zionism—your naïveté and your currying favor with the wicked will destroy you. Your children will no longer keep Torah and commandments, and your great enterprise will collapse before your eyes. You are walking like a blind man on the edge of the river, as Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto describes in Mesillat Yesharim in the trait of watchfulness. May God help and open your eyes.
How does the Rabbi answer the Talmudic passages about Abraham and Asa, who imposed forced labor on Torah scholars {please don’t send me to 649, Rabbi…}
What is the reasoning behind the rule of “he receives only the greater penalty”? Why shouldn’t he pay for everything?
Thank you very much,
Eyal
To the officer who became religious: have you read the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) from beginning to end? The Torah army of Joshua and David—really? David comes to Nabal the Carmelite with his gang, doesn’t get food from him, plans a raid to take revenge for it, and then Nabal’s wife prevents it. Later, after Nabal dies, David marries her (and another woman as well). Truly the behavior of a Torah-based and spiritual personality, hahaha.
And we haven’t even talked about David’s cooperation with Achish king of Gath, in the framework of which David almost became a fighter in a Philistine campaign against the Jewish people, on the Philistine side.
And we haven’t even talked about your assumption of “proven facts.” It ignores the fact that the obligation to create a suitable framework that would prevent this decline rests on the Haredi public, and that you have no proven data at all about the army’s contribution to that decline. After all, those who get there are already people who had declined, so on what exactly are you basing your “proven facts”? And a collection of such nonsense is the basis for not fulfilling a clear and unequivocal moral and halakhic / of Jewish law obligation. Such frivolity is itself a terrible moral distortion. And this is what they call fear of Heaven. Of that heaven I am not afraid (I fear them, not it), that’s for sure.