Question

 
As someone who knows the Haredi world up close, you argued—and rightly so—that the Haredim “suffer” from duality: a split between their inner thinking and their practical layer. You spoke with many Haredim who agreed with you about the need to go to the army, to work, and so on, but they are not willing to take the critical step and leave the walls of the ghetto.
Who better than you—a sharp, analytical genius who knows how to get to the root points without evasions or whitewashing—to have touched here too on the root point that prevents a Haredi person from going to the army.
Allow me to illuminate this point of duality, just as you illuminated the public to this correct diagnosis.
 
A yeshiva student is educated to learn in the way you said: the sky is the limit, throw out theories in every direction, open your mind, don’t be rigid—but all of that gets stuck, disappears, evaporates, and falls apart when it comes to observing Jewish law. Yes, exactly so: when a Jew stands before the will of God—which everyone agrees is expressed in Jewish law—then the Jew lowers his head, locks his mind, and accepts the decree of God’s commandments.
After all, I know several good people who are close to God, and for some reason Sabbath doesn’t work out in their schedule. So they decided that they devote Friday, or Sunday, or some other day to the holiness of Sabbath; they make kiddush and set a table, pray and read from the Torah. Sabbath is a foretaste of the World to Come. But what? They have not done the will of God. However upright their reasoning may be, it bends and evaporates before the will of God.
This duality accompanies the Jew wherever he goes. You too, Rabbi, bow your head before the will of God. You do not claim that a quorum over Zoom is prayer because that is what you decided; you claim that the will of God, as expressed in the laws of prayer, is manifested in Zoom as well. (I am not entering here into the discussion of joining a quorum over Zoom, because that is not from the quorum—double meaning intended.) But you too do not dare bend the will of God to your liking.
You argue—and very rightly—that the real world is holy with a supernal holiness. Indeed, your words are sincere and you have spoken truth; Maimonides is full of this, the Zohar and Kabbalah are bursting with it. But none of that changes anything at all regarding the burden of a Jew who stands before the will of God as expressed in keeping Torah and commandments.
 
Indeed, this is a great question, because modernity presents the human being as a creature who is essentially good, in whom evil is not rooted, whereas the old religion supposedly stands against evil with a rod of punishment and strikes it like an Egyptian striking a frog that swarms forth in hordes upon hordes. Why does the human being—whole, enlightened, and pure—need all sorts of strange commandments? Is not the goal knowledge of God and intellectual apprehension of Him, as the Great Eagle, Maimonides, says?
Let me slow my pen with a parable in order to answer. A person’s essence is the life pulsing within him. No one in the world thinks that life is a finger or a leg. On the contrary: life gives life to the person who appears before us with fingers, hands, and feet. Even the heart is not life itself; it is only a vessel that causes life to be revealed here in our body.
If someone comes and belittles the body through which life is manifested, very quickly he will be left with “life” alone, while the body is empty and hollow—dead.
Indeed, “life” is the perfection of a person; without it he does not exist. But without the “body,” life is not manifested here in the world.
Moreover, if a person comes without a leg, is he less alive than a person with a leg? That is a question our philosophers may discuss. And what if there stands before us a perfect person lacking a tiny pinky finger—one can barely see the absence—would he be called a whole person? It is clear to everyone that he is blemished.
That little pinky does not affect his appearance at all, nor his abundant day-to-day life, and nevertheless we would all say with one voice: he is blemished.
Since we all understand that the perfect human form is a person made up of 248 limbs (according to the view of the Sages), then any lack is nothing but a blemish, even if we do not understand how that lack damages the wholeness of the person before us.
The Torah is exactly like a person. Each commandment expresses a certain limb of the body that sustains the pure and human “life” that all humanity seeks. Why are there ten fingers and not nine? I do not know. But I know very well, and so do you, that a person with nine fingers is blemished.
 
Does the Haredi person bow his head? Does he live in duality? No! The Haredi person is realistic. He knows very well that a person missing a finger is blemished. Likewise, the Torah and its 613 commandments are the vessel that sustains the most humanly whole and complete life here in the world. Why? No one knows, but that is reality.
Someone who lives here in the world and keeps all the commandments is a whole person, even if his life does not shine so brightly. But someone who lives an enlightened, human, idealistic life and does not keep the commandments—behold, we have a blemished person before us. And if, God forbid, he damaged an organ on which the soul depends, such as Sabbath desecration and the like, then he remains with life in his hand but without a body—in other words, dead.
Why is it like this? I don’t know. But it is the reality that someone who has a hole in his heart or a clot in a critical place in the brain is dead.
Indeed, “duality” exists in one who thinks he can live a whole and full life without keeping the commandments. He is exactly like a person trying to live without a heart or a brain.
 
In addition, you argued that the Haredim invented a method: “the new is forbidden by the Torah,” and so on.
The truth is that the Haredim are trying to do only one thing: preserve Judaism, keep the Torah and the commandments. Indeed, in every generation we see how reality changes, and Jewish law or the disputes move along with it. Anyone who goes deeply into the disputes of our Sages sees that this is the issue under discussion (and this is not the place to elaborate).
In every generation they do “cosmetic work” on Jewish law. True.
But when suddenly people came and did sex-reassignment surgery instead of cosmetics, then the Jews who keep Torah and commandments stopped and said: Wait. If we keep doing cosmetic adjustments according to fashion, in the end we too will very quickly reach sex reassignment, and from Judaism we will become another religion—God forbid.
Therefore those Jews arose and fenced themselves in: no more cosmetics. And in Israel they were called: Haredim.
Indeed, since then Jewish law has not put on makeup—after all, we are in exile. It has also grown hair, and maybe pimples too. But it is the same Jewish law and the same Judaism. Whereas others—there are such people—have long been living in another world in which they invented a new religion. Maybe they don’t observe Sabbath on Friday or on Sunday, but they simply do not observe Sabbath, and so on.
We have been promised that “truth will be missing.” Indeed, truth wanders around the world in herds and herds. In every group in the world there is a point of real and pure truth: in LGBT, in feminism, in Iran and in Saudi Arabia—everyone has a point of truth. The Haredim took one point of truth and guard it as the apple of their eye: keeping the Torah and the commandments, even if it is not made up, even if it is shabby.
Should we not praise them and raise them as a banner? After all, they are willing to lose e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g for the point of truth of Torah and commandments, which we all agree is the will of God. They are willing to live in stinking cities below the poverty line. They are willing to pay a fortune for education that in principle is given to them free. They are willing to go into debt so that their children will grow up in the light of Torah and commandments. Should we not applaud them?!
Indeed, the Haredim are not perfect. Many points of truth are wandering through cities and countries that a Haredi foot would not dare tread in. But the ordinary Haredi, who lives in “duality,” gives himself over in order to preserve Torah and commandments in purity even when he does not feel like it at all. Should we not bow to him? Should we only strike his bleeding nose and steal from him the few pennies he has left?!
 
And now to the matter of the army. The army is based on one thing—“duality”!
You can think whatever you like about how to run the state or the war, but when you serve in the army you are subordinate to your commander. If you said something out of place, or if God forbid you did something contrary to the explicit order given, your end will be bitter and bad.
That may not be nice, but there is no choice. Otherwise the army will become a confused collection of people carrying weapons; this one will strike that one, and victory will recede and evaporate. Yes, even in a democratic state there is hierarchy in the army. Discipline has meaning, and woe to whoever departs from it.
The army is exactly like the Haredim. Both of them have “duality”: keep the thoughts in your head to yourself, but your hands will do exactly what the one above you directs you to do.
And I ask you, Rabbi—you who touched the point of “duality” with your sharp and polished scalpel like a razor—would you not agree that a Jew who bows his head before the word of God, that is Jewish law, cannot go to an army that requires him to bow his head before the word of the government, that is the army?
Can it be that a Jew who keeps Torah and commandments would go out to war when the commander decided this on his own, without asking a rabbi? Can one enter into fateful questions of saving life without a rabbi deciding whether to go to war or not?
 
Does anyone in the state agree that before every action the army commanders should first ask rabbis for approval?
And by the way, the approval should be mutual. That is, if the rabbis decide for some reason that the army needs to fight in a certain city because it is entirely idol worshippers—that is, an idolatrous city—then the army commanders should also accept the authority of Jewish law and go destroy an entire city and burn it together with all its contents. Does anyone here agree to give the rabbis an armed force equipped with the best of modern weapons?
Indeed, the Haredim live in a world of “duality,” and precisely because of that they cannot serve in an army that demands from them a “duality” completely opposite to Jewish law.