In my view, accommodating them has become completely excessive. In Hashmonaim you get punished for being late to study session or to prayer. Meaning, the army is committed to making sure they come out Haredi. It’s simply unbelievable. Fine, commit to allowing them to remain Haredi—but to require it? What, is the army working for Rabbi Lando? It’s a scandal. Can a secular person demand that his son be punished if he goes to pray? People have completely lost their bearings in all this consideration for the Haredim.

Even if they’re wrong in not enlisting because of what we’ll call the “minor” halakhic difficulties,
in a Jewish state people ought to have the right to serve in the army while fully preserving Jewish tradition. Let’s admit that the army is not always one hundred percent considerate. (I know the Rabbi’s view is that this should be a secular state… that isn’t the topic here, but most of the religious public believes that maybe it shouldn’t be a full state of Jewish law, but that at its core it should be Jewish. In any case, we would all agree that there ought to be freedom of religion for everyone.)
I really don’t understand what bothers the Rabbi about a soldier being punished if he is late to study session. I see that as an excellent integration of Torah and the army.

I explained. If you don’t understand this simple logic, apparently nothing will help.

Why do you think they are wicked and not mistaken? Don’t they genuinely and sincerely believe that this is what is good for the Jewish people?

As individuals, some of them do. They are brainwashed. That’s why I emphasized that it is a wicked society.

Why is the society wicked if it is driven by a desire to do good?

It is absolutely not driven by doing good. It is driven by what it understands as religious duty, and let morality burn.

So I’ll address the Rabbi’s “simple logic.”
There is no such thing as leaving them alone and allowing them to remain Haredi. Because what happens in practice is that if there is no framework for a young man, half the time he won’t get up for prayer (you can see this in the high dropout rates in Religious Zionism). Just as you need to keep kosher, you need someone to push these young men to pray and to study Torah. Because otherwise they simply won’t do it, and they’ll stop being Haredi (and even religious). As for the question about the secular parent who would ask the army to forbid his son to pray—that’s an interesting question, and if some public in Israel were to ask for that, it could be considered. But just because that request sounds strange, that doesn’t mean the Haredi request is not justified. Just as it is right that the army provide kosher food, so too it is right that Haredim be compelled to attend prayer (even though that is not indispensable, and here lies the point of dispute between us and the Haredim).
Until the Hashmonaim Brigade, the army did not give them this possibility, because army leaders (and maybe also the Rabbi) believed that the army was supposed to be a melting pot.
In any case, all the Rabbi’s responses so far only prove my point. The phenomenon the Rabbi described in the article “The Loop That Gets Us Stuck” (710)—that is exactly how the Rabbi is speaking. Haredi society is of course not wicked, just as leftists are not, and secular people are not, and right-wingers are not. You can say they are mistaken; maybe you can even say the leaders are wicked (and that you would somehow have to prove; I don’t know how one can prove they are wicked and not simply mistaken).
In any event, the people are very good people, who intend to do the right thing. For them there is no distinction between what is moral and the Torah. From their point of view, obedience to the Torah is the most correct thing there is (which also isn’t all that implausible). From the Rabbi’s way of speaking, it sounds as though he has never spoken to a Haredi person.

It’s very hard for me to deal with such a low level of understanding of what I write. So I’ll stop here.

“In war you even eat pork. It’s a matter of saving life.”
Quite apart from the rest of the discussion, it’s obvious that saving life overrides kashrut and the like, but if this really is a melting pot as he said, then it is a decree of religious persecution, and one really should give up one’s life rather than go there, no?

Indeed. And even if it were about wanting to murder every Haredi who enters the army, or abuse him, even then there would be no obligation to enlist. To see the situation here as a decree of religious persecution is a joke. Beyond that, if this is a decree of religious persecution and he isn’t willing to enlist, then he shouldn’t also enjoy the bonuses given by the persecutors. In short, I’m sick of these idiotic discussions.

1. You determine that this is “wickedness” because in your view universal morality overrides sectarian Jewish law, as I’ve seen you write elsewhere. But for the Haredi person, obedience to the leading rabbis of the generation is morality and nothing else. Therefore, at most they are mistaken in their understanding of reality or of the duty of obedience, but a “wicked” person is someone who acts against his conscience, not someone who acts in accordance with it, even if his conscience is distorted in your eyes.
2. Your shock at the army enforcing prayer is puzzling to me. If the army recognizes the need for Haredi enlistment, and the way to preserve them as a fighting force is by maintaining their way of life—this is not “working for Rabbi Lando,” but straightforward military pragmatism. In your view, is enforcing food discipline on base also “working for the cooks”?
3. When you dismiss every argument about your statements regarding the Haredim as an “idiotic discussion” or a “low level,” you are falling into exactly the loop you described in article 710, as Akiva argued. You stop listening to the factual claims (such as the actual effect of enlistment on Haredim, and the results are fairly bad) simply because their moral conclusion does not appeal to you. On the contrary, there you propose the solution as listening to the other side—have you adopted that idea with regard to the Haredim as well?
Although I too think the Haredim are morally mistaken, they are not wicked. I’m sure you also don’t think fundamentalists are considered wicked. (Or do you?) This determination that the Haredim are “wicked,” as you phrased it in your comments, may provide a quiet conscience, but it blocks any possibility of analyzing whether they are indeed problematic.

The Nazis too thought that their religion overrode morality. And it is still commonly thought (and I think so too) that their society was wicked. Regarding the distinction between judging an act and judging the person who does it, see column 762, which has just now gone up, and the references there. And yes, I have adopted the recommendation to listen to the Haredim, as was described in great detail in the preceding column (761, where I addressed exactly this claim).