Charedi Chickens Come Home To Roost

The following article of mine appeared in today’s edition of The Jerusalem Post

By now, you have probably seen the footage. Two female IDF soldiers — commanders from the Education and Youth Corps, making a routine welfare visit to a draftee at his home — were surrounded by a mob of hundreds of charedi men in Bnei Brak. They were chased, screamed at, and called Nazis. Police had to rescue them from behind overturned garbage bins. A police car was overturned and a police motorcycle was set on fire.

Following this, many Charedim and their supporters insisted that the mob’s behavior was not representative of charedi society as a whole. They point to statements by charedi rabbinic leaders condemning violence. Yet this is beside the point. The point is not whether it is representative of charedi society; it is whether it is symptomatic of a severe societal problem. And the answer to that is clearly yes.

Most people in charedi society would not engage in violent protests or chase after soldiers. But the growing thousands of people in Bnei Brak, Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh and other places who do engage in such things did not emerge out of a vacuum. They are the result of a society of over one million people which sees the rest of Israel as an entirely different and religiously invalid socio-religious group - effectively a different and illegitimate nation.

When you’re living among what you view as a different and fundamentally illegitimate nation, then it’s easy to believe you have no obligations to society. There is no reason to be concerned about extracting financial and other resources from everyone else, and there is certainly no reason to take the difficult step of serving in the army. And thus the armed forces of that society, who represent the enforcement of its rules, easily become the enemy.

This is not an easy problem to solve. Being separate and distinct from wider society is the very raison d’être of charedi society. It started with good intentions; trying to insulate one’s Jewish identity from the threats of the modern world is a goal to which one can certainly be sympathetic. But charedi Judaism takes this to an extreme that is against Torah and extremely dangerous. Coupled with an innovative theological reform which professes that material endeavor, secular knowledge and economic self-sufficiency are worthless and even spiritually harmful, it makes for a lethal combination.

It’s all very well to be a distinct community that does not see itself as part of wider society when it’s a matter of a relatively small number of Jews in the shtetl. But when you’re a community of well over one million people that is rapidly growing and already represents a third of Jewish first-graders, then it’s a very different matter. Being detached from the realities of economics and security, along with having no sense of civic duties (despite their fundamental importance in the Torah), is a tremendous threat to the economy and to national security.

Who is responsible for this catastrophic situation? Fundamentally, it is the fault of the charedi leadership. But their lifestyle and accompanying ideology only became possible and further evolved as a result of successive governments that legislated and funded such economic and security freeloading in exchange for votes.

For the first few decades of the state, only a maximum of 800 young men received an exemption from army service under the framework of “Torato Umnato.” Menachem Begin released any limits to the number in exchange for charedi political support, but he probably did not imagine that it would balloon a hundredfold to 80,000 young men. And this occurred in conjunction with the standardized transfer of billions of shekels to an “education” system that raises children to have neither the ability nor even the desire to be economically self-sufficient, nor to have any sense of civic duty or respect for “Zionist” law.

In response to yesterday’s appalling events, Itamar Ben Gvir claimed that most of charedi society are law-abiding. Well, they are indeed mostly not people who join riots against soldiers and police officers. But there is virtually no respect for “secular” law, and there are some very significant laws by which Charedi society most certainly does not abide. One is the law to enlist; another is the law against discouraging people from enlisting.

And the current government, desperate for charedi political support, has no interest in enforcing these laws. Ben Gvir might boast about extending Israeli control and sovereignty over areas inhabited by Arabs, but meanwhile we are losing Israeli control and sovereignty over areas inhabited by Jews.

Moreover, and even more dangerously, the current government seeks to enable the separatist and freeloading ideology of charedi society by legislating an exemption from army service for most charedim, which in turn frees up the transfer of billions of shekels to further enable the charedi freeloading lifestyle. This buys short-term political support from charedim for the government. But in the long run, it is a clear existential threat to Israel’s very survival.

The big problem is not lawlessness and riots in the streets of Bnei Brak and Jerusalem, though there will doubtless be much more of that. It is the refusal of the charedi community to enlist, with all the difficulty and suffering it causes for the families in which men have to do endless rounds of reserve duty due to the IDF manpower shortage. And the even bigger problem is the eventual economic and then military collapse of the State of Israel, with all that will result. And it will be our own fault.

The next elections may be the very last chance to correct this problem. After that, it will likely become politically and socially impossible. Time is running out.