Clueless or Callous?

There is a suffering population at war. Which is it?

I just saw a newspaper point out how shocking are the gaps in the perception of reality between charedim and non-charedim. One community is enduring immense hardship as they engage in a war to protect their lives, whereas the other community is enjoying a good life as usual and is not even remotely aware of the enormous harm being suffered by the other group.

The newspaper was HaModia. The community being described as enduring immense hardship as they engage in a war to protect their lives was the charedi community, and the community being described as blithely enjoying a good life and unaware of the terrible suffering of the first group was the non-charedi rest of the population. I kid you not.

It beggars belief. Do they really not know about how over a thousand IDF soldiers have been killed over the last three years, over 22,000 have been injured, dozens have committed suicide, and hundreds of thousands more have suffered immense and sometimes catastrophic harm to their careers, their businesses, their marriages, their family lives, their mental and physical health? How on earth can they describe the non-charedi community as blithely enjoying a good life and being ignorant of the great suffering being endured by the charedim who are battling for their lives?!

And it’s not just an aberration in HaModia. Two weeks ago, Mishpacha magazine ran various stories about the immense suffering being experienced by charedim as they endure all kinds of terribly government decrees - i.e. the same laws that apply to the entire rest of the population. This past week, Mishpacha’s owner Eli Paley published an editorial filled with various lies that I shall rebut in a different post, and opened by talking about how “the chareidi community in Israel has come under relentless assault.” Silly me, I thought it was Israel that has come under relentless assault, by Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis and Iran and Palestinian terrorists, and the non-charedim who have been doing all the difficult work of protecting us, with the charedim refusing to help.

And you can’t just write off these insane claims (as some charedi apologists do) as merely being the “media,” and not reflective of the The Gedolim. Because none other than R. Dov Landau himself demonstrates the same attitude, as quoted in the Yated last week:

“A Yid cannot remain indifferent to the pain of another Yid.” Unless it’s non-charedim collapsing under the burden of endless reserve duty. Then they can completely ignore it. They force the reservists to serve for even longer and they make no effort to help theirs and their families situation in any way. R. Landau himself even instructed charedim not to visit wounded soldiers or attend funerals. If there was ever an extreme case of Yidden being indifferent to the pain of other Yidden, it’s the charedi leadership and community being indifferent to the suffering of others during three years of war.

So are they clueless or callous? I think that it’s a combination; they are callously preferring cluelessness. In other words, they are certainly aware that there has been a war going on for nearly three years and hundreds of thousands of people called up to reserve duty. But they make a choice not to think about it too much, not to find out more about it, and certainly not to address it. They prefer to remain indifferent to the pain of other Yidden, because it’s far more comfortable for them not to have to take on any responsibilities, and because ultimately they don’t consider the rest of us to be Yidden - certainly not part of the same socio-religious community.

Meanwhile, in contrast, here is what was given out to each guest at a wedding I attended last night, in which the groom and his brothers all studied in yeshiva and all serve in the IDF:

Under the chuppah, there was a tefillah for the IDF, and reference to all the pain and suffering of the last few years - the real pain of the non-charedi community, not the reduction of special funding in the charedi community. The mesader kiddushin, Rav Doron Peretz, spoke about why we reference national suffering at a time of the greatest joy: because building a bayis ne’man b’Yisrael means being ne’eman l’Yisrael, being loyal to the national experience and history of the Jewish People.

That’s what Yidden do.