Horses and Asses

The latest with the charedi draft crisis

I almost was not going to write another post about the charedi army refusal this week, because I am just so sick of it all and it feels like flogging a dead horse. But the insanity is so broad and multilayered, I feel an obligation.

Where to begin?

There’s the editor of Israel’s Yated Ne’eman, the representative of Daas Torah, who claims that the IDF tanks and planes only operate thanks to the tens of thousands of charedim in yeshiva. Of course, it begs the question of how Israel won in 1948 and 1967 when there was hardly anyone in yeshiva, but such obvious questions are not addressed. The voice of Daas Torah says something that is simply lunacy, but nobody in the charedi world seems to be even aware of it, much less call it out.

The voice of Daas Torah also asserts that if there was stronger learning in the yeshivos, the IDF would only need 15 soldiers to win all of its wars. (This is similar to the claim that Mordechai Neugerschal made to me.) One wonders how this squares with the number of soldiers that were required in Torah times. One also wonders if this would also reduce the number of students who need to leave the yeshiva for protests - and if so, why don’t these students just stay in the yeshiva and strengthen the learning instead of protesting?

Then we have Ateres Shlomo, the yeshiva of the student who was imprisoned for a few weeks for draft-dodging (or, as the Rosh Yeshivah Shalom Ber Sorotzkin presented it entirely unapologetically, the student who was held hostage, like the Hamas hostages, for learning Torah). When he was released early, they held a celebration in which this zero-responsibility kid was paraded in a horse-drawn carriage like some kind of royalty. The horse, who apparently like Bilaam’s donkey had more horse sense than to cooperate with sinful people, did not want to schlepp the heavy carriage. Whereupon it got struck by a charedi man who approached it from behind (which you should never do with a horse), panicked and ended up on the ground. Poor horse, suffering from a bunch of asses.

Then we have Mishpacha magazine’s breathless coverage of the emergency “prayer” rally, in which the entire charedi world came together on behalf of the suffering hostages soldiers IDF widows and orphans yeshiva students. They criticize the “cynics” who called it a power play, yet only a few lines later triumphantly declare that “None of the 120 Knesset members can now be in any doubt about where the chareidi world stands on the draft issue.”

Mishpacha interviews several participants who spoke about how the rally was such a valuable and inspirational experience - for them. They didn’t quote the hundreds of thousands of religious Jews who did not attend and considered the entire event to be the most appalling chillul Hashem. Nor did they interview the people who were harassed at that rally, such at the woman who wrote to me about her own experience that day -

On my way to support the reservists at Binyanei HaUma, I was spat upon, called names, and my sign with divrei Torah was torn from my hands and thrown away… I am done… The haredi rally was the last straw. We found out on 7 October what will happen if there is no army. What do they believe will happen, practically speaking?When the leftists who can leave, leave. When our sector is dead. And they are the majority and in power. They all seem to be functionally Neturei Karta. And I would be happy to understand better, not sarcastically, what they think is going to happen when 7 Oct comes to Mea Shearim. I grew up where men support and protect their families. That is so basic I can’t relate to this anymore.

And then we have the endless claims in Mishpacha that the charedi world is out to defend Torah students’ way of life. No mention of the fact that nobody is actually going to force yeshiva students into army service, which is impossible - the only real threat is removing the money that the charedim expect everyone else to give them. Nor is there any reference to the fact that there are tens of thousands of men in the charedi world who aren’t even learning, who could have enlisted at the beginning of the war and prevented the terrible price paid by the reservists (and also relieved the pressure on charedi yeshiva students to enlist), and yet with which the charedi leadership has been adamant must not serve.

But of all this, the thing that bothers me the most is that in all Mishpacha’s extensive coverage of the topic this week - the rally, the interviews with various charedi rabbis, all the different questions they ask and the various explanations of the “crisis” - there is something entirely missing from all the discussion.

Can you guess what that is?

Yes, it’s the teeny-tiny matter of the costs of the war that Israel has been fighting for two years.

No mention of the nearly one thousand soldiers who have been killed. No mention of the many thousands injured so badly that they can no longer serve. No mention of the army’s desperate manpower shortage. No mention of the crushing burden on the hundreds of thousands of reservists and their families from endless call-ups - the ruined studies, the destroyed careers, the broken marriages, the damaged children, the PTSD, the suicides. No interviews with all the national-religious rabbis, roshei yeshivah and laypeople who want the charedim to serve out of a desperate need for others to help share the burden of war. Nope, none of that. According to Mishpacha, the entire charedi draft crisis is all about an anti-religious Supreme Court that is suddenly out to destroy Torah.

What a load of horse manure.