How Many Learners?

Reality vs. Ideals

How many of the approximately 66,000 draft-age charedim should be enlisted?

The question has to be broken down into an ideological question and a practical question. To deal with the latter first: enlisting 66,000 charedim is simply not going to happen in any circumstances. It’s just impossible. You can’t force people who are totally opposed to fighting for the nation into doing so, and there is no point in even trying. Many of them would rather go to prison.

What can be done is to incentivize army service and disincentivize draft-dodging. This can be done with a combination of outreach and the creation of charedi-friendly army tracks, along with negative consequences for not serving. Until now, charedim who avoid army service suffer no negative consequences and moreover receive an enormous amount of financial benefits. If all that were to change, charedi society would start to change. Necessity is the mother of hashkafic reinvention.

With the right government (i.e. one without Bibi leading Likud, which would enable a broad coalition), in a best-case scenario, we could perhaps enlist ten or twenty thousand charedim within a few years. (Most of these would be from the chassidic or Sefardic communities, which are much less impractical than the Litvaks). With the wrong government, maybe five thousand will enlist, tops.

So much for the practical. What about the ideological? What is the utopian scenario? How many charedim should be in full-time learning and exempt from the draft?

This might come as a surprise to some. But in the opinion of much of the dati-leumi community - perhaps even more than among secular Jews - no charedim should be exempt. The ideal is that everyone goes to the army.

Don’t we need dedicated Torah scholars? Of course we do. But first of all, even if all the charedim enlisted, there would still be more people in full-time Torah study than at any point in history. Not everyone is age 18-21!

Second, serving in the army is a mitzvah that contributes to the growth of a Torah scholar and leader. In the eighty dati-leumi hesder yeshivot, most of the roshei yeshiva and rabbis served in the army. Performing such chessed for the nation enhances their spiritual growth, as well as their understanding of the realities and needs of the nation. It makes them superior Torah leaders, and it doesn’t detract from their becoming great Torah scholars (just as the previous generation of Gedolim were considered Gedolim even though they mostly attended college).

And what is the value of the Torah study of someone who avoids serving in the army? Especially if he is part of a society whose values do not include sharing such responsibilities, what value does his Torah have?

Again, this is a utopian ideal which is just not going to happen. But it’s crucial to get at least a few tens of thousands. This is both due to the current manpower shortage and to have the ability to face future threats from the Palestinians. And there’s also a need to boost the national spirit; when one large growing sector of society, claiming to represent the Torah, secedes from the Jewish People and doesn’t care about the sacrifice that everyone else makes for them, it is greatly damaging. Let’s hope that the government changes and that national change happens.