Hysteria vs. Hashem

The Charedi response to the expiration of their exemption

Following the government’s failure to submit a workable proposal regarding charedim and the army, the legal basis for their exemption has been cancelled. This does not mean that the 66,000 exempt charedim are going to be drafted next week. But the immediate significance of this is that the government is no longer allowed to be giving them money to be in yeshiva.

Predictably, the response from the charedi world is hysteria and absurd rhetoric and conflating “Torah” with “allowing every charedi male age 18-24 to avoid army,” and pretending that having a hundred thousand people in yeshiva (or at least registered as being in yeshiva) was something that always existed and that Israel cannot survive without all of them continuing to be in yeshiva and growing in number, and ignoring all the Torah learning in the dati-leumi yeshivot.

Rav Dov Landau warned that if there are less people in yeshivah to provide the protection of Torah, the country itself will be in serious danger. UTJ chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf declared that “the order given by the judges of the High Court of Justice, whose purpose is to seriously harm the Torah and Jewish people (!), here in the Land of Israel – the state of the Jewish people – is a sign of disgrace and contempt… The State of Israel arose to be a home for the Jewish people whose Torah is a Torah of truth… Without the Torah, we have no right to exist.” Senior UTJ lawmaker Meir Porush condemned the court for taking the “unprecedented step of imposing economic sanctions against those who chose to study the Holy Torah.”

It’s a rather ridiculous to describe not giving free money (to those who avoid contributing what everyone else contributes) as "economic sanctions." But there’s something else that I’d like to focus upon: where charedim see Hashem’s role in all this.

An article on the charedi Kikar Shabbos website tried to boost the spirits of its readers. It urged them to bear in mind that while this is a significant development, it’s not the end of the world, because “parnasah is from Heaven, and it’s only the intermediary which changes.” Which is exactly what Desslerian (and non-traditional) charedi hashkafa dictates. Everything is from Hashem, and occurs solely as a result of our spiritual merits, and human action has no actual significance.

So what’s all the hysteria about? What’s the anger against the Supreme Court about? Their actions have absolutely zero significance! If Hashem wants charedim to get money, they will get money, regardless of what the Supreme court says! If he wants them to be saved from the draft, they will be saved from the draft! Where’s their emunah and bitachon?

And if the spiritual merits of the Torah of charedim can’t even protect them from the damage caused by the Supreme Court, then on what basis can they possibly claim that their Torah study can nevertheless protect against genocidal terrorist attacks and rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah?

The other strange aspect of this is that there is apparently no consideration that, seeing as everything is believed to be from Hashem, surely Hashem Himself might be saying something here. After all, many people in the charedi world believe that, at least broadly speaking, you can interpret what happens as a Divine message. As Rabbi Moshe Meiselman and others argued, the people massacred on October 7th were from secular moshavim, and frum places were not harmed.

So when Hashem brings about calamity for the charedi community specifically, and it’s not an enigmatic calamity of sickness or death or overcrowding accident but actually a direct and very specific harm to charedi yeshivos only, would it not be logical to wonder if Hashem might be saying something about a problem with charedi yeshivos?