Inception

A novel idea for causing change in the charedi world

The fundamental reason why charedim are not interested in helping with the mitzvah and burden of national defense is that they simply don’t feel any need to, because they don’t feel themselves to be part of the larger Jewish community. Still, this is not a palatable thing for them to say to others, and for many people in the charedi community, it’s not even a palatable thing to tell themselves. Hence, they have come up with the mystical notion that by learning Torah they are actually helping with the war effort via supernatural means.

And this has become thoroughly ingrained in the charedi psyche. I’m not sure that people actually believe it, but they certainly believe that they believe it, which is functionally the same as long as their lives are not on the line. At the Siyum HaShas hosted by Agudas Yisrael, one of the speakers declared, “Every blatt Gemara is a missile!” Even some non-charedim have come to believe it, claiming that while non-learning charedim should enlist, charedim learning in yeshiva are helping with the war via the Torah they learn.

Now, I’ve devoted many posts to demonstrating that all the alleged sources brought in support of this concept say no such thing. And R. Moshe Klausner wrote a freely downloadable work on the topic in both English and Hebrew. Still, for most people, source analysis doesn’t change their minds. It’s like with the evidence for the safety of the vaccines - studies have shown that the more evidence you present, the more resistant vaccine-deniers become.

So how do you get people to acknowledge the fallacy of a belief that they are deeply resistant to having disproved? It occurred to me that the answer might be like that in the science-fiction movie Inception. You have to get them to realize it themselves. Now, unlike in Inception, we don’t have a technological means to actually enter their subconsciousness. But I did think of the next best thing.