It's Time for Bravery
And I'm not referring to the charedim.
I am not a particularly brave person. I won’t go on rollercoasters, and I don’t ever complain at restaurants or even return items to stores. And while you might have seen pictures of me swimming with large sharks or manhandling alligators and pythons and leopards, that’s not bravery, it’s just that I have no fear of animals.
I also happen not to have a fear of public speaking. Nevertheless, when I went to the neighborhood shiur a few weeks ago in which R. Mordechai Neugerschal explained why charedim don’t go to the army, I was scared to speak up. This was a crowd of hundreds of people who were not going to appreciate me challenging their special guest speaker.
So how did I pluck up the courage to stand up and speak out? Because I was thinking about my son. He is in his second year of yeshiva and due to enlist in a combat unit later this year. I’m expecting him to confront Hamas and Hezbollah, and I’m too afraid to confront a rabbi?! So I forced myself to go ahead and do it, even though I was actually shaking (though that may have been with anger at the nonsense he was saying).
I’ve heard endless people from the dati community express their hurt and frustration and anger over their charedi relatives, friends, colleagues or neighbors who don’t serve in the army. Sometimes they tell me about incredibly foolish or insensitive statements that these people have made. And I ask them, So what did you say to them? And they tell me that they were too shy and uncomfortable to say anything.
Seriously?! We expect our children to be brave enough to confront Hamas and Hezbollah, and you’re not brave enough to confront your fellow Jews?!
It’s crucial to speak up. Many charedim (especially Anglos) have no idea that there are religious Jews who object to the charedim not serving. Many of them have no idea that there is a religious perspective that such evasion is absolutely against the Torah. Many of them have no idea about the pain and harm that this causes other religious Jews. Many of them don’t even know that there is a manpower shortage, and the cost that this is exacting on people.
There’s different ways of speaking up, and wisdom is needed to figure out what is the best way to do it. Maybe try to talk to them. Maybe send them the video of Rav Granot. Maybe send them the index to my posts on the topic. But say something! We owe it to our soldiers.
Interesting (to me at least) than in many of your posts you refer to people with "charedi relatives, friends, colleagues or neighbors". In the circles I move in, including the town where I live, my work, and almost all of my immediate family I know almost no Charedim. With the more distant family who are in the Charedi world, we rarely speak, and when we do the topic of army almost never comes up. Almost everyone I know or interact with on a regular basis has kids in the army, or kids who will be drafting in the next few years.
I assume that this is true for the majority of Israelis, and even more so (in reverse) for the vast majority of Charedim who almost never interact with people from the Dati-Leumi or secular communities.
I think that places like Ramat Beit Shemesh are an exception, where you have Dati Leumi and Charedim (mainly Anglos) living alongside each other, shopping in the same stores, and often attending the same shuls.
This may be a big part of the problem, that the Charedi society is almost totally removed from the general population (as is a large part of the Arab community) and the issues that are important to other parts of the community do not even come up in their communities. This is true not only for army, but for politics, education, economics, and other aspects of life. I often feel that we are living in parallel but separate worlds.
When I moved to Israel 30 years ago this was less of an issue, there were many neighborhoods that were mixed (Har Nof, Bayit Vegan, and even Geula had large non-Charedi populations), but over the decades the communities are drifting further and further apart. Ramat Beit Shemesh may still be one of the few exceptions, although over the past 20 years it also is becoming more segregated (when the neighbourhood was built, developers tried to sell us a home there claiming that it would be â…“ Black Kipa, â…“ Knitted Kipa, and â…“ no Kipa - didn't quite work out that way)
I'm not sure what the solution is, but unless we find more avenues for different segments of society to interact on a daily basis, most of society will remain oblivious to the way that they are perceived by other segments of society.
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." --Edmund Burke