No, Your Rabbis Don't Know

Mishpacha Magazine's insistence on faith in The Gedolim

There’s a fascinating article in Mishpacha magazine by Gedalya Guttentag about charedim and the draft. Guttentag begins in a very valuable way, by speaking about some of the tremendous sacrifice that the rest of the country has made, and noting that there are religious soldiers among the casualties.

The rest of the article, however, is utter codswallop.

A wartime election campaign prompted by a failure to pass a draft law will be about one thing only: bashing the chareidim.

No, not “bashing.” Pointing out that the chareidi wholesale refusal to enlist, even for non-learners, has caused immense suffering for the reservists who have been called up repeatedly for nearly two years, with crushing results on their learning, careers, family lives, marriages, and mental and physical health. There is a suicide hotline for soldiers, which has been contacted by nearly four thousand soldiers.

Right and left will compete to vilify the cowardly, fanatic, obscurantist, un-Jewish draft-dodgers.

No, it’s not about cowardice or fanaticism or obscurantism. It’s just about an identity of isolationism that has resulted in charedim not caring about civic responsibility - something that Mishpacha columnist Jonathan Rosenblum himself acknowledged in the magazine a decade ago.

Erstwhile friend and longtime foe will race to the bottom to find the worst sanctions for yeshivah bochurim.

It has nothing to do with friends or foes. It’s simply about a way to solve a serious problem which causes immense harm today and which, if not solved, is an existential threat for all Israel. The charedim are exponentially growing, how will Israel survive if they are paid not to enlist?

Guttentag then gets to his main complaint, which is the basis for the title of the article, “Don’t The Rabbis Know?”:

Such an election campaign will see the return of a hackneyed phrase, consisting of four of the most toe-curling words in the English language: “Don’t the rabbis know.”

As in: “Don’t the rabbis know that after October 7, everything needs to change?”

He proceeds to disparagingly note the various ways in which this sentiment is voiced:

There’s the hostile critic’s version: “Don’t the rabbis understand that the chareidim can’t carry on as before and sponge off everyone else?”

There’s the blogger’s version: “It’s true that Torah study is very important, but don’t the rabbis know that Israel needs a big army now?”

Or even the lomdish version: “Don’t the rabbis know that according to the Rambam, this is a milchemes mitzvah?”

Well, yes. All these things are absolutely true. Amazingly, Guttentag does not even try to refute them! Instead, he makes the baseless claim that all the tens of thousands of charedi yeshiva students are essential for the success of the war. He perceptively notes the difficulty of explaining to the wider public “the finer points of Rav Chaim of Volozhin’s teachings about how Torah protects the Jewish people.” Well, it’s probably difficult because even in the charedi world, this is not held as a serious belief with practical relevance, and it has absolutely no basis in traditional Judaism (as indeed is also the case for Rav Chaim’s innovative description of the function of Torah study, as noted in Rabbi Dr. Lamm’s Torah LiShmah and in my book Rationalism vs. Mysticism).

Guttentag himself seems to be aware of the profound problems with the chareidi approach, and so he resorts to surrendering responsibility and relying on others: Trust the Gedolim!

Whether we understand how the IDF will make up numbers, or not; whether we can figure out how the gedolim’s position fits in with the Rambam or not, let’s not stoop to bitter charges against those who learn Torah, accusations that they don’t feel the pain of those sacrificing on the front lines.

Unfortunately, these accusations are correct. If there’s one thing that absolutely clear, it’s that the charedi Gedolim don’t feel the pain of those sacrificing. (And why would they? It’s not as though they are personally familiar with those people or are part of those communities.) They don’t talk about it, they do not visit wounded soldiers or attend funerals or do chessed for those affected, and they even actively discourage their followers from these things. Whenever charedi rabbis talk about the war and its victims, they are referring to the fictitious “war on Torah” and the “suffering” of yeshiva students.

And then Guttentag reaches his final sentence:

Because it’s a tenet of belief that has endured throughout our long history that, yes, the Rabbis know.

Goodness, it’s 2004 all over again. No, there is no such tenet of belief. (And there are several of Mishpacha’s own columnists, including rabbis, who don’t believe it, even if they are wary of publicly saying so.)

First of all, there are different types and groups of rabbis. There are plenty of rabbis who do indeed know that the charedi world needs to change: all the dati-leumi rabbis.

Second, it’s become painfully clear on several occasions that the charedi rabbis did not know some very important things that were known to others. Perhaps it’s time to refresh people’s memory with some recent examples from Jewish history:

• The Rabbis didn’t know that destruction was coming to Europe - it was the Zionists who figured that out, and even as Hitler rose to power, there were charedi leaders who told their followers that the crisis would pass and they would be safe in Europe.

• The Charedi Gedolim didn’t know that it was a prominent view among most Rishonim and many Acharonim that Chazal sometimes erred in their statements about the natural world, and thought it was either an aberrant minority view or even non-existent.

• The Charedi Gedolim gave immense power and authority to Leib Tropper, not knowing that he was a manipulative predator - even though I figured it out immediately, and countless others knew (and eventually we were proven correct). The same goes for Yona Metzger.

• The Charedi Gedolim didn’t realize that child abuse was a serious problem until bloggers made it a cause. (Even Agudas Yisrael’s Chaim Zweibel acknowledged that.)

• Prominent Charedi Gedolim, at the beginning of Covid-19, claimed that Torah protects and yeshivos should continue as normal. That was hastily backtracked, and Bnei Brak ended up having the highest mortality rate.

By the same token, and for much the same reasons as the above, the Gedolim do not know (or care about) the suffering that they are causing to the Jewish People, they do not care to know about the authentic Torah view on warfare, and they do not know or even care to think about how Israel can possibly support the exponential growth of a sector that does not serve and is not economically productive.

These are harsh truths for someone who has been brainwashed into believing that The Rabbis Know. And it’s much easier to place one’s trust in others than to take responsibility for one’s life and one’s community. But it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.