"Rav Chaim Can't Be Wrong!"

The ultimate argument against army service for charedim?

In a recent argument with someone about charedim avoiding serving in the IDF, my disputant brought what he thought was a dispositive proof for his position:

• Torah is the ultimate Divine source of wisdom

• Rav Chaim Kanievsky knew the entire Torah

• Rav Chaim held that yeshiva students shouldn’t serve in the IDF

QED!

You might wonder why he mentioned Rav Chaim Kanievsky in particular. (And it is actually somewhat ironic, because Rav Chaim himself served in the army, back in 1948, albeit doing little more than sitting on a hill with his Gemara! Still, like others in the charedi world, he ultimately took the position that charedim should not serve.)

The answer is that, more than any other rabbinic leader in the Lithuanian charedi world, Rav Chaim reached near-mythic status. He was known in the charedi world as the “Prince of Torah” (and even Aish HaTorah presents this description as being “undisputed,” though it is in fact very much disputed by those outside of the charedi world). His knowledge of Torah (albeit strictly from a charedi perspective) was extremely far-ranging, and his isolation from the wider world is something that from a charedi perspective means that his Torah wisdom was pure and true. And so, runs the argument, it’s absurd to say that he’s wrong.

Now, this is somewhat reminiscent of the notorious ban on my books twenty years ago. My antagonists then were saying that Chazal knew the entire Torah, hence they knew all wisdom, hence they couldn’t be wrong about science. At the time, my counterarguments were to cite authoritative sources who said that Chazal could indeed have been mistaken about science. This meant that knowing all Torah does not mean knowing about the natural world.

But the argument about army is a little different. That’s not dependent upon knowledge of the natural world; it’s an “internal” Torah matter. And Rav Chaim said that our safety in Israel depends on the yeshivos:

“Watch out regarding your lives and your very existence, for you should assuredly know that the very right of Klal Yisrael to exist is from the merit of those holy bnei Torah… it is very dangerous to interfere with their purity…”

So how do we counter that?

Well, one way is to laboriously go through all the sources and demonstrate that there is absolutely no basis for claiming that Torah study replaces ordinary hishtadlus for military protection. This is something to which I have dedicated many posts. But it doesn’t help with those who take the more basic position that no matter what arguments I present, it’s simply impossible for such a great Torah scholar to be wrong.

And so a different approach is required. One could demonstrate from history that knowledge of Torah does not equate to being correct, with examples of many great figures who believed themselves to be correct about something but were clearly wrong. And one could point out that Chazal and the Rishonim most certainly did not believe that other members of Chazal and Rishonim were neccessarily correct about anything and everything - that’s why they always argued with each other!

But I came up with something much more direct, powerful and conclusive.