The Craziest War Comment

What's the most bonkers claim that's been made?

There’s been a lot of badly mistaken and wrong stuff said by people all over the world since October 7th. But what’s the absolute craziest?

One contender was certainly Sky News' Kay Burley. She notoriously asked Israel spokesman Eylon Levy if the ratio of three Palestinian prisoners being traded for each Israeli hostage shows that Israel does not value Palestinian lives as much as Jewish lives. The normally unflappable Levy was so taken aback that he responded with a look that became famous:

But I saw something - alas, I’ve completely forgotten where - that was even crazier. Someone argued that just as the Hamas attack only lasted for one day (people always seem to forget about the thousands of rockets over several months), so too Israel should have only had one day to attack Gaza!

I saw that comment many weeks ago, and I had forgotten about it until I saw a person argue something similar in the comments to the previous post. Amidst the arguments about charedim not participating in a milchemes mitzvah, someone claimed that it’s no longer a situation of defensive war, because the attack started and ended on October 7th!

It’s a stupid comment, but I think it’s revealing of a general problem. Some people get into all kinds of nitpicking about whether the war qualifies as a milchemes mitzvah. And there are two ways in which this reflects an inability to see the wood for the trees, of getting lost in technical details and not seeing the bigger picture of what’s going on.

One, of course, is with the regard to the war itself. This is unquestionably a defensive war, on multiple levels. It’s a defensive war against Hamas, which will always pose a clear and present danger, and it’s also about warning other regional enemies against a larger attack.

The other way in which the perspective is skewed is with regard to the obligation to serve in the IDF. As I mentioned in a post a while ago, Rav Aharon Lichtenstein has an English essay in which elaborates on the idea that serving in the army is not just about a specific mitzvah of milchemes mitzvah, but rather a more fundamental idea of what Torah is all about:

….military service is often the fullest manifestation of a far broader value:  g'milut hasadim, the empathetic concern for others and action on their behalf.  This element defined by Hazal as one of the three cardinal foundations of the world, is the basis of Jewish social ethics, and its realization, even at some cost to single-minded development of Torah scholarship, virtually imperative…  When, as in contemporary Israel, the greatest single hesed one can perform is helping to defend his fellows' very lives, the implications for yeshiva education should be obvious… There is, then, no halakhic, moral, or philosophic mandate for the blanket exemption of Bnei Torah from military service.

To many of us, this is all so obvious. How can anyone be oblivious to the fundamental importance of sharing national responsibility? Those who cannot see this are suffering from a worldview which has developed in a Beis HaMidrash that is disconnected from the world.

This point was made by Rabbi Elchanan Nir, in a front-page article in Friday’s Makor Rishon which is causing quite a stir; you can read it here. (It’s a very long article in a more difficult Hebrew, and if someone has the ability and time to translate it, that would be great.) He writes as follows:

…In its charedi version, the Torah was deprived of being an elixir of life. It has lost its connection to its surroundings, to the wide avenues of the nation, to the reality to which it is supposed to turn and influence it from its spirit. It is not for nothing that the Sages said, "Whoever says he has nothing but Torah – he does not even have Torah" (Yevamot 19:12). There can be no true Torah with those who are not involved in life itself. From being a Torah of life, which provides an answer and light to its surroundings, a Torah has instead developed that does not deal with reality, that does not have responsibility and simple humanity, lending a shoulder to collapsing agriculture or a partnership with the soldiers who fight for it… Suddenly, many in the national-religious public are internalizing the truth: This Torah that our charedi brothers boast about is not the Torah we are studying. In our community, we don’t believe in a Torah that absolves one of responsibility and of sharing the burden with one’s friend, a Torah that is not a Torah of life.

What’s clear is that things in Israel have changed. The national-religious community, especially the more Torani sector, used to be relatively cooperative with the charedi approach, perhaps even romanticizing it as somehow more authentic, or seeing it as “eilu v’eilu.” But now they see that it’s a fundamental perversion of Torah, and they will tolerate it no longer - and it’s perhaps the more Torani sectors that are the most upset.

The people in the national-religious community simply cannot take it. So many of their young men - including dedicated Torah students - are being injured or falling in battle, and they are being demanded to take ever more time away from yeshivah and their jobs and wives to shoulder an ever-greater burden. Meanwhile, the charedi community claims that Torah and IDF service are incompatible (which dati’im know to be false, and which negates their lives and deaths) and demands a full exemption. If change does not happen - and in all likelihood, it won’t happen in any significant way - there is going to be an enormous rift in Israeli society.

(Meanwhile, the powerful video message from Rav Tamir Granot that I mentioned last week, which has already had over 50,000 views, was just released by Tradition magazine in an English translation/ transcript.)