The Greatest Disgrace

A new effort to exempt charedim from helping

The charedim and their friends in the Likud have stooped to new depths in their efforts to exempt charedim from helping relieve the IDF manpower shortage and resultant crushing burden on the reservists.

The first try, which the Likud put a lot of effort into over the past year, was a “Draft [Exemption] Law.” This was going to set minimal enlistment targets without any serious means of enforcement. And as Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch revealed, there was no intent of actually carrying it out. But even this farce of a law was too much for Rabbi Dov Landau to agree to, as it symbolically represented a consent to some charedim enlisting. He therefore nixed it.

And so now there’s a new legislative plan. It’s to create a new “Basic Law” which circumvents the entire legal issue of exempting charedi yeshiva students - by instead rating them as serving the country by being in yeshiva!

The proposed law states that “Torah study is of foundational importance in the heritage of the Jewish People.” That part is fine, but then it goes on to make considerable baseless extrapolations.

First, it elaborates that the State of Israel should therefore encourage Torah study. This sounds fine by itself, but in light of what comes later in the proposed law, it clearly refers to the encouragement of Torah study by adults, full-time, for a substantial portion of their lives, in place of serving or working or materially helping the nation in any way.

And it further proceeds to argue that this Torah study is considered to be a contribution to the state, on par with army service (and thus those who engage in it have no need to do military service). This also has the consequence, spelled out explicitly in the proposed law, that those who dedicate a significant portion of their lives to Torah study should receive the same financial and legal benefits as soldiers!

Have you ever heard of anything so disgraceful? That an entire society of people doing nothing other than sitting and learning Gemara, in an air-conditioned Beis HaMidrash, going home every night, and raising their children for the same lifestyle, would be considered equal to a society in which so many people are sacrificing so much of their time, health, careers, family lives, and sometimes their very lives?!

Rav Yaakov Medan, in a scathing critique, wrote today that “I do not remember in the history of the State of Israel a law more replete with blasphemy and contempt for and distortion of the Torah than this law.” He also condemns the tremendous damage to national morale that such a law would cause - which I would note has already been caused, to an extent, by the charedim and the government over the last few years.

The proposed law represents a fundamental distortion of what Torah is all about. As I discuss in detail in my book Rationalism vs. Mysticism, the Sages were very clear about the goal of Torah study:

“It is not the exposition that is the main point, but rather the actions.” (Mishnah, Avot 1:17)

The Midrash elaborates that the primary goal of Torah study is to fulfill it:

“Rabbi Eleazar said: What was the blessing that Moses first blessed upon the Torah? Blessed are You, God our Lord, King of the Universe, Who chose this Torah, and sanctified it, and desired those who fulfill it. He did not say “those who toil in it,” and he did not say “those who contemplate it,” bur rather “those who fulfill it”—those who fulfill the words of the Torah.” (Midrash Rabba, Devarim 11:6)

But what about Talmud Torah Keneged Kulam, the statement that learning Torah is equivalent to everything else? Rambam explains:

“There is no mitzvah among all the mitzvot which can be weighed against the study of Torah; rather, the study of Torah is equal to all the other mitzvot, because study brings to action, and therefore study always takes precedence to action.” (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Talmud Torah 3:3)

Torah study is the most fundamental mitzvah only inasmuch as it’s the one which teaches you how to fulfill all the others. The goal is not to learn Torah, it’s to live Torah. Meiri notes that this accounts for a rule that would otherwise be inexplicable, that one stops learning Torah to fulfill other mitzvot:

“Should you ask: How could they be more lenient with the study of Torah than with all other mitzvot, in which they said that one who is busy with a mitzvah is exempt from other mitzvot?.... The answer is that study is for nothing other than to bring to action, so how could it remove the obligation to act?!” (Meiri, Commentary to Shabbat 9a)

These sources demonstrate that the problem with the proposed law stems from the initial distortion. Torah study is indeed a supreme value, and something that the nation should fund up to a point, but this is because people need to know how to live as good Jews. People who learn Torah beyond that are not contributing to the nation. This is in the same way as learning to read and write is extremely important, and something that society should fund everyone to learn, but spending years of adulthood improving one’s reading and penmanship is not contributing to the nation.

There are Torah teachers who contribute to the nation - and those who do it in a way that we should support are those who encourage their students to support the nation materially and militarily, i.e. the Dati-Leumi rabbanim. But merely learning Torah only contributes to one’s own knowledge, and is not any form of contribution to anyone else, certainly not in place of other needed contributions and obligations. Those who claim otherwise are invoking a mystical innovation with no serious basis in traditional Judaism, just some quotes taken out of context.

In the proposed law being raised in the Knesset, there are also numerous distortions of the Gemara and of history. It presents references to the centrality of Torah study in Jewish history, without acknowledging that this always referred to a basic level of study by most people, with full-time dedication only by a small elite group who were the teachers of the nation. It never meant tens of thousands of men engaged in full-time Torah study and being supported by others, and nor did it exempt them from other obligations.

Meanwhile, not only were Shas and UTJ advocating for this anti-Zionist disgrace, but Bibi apparently promised to push it through, and some Likud and Otza Yehudit MKs have been vocal in their ideological support for it. One Likud MK declared that “it’s as basic as brit milah.” Fortunately, Smotrich declared that it was a red line for Religious Zionism to declare that yeshiva students are equal to soldiers for legal and financial benefits, and that section of the law was apparently removed. But it seems that it will still say that the State should finance charedim to learn full-time, as a contribution to the state.

If this abomination of a law goes through, then anytime there is any charedi request for any financial or material support, we should tell them that our Torah study is a contribution to them.