The Perfect Charedi Storm

A Recipe for Disaster

While a day before Rosh HaShana we were celebrating Iran’s failure to kill anyone or cause serious damage, along with the general success of the war against Hezbollah, Rosh HaShana came in as we heard about six soldiers that had been killed. When I went to shul, which is normally very crowded for Rosh HaShana, I was struck at how many empty seats there were; then I realized that it was because so many young men had been called back into the reserves. My son’s hesder yeshivah is half empty. During davening on Rosh HaShana morning, there were tears shed as even more young men were called out of shul. The Rav was crying during his speech.

Similar scenes took place at every dati-leumi shul in Israel. But for charedi shuls, generally speaking, there was no significant difference between this Rosh HaShana and every other one. Everyone was home with their families as usual, except for those who were in yeshiva or Uman.

While all year I have been hearing expressions of anger and upset and resentment, I’m now also hearing something else: sheer disbelief. How can it be that we’ve been at war for a year, with so many millions of people’s lives turned over, and yet for the charedi community it’s just life as normal? How can it be that there is a severe IDF manpower shortage when there are so many able-bodied men available? How can it be that endless thousands of non-charedi men are suffering from being away from their lives and jobs and families for months on end and risking life and limb, while charedim continue their studies or their jobs as usual, and do not even provide any physical or material assistance to the soldiers or their families or others affected by the war? How can charedim have the gall to declare that it’s all about Torah, when aside from the Torah having a lot to say about the importance of going to war to defend the nation and nothing at all to say about exemptions for people in yeshiva, the charedim are perfectly happy for thousands of dati yeshiva students to be pulled out of yeshiva rather than have charedim who aren’t even in yeshiva be drafted?

A few days ago, someone asked me this question in a more focused way. He asked what is the ultimate horrible root in charedi society for behaviour that ultimately cannot be described as anything other than evil. What moral rot lies at the core?

My answer is that there isn’t anything evil at the core. Just the opposite - it started with some very noble ideals. It’s a perfect example of how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. You don’t need evil intent or evil people to have evil results. You just need a perfect storm of factors. The recipe for the disaster that is the charedi non-response to the war is the following combination of ingredients and incubation conditions:

RECIPE FOR DISASTER

Human Ingredients:

• A small pietistic community that lived in poverty-stricken Palestine while being materially supported by Jews abroad;

• A few thousand Holocaust survivors, remnants of a deeply religious community that was largely destroyed and want to rebuild.

Ideological Ingredients:

• A noble desire to puruse spirituality and insulate oneself from the corrosive influences of the modern world;

• A belief that one’s way of life is traditional and therefore perfect and therefore explicit change should never be made;

• An accelerating ideology of mysticism, which ultimately presents spiritual “work” as being so effective that it actually replaces material endeavor;

• An innovative claim that “Torah liShma” does not mean that Torah should be studied for the goal of creating a society based upon its values and laws, but rather for the sake of learning.

Incubation Conditions:

• Modern technologies and healthcare systems which enables communities that do not practice birth control to grow at a massively increased rate than historically was the case;

• A welfare state that enables people who are not economically productive to be supported financially, even on a large scale;

• A multi-party parliamentary democracy in which small parties are offered large incentives to support policy decisions and keep the largest party in power.

Mix together the human and ideological ingredients under these incubation conditions for seventy years, and voilà! You get a society of over a million people which has been habituated to being financially supported while having no duties to larger society, a society which actually aims for being detached from the nation, and which rationalizes to itself that a particular type of religious lifestyle is a substitute for physical and material involvement in the needs of the nation.

And what’s the solution? The ideology needs to be changed and the last two incubation conditions need to be reversed - i.e., the funding of the lifestyle needs to stop, and it needs to be politically toxic to enable the lifestyle. But it’s going to be tough. Societal change is not easy to achieve. We are going to have to work hard at it.

A full list of my posts on the topic of IDF service is at Torah and Army: The Big Index