Torah on a Large Scale

When Jews need to think about an entire country

One core difference between the charedi community and the dati-leumi community is seen very powerfully in this week’s Torah reading.

Many mitzvot apply on a personal level. Tefila, arba minim, lashon hara, etc. Parashat Shoftim, on the other hand, is about various mitzvot which come into play when you’re operating an entire society. Shoftim v’shotrim - creating a legal system and a police force. Al pi haTorah asher yarucha - establishing a national system of rabbinic authority. Som tasim alecha melech - arranging suitable national political leadership and making sure that it is not corrupted. Eglah arufah - taking responsibility for unsolved crimes. Ki tetze lemilchama - when and how to wage war. Venigash haKohen vediber el ha-am - how to raise morale for the army and ensure military success.

The types of things that you need to think about when you are responsible for running a country are not the types of things you need to think about when you live as a small minority under a foreign leadership in exile.

The dati-leumi community - and the secular Israeli community - understand this. The charedi community does not, because they are still stuck with a self-perception that they are a small minority under a foreign leadership in exile.

The charedi community thinks that if you need to borrow chairs from the neighbor for a shalom zachar, and you need to rent more for a bar mitzva, then if you’re doing an even bigger event, you just need to arrange even more chairs. They don’t understand that if you’re doing an event for 200,000 people, you don’t just need a lot more chairs, and bleachers tied together with zip ties. You need professionally and scientifically trained engineers and experts in crowd control who can determine what the structural requirements and safety protocols need to be. Otherwise you get a situation where people are killed.

There is an anecdote that someone once asked the Brisker Rov what the charedi rabbinic leadership would do if they had the opportunity to run the country. The Brisker Rov replied, "When we are faced with the halachic question of agunah, we must look into the Shulchan Aruch and its commentaries, the responsa of the Chasam Sofer and the like. But with regard to running the country, we have no precedent to study, not even a single paragraph. Even if I were the prime minister, and HaRav Yechezkel Abramsky the foreign minister, with Torah leaders serving as all the other ministers, we couldn't handle these matters."

The Brisker Rav gave an honest answer. They wouldn’t have any idea how to handle such matters, because they didn’t have to think about any of the issues involved in running the country. After all, there weren’t many charedim in existence at the time. They just had to think about how to rebuild their tiny community.

You feel that some people should be solely dedicated to Torah and not serve in the army or work and receive financial subsidies and benefits for doing so? As long as there’s only a few hundred such people, it doesn’t make much of a difference. But if the numbers grow, then you need to start thinking about how many that should be. 2% of the country? 10%? 30%? 50%? And what will be the effect on the rest of the population? The charedi leadership doesn’t even think about such things.

If you’re a community of a few thousand, you can afford to have a lot of people in learning and live off welfare and avoid army service. If you’re a community of over one million and rapidly growing - fifteen percent of the country and soon to be a third - you can’t.

In exile, we only had to think about avodas Hashem on a very small scale. The mitzvot of parashat Shoftim were interesting but not ones that we had to think about too much. Now that we have sovereignty, we need to take the Torah much more seriously.

For an example of rabbinic leadership which takes Parashat Shoftim seriously, see Rav Eliezer Melamed’s volume on Ha-Am VeHaAretz, available to read for free online here. This is not to say that his approach is the only legitimate approach. The point is that he is thinking about and addressing the large-scale issues. Whereas in the charedi world, nobody knows what the plan is for large-scale charedi society, and nobody in the leadership is even talking about it. They’re probably not even thinking about it - in fact, Rav Chaim Kanievsky allegedly said that it’s forbidden to think about i!

The national mitzvot of the Torah are not meant to be just casually learned, they are meant to be seriously contemplated and to be lived. We ignore that at our peril.

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