Which Connection Are We Missing?

Some stunning obliviousness

Do we even feel that we are in galus (exile)? Such is the question I saw posed by a certain person today, who lamented that various Jews enjoy the luxuries of their lifestyle and do not genuinely mourn the absence of Mashiach. He bemoaned that they’re just not connected to our nation’s real situation.

Similarly, former Sephardic Rishon LeTziyon Rav Yitzhak Yosef recently expressed horror at how some US restaurants hire yeshiva students to make siyumim during the Nine Days, so that they can serve meat. Why are they trying to circumvent mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem? Where is their connection?

These are but two examples of the sort of thing that we hear a lot about during the Nine Days. And I find it astonishing.

Surely it’s the height of hypocrisy to protest that people are looking for ways to eat meat and are not sufficiently connected to the suffering of Jews two thousand years ago, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t care about the suffering of Jews right now and you state that charedim should leave Israel rather than ease the burden on the reservists?

Likewise, surely a much more pressing question than "do we feel that we are in galus?" is "do we feel that we are in an active war in which there are hostages and thousands of casualties and which is creating a crushing burden on countless thousands of soldiers and their families?"

And the answer to that question for the rabbinic leaders of the charedi community is certainly in the negative. In nearly two years of war, they have never once demonstrated any concern for those who are involved in it.

Yesterday there was a major charedi rabbinic conference about the draft situation, where they stated that “the pain, the outcry, the exploitation, and the injustice are irrational and unbearable.” You’d think that such a sentence would be describing the hundreds dead, the thousands maimed, the endless thousands suffering PTSD and collapsing businesses and collapsing family life due to their endless service in order to protect everyone in Israel. But no, it was referring to the charedim who haven’t done anything in the war except receive hundreds of millions of dollars to not contribute.

Meanwhile, a group of the most senior charedi rabbis is planning to visit London to raise money for those people in Israel in their “hour of need.” And needless to say, this does not refer to the families of hundreds of killed soldiers, or the thousands of injured soldiers and their families, or the families of the hostages, or the reservists whose parnasa has been destroyed by their leaving their jobs to fight, but rather to the 120,000 yeshiva students and their families who are not affected by the war and who need money because they choose not to get an education and work for a living.

I find it remarkable that people talk about the need to be connected to Jewish national tragedy of 2000 years ago while they do not care one whit about helping with the Jewish national tragedy taking place today.