You're Not a Fool

Did you fall for an April Fool's Day prank?

The best April Fool’s Day prank is one that is just plausible enough to actually fool many people, but which others will recognize as a prank. My personal preference is to also ensure that the prank involved actually has a message, and it’s even better if that message is delivered by the very fact of it being a prank.

This is what I set out to accomplish with my previous post, and I hope that I was successful (and I apologize if I wasn’t). Allow me to explain.

The amazing thing is that the prank part was actually less extreme than the things that they actually say. The very first part of the post was absolutely true, and I included a link to the original article for verification. Rabbi Tzvi Friedman, leader of the Yerushalmi Peleg movement really did say that he would prefer his grandchildren to eat pork or be murdered by Hamas rather than draft into the IDF. That’s what is genuinely unbelievable, and yet that’s the part which is actually true!

Did he really mean it? I honestly have no idea. I don’t know if he even knows whether or not he really means it. But since it was said as part of a serious conversation, we can take him at his word. (And the picture of a demonstrating charedi student with a sign saying that “we will die rather than draft” is one of many such genuine photos.) And none of the fake stuff that I mentioned is anywhere near as extreme as what he said.

While the Peleg Rav represents the most extreme faction, he was not condemned by mainstream charedim. And Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch himself spoke about “mesirus nefesh,” while the Sefardic Chief Rabbi spoke about the entire charedi community abandoning Israel. (There’s a new even more outrageous claim, about how it would be best to dismantle the State of Israel if that could be done without loss of life, which I will address in a future post.)

The charedi leadership, along with many charedim, have no problem with the transgression of certain halachic prohibitions in order to avoid the greater evil of army service. After all, they are generally accepting of young men lying and claiming that Torasam Umnasam even when they are not actually in yeshiva. And there are those who fake mental illness in order to avoid army service.

Historically, there were Jews who self-mutilated in order to avoid being conscripted into the Czar’s army. Of course, that was a twenty-year draft that was likely a death sentence. But nevertheless, according to Rav Zevin, there were still plenty of chassidim who drafted. And yet most charedim today seem to regard drafting into the IDF as being as bad as, or even worse than, drafting into the Czar’s army. After all, if it’s better to die rather than draft, it’s certainly better to self-mutilate.

Thus, the reason that so many people fell for the prank reveals the utter outrageousness of some of the statements made by senior rabbinic figures in the charedi world. If you’re going to use crazy language, then you can expect that people will believe that you are capable of crazy things.

(I’d be curious to know whether people think that Rabbi Friedman really meant what he said.)