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| Charedi Yeshiva students defer the draft at enlistment center (VIN) |
This is an issue that will not only NOT go away, it has increased in intensity on both sides since the war with Hamas began. Charedi politicians insist that those exemptions be maintained while the rest of the country is increasingly agitated by it.
Secular and non Charedi religious Jews are risking and sacrificing their lives while Charedim sit out the war in relative peace and security. This has caused immeasurable damage to the relationship between Charedim and the rest of Israel. The anger and frustration of families whose sons and daughters serving their country in a time of war while others sit and watch from a distance cannot be overstated. If things remain as they are now, I fear there will never be a reconciliation between Charedim and the rest of Israel. That would be tragic.
I have long ago argued in favor of eliminating wholesale exemptions from army service. There is no way to justify that. Despite the best efforts of Charedi politicians and leaders to do so. How strong is their opposition? To cite just one example of that:
Chief Sephardic Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef warned Saturday that ultra-Orthodox Jews will leave Israel en masse if the government ends exemptions of mandatory military enlistment enjoyed by the community.
“If they force us to go to the army, we’ll all move abroad,” Yosef said during a weekly lecture. “We’ll buy a ticket… We’ll go there.”
But all is not lost. There has been a bit of a thaw in Charedi opposition to army service as noted in several of my posts. For example see here and here. But not without fierce opposition to those views. Which is why there is a stalemate in how to resolve this issue.
There is however a fairly large segment of Charedim that the Charedi leaders might agree should be required to serve in some capacity. As reported recently in the Forward:
There are chairs in the stacks and in quiet corners of this city’s libraries where some young Haredi men spend days on end, skipping out on their required Torah study with access to free Wi-Fi and little chance that anyone they know will spot them…
The Jerusalem-based Haredi Institute for Public Affairs says those “lost boys,” as they’re sometimes called, make up at 15% to 20% of the estimated 66,000 Haredi Jewish men of draft age (between 18 and 26). The Israel Democracy Institute, a research group that has spent years studying the Haredi exemption, puts the number between 30% and 40%, or more than 20,000.
There are apparently a lot of Charedim exempt that shouldn’t be. If I recall correctly the most venerated Charedi sage of his time, Rav Eliezar Mann Shach, was quoted saying that if a Charedi student wastes his time in the Yeshiva, he should sent to IDF. I don’t know... maybe this was just an empty threat in order to get the lackadaisical students to stop wasting their time. But I think he probably meant it. If they weren’t learning he did not want to see them taking up space in his Bies HaMedrash.
I have also spoken to a respcted Charedi Magid Shiur and Posek who confided in me that he too believes that there were many Yeshiva students wasting their time that shouldn’t be there.
Let us combine the above 2 ‘Lost Boy’ estimates and say that 25% of them are in that category. That would mean that the IDF could in theory get a boost of about 16,500 new recruits that would be immediately available for army service.
It’s true that they couldn’t possibly trained quickly enough to serve in combat. But they would surely lighten the burden of all those being forced to serve in non combat capacity for longer and in greater number than usual because of the war.
25% may not be as equitable a solution as I would like. I think that more than 25% of the Charedi student body should be required to serve. Determined by their level of Torah study. Those whose Torah study is mediocre should also be subject to the draft. That would be more equitable. But even if it is only 25% that would be a major improvement that would ease the burden on the rest of Israelis that are currently serving at a time of war..
Sad to say that this option doesn’t seem to be considered by Charedi politicians. Which makes them their own worst enemy. They may ‘win this battle but lose the war’. If they quit the government, it is highly unlikely they will get anywhere near the kind of power they have now. As noted at VIN:
Even though the war in Israel has done little to threaten Netanyahu’s government (which was even strengthened by the entry of some opposition leaders), the fiasco regarding the new draft law could spell the end of the current government…
A nocturnal meeting on Tuesday night between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and representatives of United Torah Judaism and Shas, the coalition’s two charedi parties, over the terms of the new law ended without any operative agreement...
UTJ reportedly threatened to leave the Netanyahu-led coalition should the proposal include annual recruitment targets for yeshiva students and financial penalties for charedi educational institutions that don’t meet those quotas…
This week, dozens of commanders in the IDF reserves sent a letter to Netanyahu, Gallant and other senior officials warning that the current proposal for the draft bill will deepen inequality and harm national security…
The commanders also warned that beyond the feeling of inequality, there were concerns that under the new proposal, “the reserve system will not be able to meet its requirements, to the point of difficulty in manning operations.”
All this while Charedi Yeshiva and Kollel students sit an watch this from the safety of the Beis HaMedrash.
The common sense compromise would be to draft these ‘Lost Boys’. That would give both sides what they want. Or at east what they need. The IDF would have an influx of recruits to lighten the burden of those currently serving. and the Charedi world would maintain exemptions for 75% of their students while being true to the words of Rav Shach who basically OK’d this compromise in spirit if not in actuality.
It’s not to late for common sense to prevail. But it seems that common sense has left the building a long time ago.