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| Charedi leader, R' Moshe Hillel Hirsch |
The issue of Charedim serving in the military has not gone away. That issue is what’s driving Charedi leaders to seek over a hundred million philanthropic dollars from American Jewry. Their claim that the government is executing a war against the Torah is so obviously false, that I am shocked that anyone believes it. The well known Hesder Yeshiva program is alive and fully funded. That should certainly put that argument to rest.
That Charedi leaders in Israel are making these false charges and do not acknowledge Hesder is misleading in the extreme.
But serving in the IDF has an even greater concern for the Charedi world. This was spelled out in great detail by Rav Tamir Granot in opinion piece translated in Tradition Online Rav Granot a Rosh HaYeshiva in Tel Aviv who lost a son in the early days of the Hamas war. The following is the pertinent excerpt that demonstrates this concern:
R. Moshe Maya, one of the leading Sephardic rabbis and a former Knesset member for Shas (said) “There is no difference between those who study and those who don’t, conscription is forbidden for everyone! Conscription is worse than desecration of Shabbat.”
Let’s listen for a moment deeply and respectfully, without getting angry, to the content of his words, within his narrative. “The cat is out of the bag,” we imagine R. Maya to be saying. “Torah study is not the reason for the demand for the exemption.
The world of the Torah protects our young men from the evil cultural spirits around them, so all of them are prohibited from enlisting. If a Haredi fellow who has lived his whole life in a protected environment enlists in the big, bad, secular army, which is bathed in foreign culture, sexual immodesty, heresy, materialism, there is a good chance that he won’t last, and will completely drop out of the religious world.” That’s why R. Maya thinks it’s worse than desecrating Shabbat.
This is apparently what Charedi leaders are most afraid of. But their solution of isolating themselves from the rest of the world allows the to live in an unrealistic bubble of ‘religious purity’. Which they believe cannot be maintained outside of that bubble. If they are forced to join the army they will surely succumb to the evil temptations of the real world.
Rav Granot feels that the solution to the draft issue is to allay those fears by creating an army environment that will essentially be a bubble similar to the one they left. Thereby allaying the fears of the Charedi leadership. This will allow these leaders to change their minds about army service. At least for some of their young.
My problem with this solution is twofold.
Frist. I thought that such an environment already existed in what is commonly called Nachal Charedi. While it might be too small to accommodate the numbers the IDF needs to satisfy their shortfall, the basic structure is already there. That can surely be expanded to accommodate more Charedi recruits.
Charedim will retort that there is another problem with Nachal Charedi. Which is that those units do not fully accommodate Charedi needs. And that their commanders are not really all that cooperative. But that too can be fixed. Perhaps there are some commanders that don't cooperate. But I recall reading that there are commanders that fully support Nachal Charedi and that any shortcomings will be fixed if they are told about them. They want it to see it succeed and will do whatever it takes to get there.
But there is also a problem with an isolationist approach to Judaism. While it may filter out the bad. It also filters out the good. When a community is indoctrinated to see everything on the outside as evil, it can easily increase disease and death in that world. If you don’t trust the outside world, you becomes skeptical of everything in it. Like vaccines for example. As noted by the Jerusalem Post:
Israeli epidemiologists and other public health experts are wringing their hands in fury and disappointment over more-extreme ultra-Orthodox (haredi) and even some secular women who are refusing to vaccinate their toddlers or get vaccinated during pregnancy against potentially deadly pediatric diseases.
As noted, it isn’t only Charedim. But I can’t speak about why ‘some secular women’ are anti-vaxxers. But I think it is fair to say that an isolationist lifestyle based on the wholesale mistrust of the outside world feeds an anti-vaxxer mentality. What ever benefit one gets from being isolated is more than counterweighted by the increase in serious disease and death caused by that isolation.
I am a bit surprised that Rav Granot does not make this point himself by pointing to his very own community that already serves in the IDF. There are many Hesder Yeshivos whose students are not isolated and whose students remain as committed to their Judaism as ever despite being exposed to the outside world. And I’ll bet very few of them are antivaxxers whose children get whooping cough or meningitis because they haven’t been vaccinated.
It is telling that the primary objection to the army is the accusation that it will dilute or even eliminate the Charedi commitment to their Judaism. Those fears may be a self fulfilling prophesy in the sense that without experiencing the outside world they don’t learn how to deal with it effectively.
This is not to say I think they ought to fully imbibe in whatever secular culture has to offer. Of course they shouldn’t. But there are many things in which they could benefit if they carefully choose what to encounter and what not to. They might, for instance, learn a thing or two about the importance of vaccinating their children instead of believing in the conspiracy theories of their isolationist peers.
That being said - better to have isolationist Charedi participation in the IDF than no participation at all.