Calling My Haredi Teachers to Account

My fellow Jews, I stand in unentitled judgment.  I am writing to take religious exception to the Haredi religious exemptions.  First, however, two admissions: one, I’m American and have never served in the IDF.  I hope to make aliyah next year, but I’m hearing-impaired since youth, so we’ll see.  If Tzahal will take me, I’m in.

Second, I am not Haredi, but some of my finest teachers have been, both in the US and during my stays in Israel.  I now wish to speak directly to them.

Friends, the Knesset’s unholy alliance has granted you a reprieve.  You must be dancing in the streets.  My starkest image of you, however, will be of fighting in the streets.  Imagine: Jews fighting fellow Jews for the right to not fight in defense of fellow Jews.  Your ferocity against armed police only heightened the irony.  You people fight like…what’s the word…

Soldiers.

Is that what Ben Gurion had in mind when, at the nation’s founding, he exempted a mere 400 Orthodox Holocaust survivors temporarily in a noble attempt to “preserve the remnant?”

It isn’t.  And you know it.  A community containing 80,000 draft-age “scholars” is hardly a “remnant,” more a metastatic mass that working Israelis fund and feed, knowing their outstretched hands will be bitten.  Ben Gurion’s mitzvah, both in scale and duration, has morphed into something monstrous.

Does that mean you’re monsters?  It doesn’t.  You’ve taught me Torah, Talmud, the wonders of Hebrew.  But now you’re scorning the very lessons I reverentially learned at your feet.  Out of many, I cite a mere four:

First, the existential core: what does it mean to be human?  Hebrew answers with a single word.  “Adam” can mean both the first individual and our species at large.   Note the spelling: aleph, dalet, mem.   The aleph, with its ancient numeric value of one, can represent either the ultimate One or at least our spiritual component.  The other two letters spell dam, meaning blood.

Is this not a linguistic marvel?  The essential duality of human nature is embedded in the word itself!

Friends, are you listening?  Your Israeli compatriots are serving with body and soul.

And you?

Next, the Torah commands us to “choose life.”  In your understanding, does that include defending life?  If a lunatic with a knife charged your wife and children on the street would you grab the lid of a garbage can and block the blade or would you stand aside and pray while he slit their throats?

I think you’d fight, so let’s stay martial and escalate.

The Babylonian Talmud — in an oft-quoted dictum — states: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”  Understand: this is not reactive self-defense (Kamala Harris’s Judaism), it’s rabbinically sanctioned lethal preemption.

Question: would you abide by this?

To sharpen my query, here’s a hypothetical that I very much wish had happened.  Perhaps you’ve heard of Babi Yar, the infamous ravine outside of Kyiv where 34,000 Jews were shot over two days by the Einsatzgruppen (the Nazis’ mobile killing squads) and Ukrainian militias.  This, and other mass shootings, came to be known as the “Holocaust by bullet.”

Now, the hypothetical: suppose you had been a Jew of Kyiv and suppose all of you had been armed.  Would you have shot at your would-be-murderers first, or would you have let your weapons sit cold while the executioners escorted you to the ditch?

I ask in all sincerity.  If you’d have fought in the above scenarios, why won’t you fight for the nation that protects and subsidizes you now?  The answer I hear is that you think Torah study is as essential to the state as F-35s, the Iron Dome and the heroic men and women of the IDF.

Seriously?  Even granting your premise — which I don’t — aren’t there times when “essential” isn’t enough? Did piety protect Europe’s yeshiva world?

And tell it straight: don’t you think you’re superior to the rest of us, that you’re the sole owners of Israel’s “soul franchise” while life and limb are for “lesser Jews” to risk?

If so, that is simply sickening, an abomination.  Yes, some Haredim are now serving, and bless them.  Still, they’re a small minority.

In closing: the Talmud says all Jews are responsible — arevim — for one another.  The root of arevim is ayin, resh, vet.  The first two letters spell er meaning “awake.”  The second and third spell rav, which can mean “teacher/rabbi” but always, in its expanded forms, connotes greatness.

Friends, you were the teachers and I was the student, but perhaps I need to decode the message here:

Hebrew is telling you to wake up.  Greatly.