Matot, מטות

When I was a boy in Brazil in the 1970s, the yellow star was the one thing at the Jewish school that nobody explained, and nobody explained it because there was nothing to explain. What I learned, without anyone saying it aloud, was that the star is not ours. It was designed by other people, who chose the shape, the size, the cloth and the place on the chest, and it was made to humiliate and to set apart. My parents did not lecture anyone about this. That generation rarely spoke of the Shoah aloud, but it passed along something simpler and harder to dismantle, which is that certain images belong to the dead and are not available to the living.

On the 12th of August, on Route 4, several hundred men in black coats sat down on the melting asphalt with the yellow star stitched to the chest and the word haredi printed at its center, chanting that they would sooner die than serve, while a placard clarified, for the slower members of the audience, that dying in the Holocaust would have been preferable to entering a training camp of the Israeli army. Taken literally, and it deserves to be taken literally, the statement means that those men declared a preference for the fate of their own grandfathers over the fate of the neighbors’ sons. They declared it while living on the money of the people who serve. Those who died wearing that star shamed no one. These men shame all of us.

The most revealing moment of that afternoon occurred weeks before it, in a room, when somebody looked at the printed sample and said it was fine. There was a proposal and there was somebody who liked it. They compared shades of yellow to decide which one best evoked Auschwitz, and in that entire room of men who have studied full time since the age of four, not one hand went up. Nothing in that world is done without asking the rabbi, so the question was asked and the answer was given. The man who authorized it is most likely in his eighties, which is to say that he lost people, that he recites their names once a year, and that he had everything required to say no. He said yes.

And here it is worth stating what their own tradition holds, because the argument is not between the religious and the secular but between the Torah and what is being done with it. The Mishnah, in tractate Sotah, distinguishes the optional war from the obligatory one and teaches that in the obligatory war everyone goes out, including the bridegroom from his chamber and the bride from her canopy. Maimonides codifies this in the Laws of Kings, and he is categorical. In an obligatory war nobody is exempt. The deferments in Deuteronomy, for the fearful, for the newly married, for the man who has built a house and not yet lived in it, apply only to the war one chooses to fight. They do not apply when the people are attacked. A war on several fronts, after October of 2023, falls squarely within what the sages defined as obligatory, and none of the codes those men study all their lives lists study among the deferments.

In Numbers, the tribes of Reuben and Gad look at the pasture of Jazer and Gilead, like what they see, and ask Moses to remain on that side of the river, on the grounds that they have a great deal of cattle and the land suits them, and Moses asks whether their brothers shall go to war while they sit there. Note what he does not do. He convenes no committee, he seeks no formula acceptable to all parties, and he makes no inquiry into their culture. The bargain he imposes is the model for everything now under discussion, since the two tribes cross over armed, go ahead of everyone else, and return to the pasture only once every tribe has received its portion. The chapter gives this piece its title and is read aloud in the synagogue once a year in front of the very men who study it with our money, who hear it sitting down, every year, and every year remain seated.

The rest was assembled in two pieces. In July, by sixty-three votes to fifty-two, the Knesset made Torah study a foundational value of the state in a Basic Law. Israel has others, which deal with rights, with institutions and with the nature of the state. None before this one had raised the practice of a single group to that level, and the country that did it has never managed to write a constitution and has never inscribed the word equality there. The following day, by fifty-eight to fifty-four, it froze the arrest, investigation and prosecution of yeshiva students who fail to report, leaving untouched the penalty for any other Israeli who does the same, over the written objection of the chief of staff, who warned that the measure liquidated the principle of an army of everyone at a moment when soldiers are short, and over the objection of the Knesset’s own lawyers, who pointed out that it granted criminal immunity to one group and preserved the penalty for all the others. A value acquires a standing that courts have trouble touching, and ordinary legislation suspends the penalty for anyone who invokes it. Neither text contains the word exemption. Together they manufacture one that nobody had to sign.

Twenty-four hours later the High Court suspended the second law before it could take effect, and the Minister of Communications announced that the authorities were under no obligation to obey the court. On the twenty-seventh of October he will come asking for our vote, and the most uncomfortable piece of information in this text is that he will probably get it, because forty years of accommodation have taught everyone involved that the demands grow, the exemptions widen, and the bill is always sent to the same address. Every arrangement has been presented as the last one. Every one has been followed by a larger claim.

That leaves the word they themselves chose. Persecution presupposes somebody holding power over you, and that community vetoes the formation of any government, has obtained a Basic Law cut to its measure, receives more than half the discretionary money in the budget, and had the star made with materials paid for by the taxpayer, which means that we financed the manufacture of the mark used against the memory of our own dead. There is a name for a society that keeps yielding to those who concede nothing, and the name is not tolerance.

Moses had already told Reuben and Gad what remained to be said, and it stands in the same chapter, three verses on. Your sin will find you out.