What Moses Would Ask the Knesset: Parshat Matot–Masei and the Haredi Draft Bill

The bill now before the Knesset that would elevate Torah study into Basic Law and effectively treat it as a substitute for traditional sherut leumi or military service is being sold as a victory for Jewish values. It is not. It is a betrayal of them. There are many arguments against this legislation. There are legal arguments, economic arguments, security arguments, and political arguments. But this week’s Torah reading, Matot–Masei offers a simpler and more devastating one.

“Shall your brothers go to war while you stay here?” (Numbers 32:6).

When the tribes of Reuven and Gad ask to settle east of the Jordan rather than cross into the land with the rest of Israel, Moses responds with a question that should ring through the Knesset chamber: “Shall your brothers go to war while you stay here?” (Numbers 32:6).

That is not only a rebuke to two tribes in the wilderness. It is one of the Torah’s clearest statements about shared obligation. Reuven and Gad have legitimate needs. Their request is practical and rational. Moses does not deny that. What he refuses to accept is the idea that one group can secure its own future while others shoulder the burden of collective struggle.

That is why the proposed Basic Law: Torah Study is not only bad policy, it is bad Torah.

The bill, now moving through the Knesset after a first reading, would declare Torah study a foundational value of the State of Israel. That language might sound noble, but it is not appearing in a vacuum. It is appearing in the middle of Israel’s conscription crisis, after the High Court ordered the state to stop relying on blanket arrangements to exempt Haredi (Ultra Orthodox) yeshiva students from service, and in the middle of a war that has sent reservists back again and again to the front. Critics argue that the bill would entrench inequality in bearing the burden of service by giving legal cover to the claim that long-term yeshiva study should function as a parallel contribution to the state rather than requiring military or other sherut leumi.

In a moment like this, it is simply untenable for an entire sector, tens of thousands of young Haredi men, to take no meaningful part in defending the security of the state. 

What Israel needs right now are combat soldiers, not expanded categories of “civilian” or “national” service. Israel is nearly three years into this war, and the military’s Chief of Staff has said repeatedly that the army is short on combat troops. In a moment like this, it is simply untenable for an entire sector, tens of thousands of young Haredi men, to take no meaningful part in defending the security of the state. 

As an Orthodox woman who has spent years immersed in Torah study, I do not come to this argument from outside the beit midrash. I come to it as someone who reveres Torah and knows its power to shape a people. I also come to it as a mother of children who made aliyah and serve in the IDF, and who have chosen to bind their adult lives to the fate and defense of the Jewish state. For me, this debate is not abstract. It lives in the tension between the Torah I love and the way Torah is being invoked to excuse one sector from burdens that other Israeli families are carrying in blood, fear, and sacrifice. 

To be clear: Torah study is a supreme Jewish value. It is neither ornamental nor extracurricular.

To be clear: Torah study is a supreme Jewish value. It is neither ornamental nor extracurricular. It is one of the great sustaining practices of Jewish civilization. The question is not whether Torah matters to the Jewish state. The question is whether Torah can be invoked to excuse one population from the obligations everyone else is expected to bear, especially in a time of war. From within Torah itself, the answer should be no.

Moses does not tell Reuven and Gad that their families or livelihoods do not matter. He tells them that those concerns do not exempt them from responsibility to the people as a whole. They may return to their homes and build their lives where they wish, but only after they cross over with their brothers and fight until the land is secured for all (Numbers 32:20–22). Personal priorities do not erase collective obligation. Home comes after responsibility.

The current bill proposes the opposite moral order. It takes Torah, our language of covenant, peoplehood, and obligation and uses it to sanctify withdrawal from the burdens of national life. It asks the rest of Israeli society to accept a theology of unequal sacrifice: one public expected to serve, bury, evacuate, and rebuild, and another told that its highest contribution is to remain in the study hall.

Its defenders will say that Torah protects the Jewish people no less than tanks do. Some will invoke the ancient idea that Torah learning is itself a form of spiritual defense. I do not dismiss the seriousness of that claim, nor the religious world that produced it. But there is a profound difference between honoring Torah study and converting it into a blanket civic exemption for tens of thousands of men in a sovereign Jewish state whose citizens are fighting, bleeding, evacuating, burying, and rebuilding in real time.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, writing about Reuven and Gad, noted that Moses heard in their request an echo of the sin of the spies: the weakening of national morale and the retreat from shared mission. The danger was not only that some people would stay behind while others crossed the Jordan. It was that their withdrawal would teach the nation that the collective task was optional. That is exactly the danger here. A law that elevates Torah study into a formal substitute for service does not merely solve a coalition problem. It sends a devastating moral message to the rest of Israeli society: that there are Jews whose obligation to the collective can be fulfilled in private while others perform it in public, in uniform, and at grave personal cost. That is what makes the current bill not only bad policy but a betrayal of the Torah it claims to honor.

A Jewish state may honor Torah study. It may fund yeshivot, celebrate scholarship, and insist that Torah is part of the moral and spiritual architecture of national life.

Since October 7, Israel has asked extraordinary things of its citizens. It has asked reservists to leave work and family for months at a time. It has asked parents to send their sons and daughters back into combat. It has asked grieving families to absorb losses that should break a nation. It has asked entire communities to live displaced from their homes. This is precisely the moment when the state should be deepening a culture of shared responsibility, not codifying a theology of withdrawal.

A Jewish state may honor Torah study. It may fund yeshivot, celebrate scholarship, and insist that Torah is part of the moral and spiritual architecture of national life. But it cannot use Torah to excuse mass nonparticipation in the burdens of national defense and then call that arrangement a Jewish value. Haredi men should never have been categorically exempt from service; that moral failure did not begin on October 7. But the obscenity of this arrangement has become even harder to defend since then, as reservists cycle through their fifth or sixth round of duty and parents bury children who died defending a state that is apparently prepared to tell other parents that their sons’ highest contribution is to remain in the study hall. 

“Shall your brothers go to war while you stay here?” is not a slogan. It is an accusation. And the bill before the Knesset has no honest answer to it.