The Supreme Court of Israel confronts the Haredim

Israel's Supreme Court and its Attorney General have ruled that Israel's Haredim have no more excuses and that eligible young Haredim must serve in the Israel Defense Forces. The Haredim have refused this order and have made it clear that they will not be forcibly conscripted into the Israeli army. So a head on collision has been set up between an irresistible force hitting an immovable object.

On one side is basically modern secular liberal Israeli society that feels that Haredim must serve like everyone else, "equality of the burden" they call it, and on the other side is a traditionalist conservative Haredi mass of citizens that holds that full time Torah, Talmudic and Rabbinic studies and a strict Haredi lifestyle exempts them from military service.

This is part of a greater schism involving all sorts of issues whereby modern secular liberal Westernized Israeli society differs from and is in conflict with the traditionalist religiously conservative Haredim who cling to and practice a strict Torah and Mitzvot-observant lifestyle that places Torah study and stringent adherence to the Mitzvot as both the foundation and the pinnacle of its life's goals.

The Religious Zionists/Chardal sector combines both, zealously learning Torah and keeping mitzvot but considering it a priviilege and a mitzva to protect Jewish lives in a Jewish army. They have built programs such as the hesder yeshiva network which have a built in army service period, before and after which period their students learn in yeshiva. (Note: The war has prevented the boys serving now from returning to learning since October 7th, as there are not enough soldiers to replace them, and causing many of the Religious Zionists to feel anger at the haredim for avoiding the draft).

The haredim, however, feel that there is basically no real reconciliation possible between these two opposite, clashing and at odds secular versus religious lifestyles beyond a live and let live policy that was the original status quo until now, from the time that the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) very wisely agreed to and implemented as Israeli government policy so as to rejuvenate Torah learning after the Holocaust for a few hundred yeshiva boys. Until now, when the number of haredi exemptions increased to tens of thousands, and secular groups lobbied the Supreme Court, suing the Haredim for not serving in the army, the activist court then overturned decades of officially government sanctioned military deferments for young Haredim.

From either the liberal secular (Hiloni) or the religious (Haredi) side it is not a good situation to be in. Even more extreme, many secular Israelis and some of its leaders are virulently anti-Haredi and want to use the issue of army conscription to forcibly socialize young Haredim and turn them into secular Zionist Jews by means of army service. Naturally Haredim see through this and are therefore more emboldened to defy the wishes of secular Israel and of its Supreme Court and activist Attorney General who has set herself up as an independent power that be instructing the Israeli government to immediately conscript a minimum of 3,000 Haredim into the Israeli army.

However, the reality is that Haredim constitute a large faction of the 64 member present Israeli government and they are led by their rabbinical leaders known as Gedolim (great ones) who are in no mood to bow down to the dictates of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General. The rabbis who lead the Haredim in Israel are the final arbiters of life for all Haredim across the board and they will not compromise and go along with the wishes of secular Israeli society, its Supreme Court and the hyper-activist Attorney General, who, it is suspected, really just wants to bring down the right wing government by getting the Haredim to leave it.

Haredim in general despise the Supreme Court especially for meddling in matters that are the domain of serious rabbis and responsible religious authorities, such as cases of recognizing Halakhically valid conversions, conducting marriages and divorces according to Halacha (Jewish Law), or the appointment of religious authorities and councils that are the purview of the various rabbinical and Halakhic establishments in Israel and not of any secular bodies not even the Supreme Court of Israel.

For example, only valid Halakhic religious bodies authorized by senior rabbis and rabbinical groups can appoint Jewish religious judges known as Dayanim and create and run religious courts known as a Batei Din, or individually as a Beth Din, which in turn have the Jewish legal (Halakhic) authority to perform conversions to Judaism, marriages and divorces according to Jewish Law, and the supervision of food certifying that it is 100% kosher. Only a qualified Beth Din (Jewish/Halakhic court of law) can perform the delicate task of converting a gentile into becoming a Jew, certifying the Halakhic legitimacy of a Jewish marriage or divorce, and ensuring that food is truly kosher, something the Supreme Court or the Attorney General or any private secular Israeli citizen or organization cannot do.

Then there are financial penalties against Haredi yeshivas and private Haredi citizens that the Supreme Court and the Attorney General are imposing because the Haredim are refusing to enlist in the Israeli army. This seems draconian since many Haredim pay taxes in the state of Israel and by their very numbers they are a big part of the Israeli economy. It is estimated that there are about 1,300,000 Haredim in Israel, so just if they buy clothing and shoes and spend on food and housing, they are spending hundreds of billions of shekels that all goes into the Israeli economic system. It is illogical and unfair that Haredi tax paying and spending citizens of the state of Israel should lose the pay-back benefits from tax monies they are entitled to by virtue of paying those taxes and enriching the economy of Israel.

There are many things that secular Israelis and their state representatives like the Supreme Court and the Attorney General don't get about Haredim and their society. The first and most important point is that for Haredim to be part of Haredi communities is more like being in an "army" than the way secular Israelis are part of casual secular liberal Israeli life where basically anything goes. From the time Haredi babies are born until the moment they die in old age they are strictly regimented into an exact lifestyle starting from the day a Haredi baby boy is circumcised on the eighth day following his birth until the day he dies and is buried according to exact Halakhic rituals according to the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law) that have remained the same for centuries if not for millennia.

Haredi men all wear the same uniform clothing, basically dressing in white shirts and black outer clothing and black hats and black shoes with an exactness and uniformity that would be the envy of any army seeking to impose a strict dress code as done by Haredim voluntarily. Haredi society is led by its Gedolim, Roshei Yeshiva, Chachamim and Hasidic Rebbes who are the great rabbis and Torah scholars who practice a strict "command and control" system of leadership and social control over all their followers that would be the envy of any strong hands on army.

The educational system of Haredim is pretty much uniform focusing exclusively on Torah, Talmud and Rabbinics from the time its students begin going to school, meaning traditional yeshivas for boys and Beit Yaakov type schools for girls, until the time they leave which for many lasts into adulthood.

The social and family life of Haredim is very standardized and predictable in that they marry at a young age, often starting from eighteen years of age and then immediately proceeding to have babies and raise large families accounting for their huge growth in numbers. Contrary to what many secular Israelis are persuaded into thinking by the anti-Haredi secular media, many married Haredi men do seek employment and wish to support their families. This in spite of not having a serious secular education and not going to college or university.

If one looks at the Haredim living in the United States, where almost one million Haredim live, their communities are basically very wealthy with many Haredim and Hasidim being in the retail and wholesale business world, real estate sales, renting and construction, manufacturing, the import and export business, entrepreneurship, the kosher food sector which caters to a huge market, and many other opportunities that they seek out and find. The Haredi educational system that is based on the study of Talmud and rabbinic texts educates them in the intricacies of logical, dynamic and dialectical thinking.

In short, Haredi society is highly centralized, organized to the last detail, extremely cohesive and strongly united and will absolutely not submit to outside social, judicial and governmental pressures that seek to break their communities' strong Torah-observant foundations that they have painstakingly built up over many centuries. They do not and will not buckle to threats and will not submit to decrees and laws that seek to break and change the set patterns and rules by which their societies function and thrive.

The Haredim cannot be coerced to do what they do not want to do by the Supreme Court or by anyone else.

Conscription as a form of persecution and punishing yeshivas by withholding funds from them for not supporting conscription into the Israeli army will only toughen and radicalize the Haredim into stronger resistance to defy the attempts to conscript them. Since they cannot run away from Israel, the Haredim will march in the streets of Israel in ever greater numbers with more aggressive civil disobedience. The Supreme Court should have foreseen this, that all hell will eventually break loose on the streets of Israel where Haredim live if a political resolution to the crisis is not found soon. Then, what if Israeli Haredi Jews refuse to pay taxes to the Israeli tax authorities in an Israeli version of "no taxation without representation"? That could also happen as Haredim start suffering from prejudicial government financial cutbacks mandated by their refusal to serve in the Israeli army

While the better-known story of secular Jewish History is on the surface taken as the one and only story of what happened to the Jews, the history of Haredi Jews and Haredi Judaism is not so well known and some knowledge about it is needed to understand some of the underlying issues of the clash of cultures between Hilonim (secular Jews) and Haredim. While the two world wars were on the go and massive armies were battling it out, the Jews now known as Haredim were also fighting a spiritual war for their survival against the dislocation, threats and dangers caused by both the real wars between nations and cultural warfare against religious Jews by trying to uproot Orthodox Judaism. There had already been a long-term struggle in Europe between the proponents of the secular Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and the followers of strict Halakha by ultra-Orthodox Jews today known as Haredim ("those who fear [God]").

If one digs deeper into modern Jewish History one discovers that great traditionalist Haredi rabbis and the yeshivas and communities they headed successfully resisted and fought against the influence, inroads and lifestyle of the modern Haskalah movement adopted by secular Jews. The European Haredi leaders and many of their devout followers eventually moved to both Israel and America especially after the Second World War (1939–1945) and the Holocaust and established what are today huge booming Haredi communities in both Israel and America. It is these same Haredi communities that are defying modern inroads into their communities by secular influences and in Israel are refusing to serve in the Israeli army seen as an agent of unwelcome forcible change and a continuation of the Haskalah revolution that sought to modernize, secularize and assimilate Jews away from their old traditional Torah and Mitzvot-observant Halakhic lifestyle the way that Haredim practice it.

Rabbi Yitschak Rudominwas born to Holocaust survivor parents in Israel, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College–Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach – Kiruv Rechokim. He was the Director of the Belzer Chasidim's Sinai Heritage Center of Manhattan 1988–1995, a Trustee of AJOP, 1994–1997 and founder of American Friends of South African Jewish Education 1995–2015.

He is also a docent and tour guide at The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Downtown Manhattan, New York and the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at [email protected].

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