Enlisting Orthodoxy

This past Sunday, Israel’s defense ministry delivered one thousand draft notices to Haredi men, with two thousand more to follow soon. The ministry is carrying out the attorney general’s interpretation of the High Court ruling against army exemptions for Haredi yeshiva students, who numbered some 66,000 in 2023. Haredi leaders panned the ruling. The former Sephardi chief rabbi instructed students to disobey their draft orders. Haredi demonstrators carried signs declaring that they would rather die than enlist, and protests in Jerusalem turned violent.

Refusing to supply the IDF’s wartime manpower needs has cost the Haredim sympathy and allies. Two out of three Jewish Israelis favor abolishing the Haredi exemption entirely. So do many prominent religious Zionists, whose children have been fighting Hamas while Haredi youths sit and study. This spring, I went to a neighborhood disputation on the issue. The religious arguments made were familiar, but the debate’s intensity––and the fact that it took place at all––show how isolated the Haredim have become even, or especially, from their Zionist comrades in traditional faith and observance.

The talk was led by Rabbi Yehoshua Eichenstein, a prominent Haredi figure who runs a local boys’ school called Yeshivas Yad Aharon. Eichenstein’s neighbors are almost all religious Zionists, including many learned veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces. Eichenstein had offered to explain why the young men of his own community were right to stay in yeshiva while Israel was at war. The offer was unusual. Though Haredim have long supported rightwing governments that promise to preserve the exemption, few Haredi leaders have attempted to persuade the non-Haredi public of their point of view.

At the debate, dressed in the familiar long black coat, black hat, and white shirt of a Haredi Rosh Yeshiva, Eichenstein sits in front of his colorfully and casually dressed audience, but this shiur-style arrangement accents just one of his roles this evening. Eichenstein is a teacher speaking to men young enough to have been his students. He may know classic Jewish texts better than they do, but they are also equal citizens of a democracy, in which the political consequences of religion depend not on rabbinic stature but on votes.

The organizer is an eager thirty-something British kollel student. He calls the gathering to order and congratulates the attendees for their ecumenism: “It’s good for Haredim and religious nationalists to interact,” he says. Eichenstein corrects him: “I don’t come from a Haredi perspective, but from a Torah perspective,” which has an authoritarian ring to it, but may (also) be an honest challenge to the religious audience––to explain why, if the Haredim are wrong, they are wrong on terms that all religious Jews share.

God, Eichenstein says, has a special providence for Israel, which Israel’s fidelity to God (and what shows fidelity like Torah study?) can make better or worse. No one dissents until an excitable middle-aged man in a red shirt demands “but why is this relevant to today?” Well, Eichenstein says, because the moment you believe the Jews and their state and their army are all subject to God’s providence, and that providence is something we can and ought to influence for the better . . .

“But it’s not true!” the same man exclaims, “I’m sorry, it’s just not true. Of course, everything is done by miracles. But the miracles are God’s. We must operate according to the natural way of things,” he says, employing a rabbinic phrase. “But the moment you admit that we need the merit of Torah for miracles,” Eichenstein says, and then falters . . . “but we don’t know exactly how it works.” Someone notes that this celestial ignorance cuts against Eichenstein, leaving him reliant on the mysterious. Exactly what level of gross domestic Torah study expedites (or delays) the deliverance of the Jews?

“All this discussion,” the excitable man interjects, “what is its connection to a simple question: whether––not whether, how––we will get yeshiva students to perform the simple mitzvah of serving in the army?”

One point of contention between Eichenstein and his audience is the relation between two sections of Maimonides’s Code. In his Laws of Kings and Wars, Maimonides distinguishes a milchemet reshut––what The Washington Post would call a war of choice––from a milchemet mitzvah, waged for the survival of the Jewish polity. A milchemet reshut starts with the people of Israel assembling for battle. Anyone who’s recently betrothed a woman or planted a vineyard or built a house is excused from military service. But no exemptions are issued for wars of necessity, and a man to my left bellows the mishnaic dictum that Maimonides cites: “everyone goes, even a groom from his chamber and a bride from her canopy.”

But, Eichenstein argues, full-time Torah scholars are to be understood as voluntary members of the Tribe of Levi, dedicated fully to the spiritual life. And in Laws of Jubilee Maimonides seems to let Levites off from army service: “they were separated from the ways of the world and did not assemble for war like the rest of Israel.” Eichentstein reads this passage broadly, exempting scholars from all wars. But a man to my left looks up from a laptop screen cluttered with textual excerpts––“we could raise six or seven objections to your interpretation of Maimonides.”

The central objection is that when Maimonides says “everyone goes” to fight in wars of necessity, he really does seem to mean everyone. The Haredim must argue that Maimonides means only everyone at the initial battle assembly for a war of choice, which excludes dedicated Torah scholars. The problem is that Maimonides (and the mishnah) imagined brides fighting in wars of necessity, while there is no evidence that he (or any other authority) thought that women need to fight in wars of choice. It would be quite an irony if Haredim, who are always insisting on traditional gender roles, proposed that all women had broader military obligations than some men. If the Haredim are to avoid this awkward (and textually unsupportable) view, they must concede that the emergency army was not just the regular army minus the exempted, but included all adults of both sexes and whatever scholarly devotion.

Most Israelis think the Jewish state is now fighting a war of necessity––as an older gentleman plaintively asks Eichenstsein, “is any catastrophe greater than what we just suffered?” As a matter of numbers, a few very bright young Talmud scholars aren’t so important to the IDF. But what about the majority of Haredi students, whose commitments to full-time Torah study are––as everyone including Eichenstein admit––less than Levitical?

Rabbi Eichenstein protests that any Haredi boy who can withstand the secular temptations of army life should study Torah full-time, while anyone who cannot must be kept out of the army for the sake of their soul. One man objects that this argument fails on narrowly religious grounds: “Does the fear of violating Shabbat in the army permit you to stand idly by while your brother bleeds?” A second man generalizes the point––“where is it written,” he asks, “that someone who will falter spiritually while performing a mitzvah is excused from performing that mitzvah?”

Eichenstein says the question is to be answered through Tractate Shabbat’s discussion of baking. Baking bread on Shabbat is biblically prohibited. The rabbis, as they often do, make it harder to violate a biblical prohibition by enacting one of their own: they prohibit even removing dough from the oven on Shabbat (which makes sense: no one would put something in the oven to bake if they couldn’t take it out). But the Talmud poses a hypothetical: suppose that you happen to put some dough into an oven on Shabbat. Are you permitted to remove the dough to prevent it from baking? After a little pilpul and a digression or two, the Talmud concludes that you may remove the dough. And so it seems the Talmud authorizes the violation of one prohibition to avoid the violation of a second prohibition. Analogously, Eichenstein believes, yeshiva students may stay out of the army—even if it is a mitzvah to join—to avoid the sins they may be tempted to commit during their service.

But I think the analogy between baking on Shabbat and fighting a necessary war is not apt. People do not sin the way dough rises. Soldiers sin––anyone sins––because they freely give into temptation. But temptation can be freely overcome. Staying out of the army does not avoid the risk of sin, but only relocates it to some other part of life with temptations of its own.

The man in the red shirt is tired of Eichenstein’s evasions. “Let’s leave the Shababnikim out of the army,” he says, using the slang for lazy religious men popularized by the TV series of the same name. “I want to recruit the very best of the Haredi students, the ones who can spiritually cope in the army.” “No not them,” Eichenstein says, “their learning supports the whole world,” he says citing the famous second mishna of Pirkei Avot. “It can’t work.”

“Well, here is how it works in our yeshivas,” replies Eichenstein’s interlocutor. “The spiritually strong go. They are the best soldiers, they are the best scholars––all of it, all at once.” A forgivable exaggeration: Zionist yeshivas are not usually led by veterans of Sayeret Matkal and Shayetet 13, but they are often led by combat veterans. There is a model of spiritual and martial excellence available to the Haredim if they want it.

Eichenstein does not want it. He retreats. Great rabbis support the Haredi view, he says––the early 20^th century sage Avraham Karelitz (known as the Chazon Ish), the recently deceased Chaim Kanievsky. . . . Surely religious Zionists can just agree to disagree. “These and these are the words of the living God,” Eichenstein insists, invoking the pluralistic voice of Heaven which, the Mishnah relates, gave legitimacy to both sides of an argument between Hillel and Shammai. A younger audience member replies that such appeals for tolerance just aren’t enough anymore. Why not? “Because we have the votes.” God did gave a measure of legitimacy to Shammai’s point of view, but there still must be one law for all of Israel, and in the ancient Sanhedrin as in the Knesset, the majority rules.

The organizer ended the hour-long disputation by announcing evening prayers. The man leading the service finished his amidah in five or six minutes, along with almost everyone else. From a few feet away, I could read Eichenstein’s enormous siddur, and he was only halfway done. Everyone waited quietly, watched Eichenstein take his concluding three steps backwards, and responded to the kaddish. Prayers finished with the whole group reciting the psalms that many Israeli synagogues have adopted since the war. A week later I davened in Eichenstein’s yeshiva. He said them there, too.