On June 25, a unanimous Israeli Supreme Court ruled that there is no legal justification for the country’s longstanding military exemption given to ultra-Orthodox religious students, and the military was ordered to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.
Although the court did not set a timeline for drafting the more than 60,000 draft-age religious students, it ordered the suspension of millions of dollars in government subsidies to ultra-Orthodox yeshivas that support draft-age students who refuse orders of conscription.
Military service in Israel is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women. The exemption for the ultra-Orthodox has long been a cause for resentment.
That resentment morphed into anger as the Gaza war forced the military to call up more than 350,000 reservists, with tens of thousands of them serving multiple tours. Hundreds of those soldiers have been killed in battle. As noted by the court, “These days, in the midst of a difficult war, the burden of that inequality is more acute than ever — and requires the advancement of a sustainable solution to this issue.”
Reactions from Haredi leaders were predictable. They decried the claimed victimization of the ultra-Orthodox community and its way of life and saw the court’s order as “a sword hanging over the study hall.” And they accused the military and the courts of “hating those who study Torah” and characterized the ruling as a “declaration of war on the
Torah world.”
Senior Haredi politicians scrambled to retain their power in the right-wing coalition government’s leadership while opposing the majority of other coalition members who support the court’s ruling. And a group of senior Haredi rabbis was dispatched to the United States to raise $100 million to cover anticipated institutional shortfalls for yeshivas that have promised to support draft dodgers.
The Haredi narrative in opposition to the Supreme Court ruling is disturbing. It seeks to portray the ruling as an attack on Torah study rather than an effort to rectify the imbalance of communal rights and responsibilities for a segment of Israel’s population that is taking full advantage of their rights as citizens without fulfilling commensurate obligations applicable to all other citizens.
And nothing in the court’s opinion or the overwhelming popular support of more than 70% of Israelis for the removal of Haredi military exemption says anything about cutting off the people of Israel from studying Torah, closing yeshivas or otherwise seeking to abolish the community of Torah scholars in Israel.
Neither the court nor most public expression on the issue demeans or disrespects the study of Torah by those who choose to do so. They simply demand that all eligible citizens of Israel share in the collective national burden of the defense of the Jewish homeland rather than be exempt from service and demanding subsidies for doing so.
We applaud the court ruling. And we encourage our ultra-Orthodox brothers to pursue their interest in Torah study before, during and after fulfillment of their legal obligation of military or national service just as has been done by the Hesder yeshiva program participants in Israel for the past 50 years.
