For the first time in many years, no haredi parties are represented in the government coalition. This has led, once again, to new discussions about the exemption of haredi men from serving in the Israeli Army, especially since the Supreme Court has ruled that the government must issue new legislation on this sensitive topic.
While the government seems rightly more focused on integrating haredi citizens into the workforce, it will remain hard to avoid the draft issue as haredim continue to represent the largest growing sector of Israeli youth.
The Torah speaks very harshly of groups of people who attempt to evade national service. When the tribes of Reuben and Gad requested to settle on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, before the Israelites began their conquest of the Land of Israel, Moses exclaimed, “Are your brothers to go to war while you stay here?” (Numbers 32:6) Moses ultimately consented to their request, but only after those tribes pledged to join their brethren in battle.
The Torah exempted the tender-hearted and recent home-builders from serving in battle (Deuteronomy 20:5-8). The Talmud, however, asserted that these exemptions only applied for optional wars intended to expand Israel’s borders, but not for mandatory wars (milhemet mitzvah) which are necessary to conquer the land or defend Israel against its enemies. As the Mishna states, “Regarding an obligatory war, all go out, even the groom from his chamber and the bride from the canopy.”
Following the loss of national sovereignty, Jews were rarely drafted into the army. This changed after emancipation. As Profs. Derek Penslar and Judith Bleich have documented, the phenomenon of Jews serving in non-Jewish armies greatly divided rabbinic scholars. Some figures, including German scholars Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) and Moshe Glasner (1856-1924), were enthusiastic supporters of such patriotic service. Other 19th century figures, including Rabbis Samuel Landau and Meir Eisenstadter, expressed serious reservations about the laxities imposed on religious observance as well as the halachic propriety of the aggressive warfare frequently practiced by those armies.
While expressing similar reservations, Rabbi Moses Sofer noted that it was within the rights of governments to “tax” citizens with military service. (Shu’t Hatam Sofer Likutim 6:29) If quotas were imposed upon the Jewish community, he insisted on using a lottery to choose draftees, with no distinction made between observant and non-observant Jews. However, citing Talmudic-era exemptions of scholars toward taxes for municipal fortifications, he argued that rabbinic students and clergy were exempt from military service, a sentiment found in many cultures, including his own.
THE NOTION that spiritual leaders are exempt from warfare might have biblical support in the exclusion of the tribe of Levi from the military census. Maimonides, in noting the unique role of the Levites as spiritual leaders (“the Lord’s corps”) who lived amongst all the other tribes, asserts that they did not go to war, even as the Talmud never mentions such an exemption. Maimonides further adds, “Any person throughout the world whose spirit has uplifted him... to stand before God, to serve Him... and has cast aside the many considerations that men have sought” will share the same lot as the Levites.
Based on these sentiments, Rabbi Yehiel M. Tukichinsky (d. 1955) and other rabbinic figures active at the time of Israel’s founding asserted that dedicated rabbinic students should be excused from military service, especially since their studies provided central spiritual support for the national cause.
This thesis, however, was rejected by other leading rabbis who stressed that defending Israel’s inhabitants is a positive commandment that allows for no broad exemptions. They noted that Maimonides’s statement was a homiletic exhortation for spiritual excellence which also included non-Jews (“any person throughout the world”) and that he never mentioned such an exemption for Levites or others when he codified the laws of war.
They also argued that the historic exemption from certain tax payments does not mean that scholars should sit aside and not protect their homeland and brethren. As Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin wrote to other rabbinic leaders during Israel’s War of Independence, “It is your obligation to encourage young and healthy scholars to fight. Will you send your brothers to war, and yourselves sit at home?”
Some have retorted that even religious-Zionist figures like Rabbi Isaac Herzog, while generally encouraging enlistment as a great mitzvah, supported the exemption of yeshiva students during the state’s earliest years. Yet this was at a time when yeshiva study desperately needed resuscitation after the Holocaust, and the exemption applied to 400 students. It is hard to apply such a ruling in an era when a growing percentage of the draft-age population claim exemptions and Torah study flourishes, including in many yeshivot dedicated to producing students who will also serve as soldiers.
Some historians have further argued that even the legendary ultra-Orthodox leader, Rabbi Abraham Karelitz, who lobbied David Ben-Gurion for yeshiva exemptions, did not believe that the discharge should be applied to every haredi Jew, perhaps out of fear that widespread abuse would ultimately lead to this privilege being revoked from those who truly learn with vigor.
Of course, Torah study represents an important cultural value, and the state should be saluted for creating different types of arrangements that allow students to flourish as soldiers and scholars. But no justification exists in Halacha (Jewish law) to issue blanket exemptions to anyone who simply claims that they desire to exclusively learn Torah.
We can be hopeful that a new generation of haredi leadership will recognize the gravity of this non-halachic practice.
The writer is a presidential scholar at Bar-Ilan University Law School and the author of A Guide to the Complex: Contemporary Halakhic Debates. He directs the Tikvah Overseas Students Institute.