The importance of IDF service

The Jewish Star asked our columnist, Rabbi Binny Freedman, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Orayta, just returned from his reserve service in the IDF, to comment on the charedi conflict with conscription to the IDF.

He quoted a sergeant who works in nachal chareidi who said that a “very significant portion of the boys in his battalion arrived to the army not religious.” Freedman said that, “they are the kids the chareidi world does not know what to do with so they let them go to the army.” He noted that “there is a not insignificant portion of kids in the chareidi (for the record I hate this label but am using it for the purposes of our dialogue) world who are way off the derech already. No one knows the stats but it is not the army and certainly not a nachal chareidi army unit environment that is sending kids off the derech; it is much more complicated than that.”

He added that the army is “not a simple environment” but he has met young men who moved closer to Judaism and became “more inspired Jewishly” through their army service. He also said that, “if a boy waits till he is 20 and then does Hesder which is 17-18 months of army, IF he is seriously learning in yeshiva, that should be a reasonable recipe for most chareidi boys who want to maintain their Torah learning and shmirat Mitzvot.”

As far as how and when changes with charedi service should be made, he noted that “solutions are always best when they are gradual, and the idea of throwing tens of thousands of Yeshiva bochurim who are not ready to go into the army, into jail, is ridiculous. By the same token, assuming that anyone not in the army is really learning full time in yeshiva is neither practical nor true, and the chilul hashem involved should be motivating more bnei Torah to struggle with this question.”

Freedman quoted an article written recently in the Jerusalem Post by Rabbi Yehuda Susman, the Rosh Yeshiva of Eretz HaTzvi, who suggested that the army open yeshivot where the students could learn Torah in uniform and not miss learning opportunities in the context of army service. Freedman also noted that things have changed and a healthy solution has to be found “gradually, whilst working together.”

“In 1948 Ben Gurion exempted 400 Yeshiva students from IDF service because the Torah world was decimated in the Holocaust,” he said. “The goal of rehabilitating Torah has Baruch Hashem been accomplished and that scenario no longer exists. So its time to create a new one that all the segments of Israeli society can live with.

“Lastly, one of the many painful lessons we should have learned from the Holocaust, is that Hashem can sometimes block the vision of our gedolei Torah; they can be wrong. This was clearly the case before the Holocaust (see Rav Teichtal’s Eim habanim Smeichah) and may well be the case today.

“We are clearly in a state of milchemet mitzvah, and in such a case EVERYONE goes to war even chatan michedro and kallah meichuppatah.”