Torah Can Wait | Israel Haredim Ultra Orthodox Fighters Track

Should the ultra orthodox hasedic serve in the military to save Israel, or study Torah all their lives while everybody else protects them and the 6 kids they pop out on average? What do you think? Should the rabbits fight for Israel, or is the Torah too demanding of the time.

‘We will die and not enlist’: Extremist Haredim block major highway for hours

The war in Gaza has rekindled the debate in Israel over who serves—and who doesn’t.

The question of whether the ultra-Orthodox should be conscripted into the military, an affair that has been simmering unresolved for more than 20 years.

At first glance, it might seem strange that in the Jewish state, the most intensely religious Jews refuse to serve in the military. But the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim, have always had a problem with a Jewish state created by human action rather than by divine decree. To help win them over, Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, made a series of concessions to them around the time of independence in 1948, including exempting from conscription young men for whom “Torah is [their] occupation.” In other words, men spending their lives engaged in the study of religious texts.

It seemed like a minor issue at the time. Many Haredim were fighting in the war. Europe’s ultra-Orthodox community had been decimated by the Holocaust, and its numbers were tiny and expected to decline with assimilation. The total number who were to be exempted was about 400.

By the end of the 1990s, however, that concession no longer looked so minor. Thanks to an extraordinarily high birth rate, the Haredi population was growing rapidly. Today, it comprises about 13 percent of the population and by 2042 it may reach more than 20 percent, by the government’s own estimates. Meanwhile, state subsidies for the Haredim grew immensely after Menachem Begin and his Likud party took power in 1977, enabling the community to realize its ideal of a lifetime of Torah study for males. Even as they took money from the state, refusal to serve in the military became, for the Haredim, as sacrosanct as keeping kosher or the Sabbath.