MK Resists Haredi Draft: ‘Our Torah Protects As It Protected From The Shoah’

Just as it protected the Torah scholars killed in the Har Nof Synagogue Massacre of 2014.

Jerusalem, November 5 – Lawmakers in Israel’s strictly orthodox religious parties maintained their longtime insistence today that their young men retain exemption from military service, despite the controversial and broadly unpopular discrimination that entails against the non-orthodox, who are mandated to serve, and despite the Supreme Court already ruling such exemptions illegal, arguing that the young men’s dedication to the study of Jewish texts affords the nation a divine shield as important as military service in the same way that the devoted study of the same materials famously provided the same divine shield to the Jews of Europe when the Nazis and their collaborators attempted to exterminate them.

United Torah Judaism alliance MK Yisrael Eichler sounded anew the note that he and his Haredi colleagues have long asserted: the Haredim will not consent to any law or policy that requires Haredim, even only the men, to serve in the IDF, even though that runs afoul of the law – because their Torah study, he maintains, affords the people of Israel God’s protection of equal or greater value than IDF protection, as demonstrated during the Holocaust when a third of the global Jewish population was wiped out, including hundreds of thousands of devoted Torah scholars.

“Aside from the army not being a suitable moral and spiritual environment for a Torah-based lifestyle,” Eichler explained, “the sacred devotion to Torah study protects Israel as much as any brigade or weapons system. Our dedication to our people’s traditions and lore is what God wants, and He guards us when we keep His holy Word at the top of our priorities.” Eichler cited as evidence for that guarding the fact that only six million Jews were murdered between 1933 and 1945, by shooting, gassing, stabbing, bludgeoning, asphyxiation, starvation, disease, and brutal forced labor.

Other Haredi leaders expanded on the idea, elaborating that devotion to Torah study has protected the Jewish people throughout the generations, as they were subject to expulsion, persecution, forced conversion, mass rape, dispossession, massacres, discrimination, and all manner of degradation for being Jews, back into antiquity.

“It’s clear that Torah study protected us,” argued former Shas Party MK Rabbi Eli Yishai. “Just as it protected the Torah scholars killed in, for example, the Har Nof Synagogue Massacre of 2014, the learned and studious communities of the Rhine Valley during the First Crusade of 1096, and all the Hasidic leaders whose movements died out because they were murdered in the Shoah.”

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