OP-ED: We Aren’t Against The Draft, We Are In Support Of Torah

JERUSALEM (VINnews) —  OP-ED from Arye Ehrlich, the editor of Mishpacha Magazine:

Tomorrow, Thursday, the streets of Jerusalem will be blackened. Hundreds of thousands of Haredim from across the country, myself among them, will flock to the gates of the eternal capital of Israel to cry out a cry from the heart. Not a cry of protest,but a cry in support.

This will not be a demonstration against the draft; it will be a demonstration in favor: in favor of Torah study in the Land of Israel; in favor of an approach that cannot tolerate a situation where in the Jewish state students of Torah are arrested simply because they continue a centuries-old tradition and are prepared to absorb sanctions, arrests, disgrace and hostile treatment because of it; in favor of declaring that a Jewish state must recognize the value of Torah study, the value of those who study Torah, and the importance of the continuity of a glorious Torah world that was born centuries ago in Europe, destroyed by the Nazis, and rebuilt in the Land of Israel from the ashes.

The Charedi yeshiva world is a living, beating monument to the magnificent yeshiva world of pre-Holocaust Europe: names like “Ponevezh,” “Slabodka,” “Telz,” and the Hasidic dynasties “Gur,” “Belz,” “Vizhnitz,” and dozens more send shivers through the heart of any Jew with even a little knowledge of European Jewish history: each such name is an entire vanished world from the war. In the miraculous heavenly process of return to Zion, these magnificent institutions were rebuilt, and the country’s leaders understood: this Torah world must be preserved, developed and nurtured. Because without a large, distinguished, clear Torah reserve, there is no future for the spiritual existence of the Jewish people. And without spiritual existence, there is no material existence.

And now, after the Torah world has risen from its ruins, after it produced generations of Torah students for eight decades, we feel that an existential threat hovers over this world. Its students carry on their brow the mark of shame of deserters in the Jewish state. They face arrests and criminal entanglement, pulled from their beds on the way to the military prison, while a herd of politicians compete to sharpen the most poisonous words against their way of life and their choice to cling to the tradition.

But now, even the immortal words of the Volozhin yeshiva student Chaim Nachman Bialik are being erased. Bialik wrote: “If you have in your soul to know the spring from which your criticized brothers drew, in the days of calamity such strength, the strength of souls… If you have in your soul to know the spring from which your oppressed brothers drew comforts to God, confidence, strength, long-suffering and iron power to bear every labor… If you wish to see the bosom into which all the tears of your people poured, his heart, his soul and his bitterness… If you wish to know the hiding place in which his essence was preserved and in its pure core the great spirit of your people… If you wish to know the merciful mother, the old, loving, faithful mother who with great compassion gathered the tears of her lost son — oh, a suffering brother! — if you do not want to know all these things, turn away from the house of study, old and new, on the long nights of Tevet, the desolate nights, in the burning days of Tammuz… Jews pale, faces shriveled and narrowed, Jews of the Diaspora, bearing heavy burdens, they pull their burden, wearing away their toil on a worn page of Gemara.”

And Bialik continues, as if the words were written in 2025: “Alas! How easy and pitiful this sight is, a stranger will not understand!” And Chaim-Nachman pleads: “Know and hear, behold, my afflicted brother! For it is only a rescued spark, only a small surviving ember, that by miracle escaped from the great fire. And who knows whether the rivers of their tears did not carry us and bring us this far, and in their prayer to God they sought us.”

True: we have gone through two difficult years. Israeli society after October 7 is not the Israeli society that came before it. And true, amid the mix of cynical voices of politicians intent on harvesting political capital, you can also hear the authentic cry of reservists and their families who groan under the weight of the military task. This will not be solved by the hard hand of an obsessive legal adviser, an overriding High Court, or military policemen who take a yeshiva student to jail in the midst of shiva for his deceased father (an incident that occurred this week). It will happen through understanding, sensitivity, and dialogue. The current way will bring one thing to the draft: more mandates to the bonfire of the society’s polarization.

I will be there tomorrow at the gates of Jerusalem, and alongside hundreds of thousands of my charedi brethren I will plead at the gates of Heaven: O, afflicted brothers! Recognize the importance of the old house of study and do not harm it. From there the road to a solution and to national reconciliation will be shortened.