Traumatized by the Bar-Kochba Revolt’s defeat, Rabbi Yossi ben Kisma said of Rome: “This nation has been crowned by the heavens,” for otherwise how could it “destroy His [God’s] house, and burn His shrine, and kill His devotees, and liquidate His best – and still stand?” (Babylonian Talmud, Avoda Zara, 11a).
It took hardly a century from Rabbi Yossi’s time for Rome to break into three parts, replacing 26 emperors in 50 years of invasions, plagues, civil wars, shortages, and inflation – all of which made it plain that Rome was not “crowned by God.”
Such misjudgments are no sin; everyone makes them occasionally, including learned scholars, not to mention us columnists. The problems begin when people judge reality without studying it, and while at it, claim their view is not theirs, but God’s. The problem swells when people actually accept such misjudgments as divine and follow them to disaster.
This, for instance, is what happened when Rabbi Akiba claimed that Simeon Bar-Kochba was the messiah. It happened again in 1666, when a whole generation of rabbis accepted as the messiah a man who ultimately converted to Islam.
Even more fatefully, when the Zionist idea emerged, most rabbis rejected it as blasphemy. And when Jews left Europe for America, ultra-Orthodox rabbis forbade that relocation, calling America “a profane land.”
Those rabbis knew a lot of Talmud but they didn’t know what every Tevye who crossed the ocean understood by instinct, and what Theodor Herzl actually wrote: that Europe is a death trap.
One would therefore hope that, with such a record of misjudgment, those rabbis’ ultra-Orthodox successors would draw conclusions, and leave reality’s judgment to those who, unlike them, study reality, and do so systematically, impartially, and without purporting to represent God.
Sadly, as this week’s political drama showed, ultra-Orthodox rabbis are once again misjudging reality, and leading their flock into a historic dead end.
Shas and United Torah Judaism only care about their power
That the politicians played their expected roles in this tragedy went without saying. The ministers and lawmakers of Shas and United Torah Judaism are not expected to care for truth, justice, or morality. They care for their power and our money, and if this means ignoring the rest of Israel’s loss, sacrifice, suffering, and dignity – so be it.
The same goes for the other politician in this waltz, Benjamin Netanyahu, who would never in his right mind stand up to his “natural allies,” as he calls Arye Deri, Yitzhak Goldknopf, Meir Porush, and Moshe Gafni, and tell them squarely: “We are at war. Join it! Fully, immediately, to the last of you, like everyone else.”
Ultra-Orthodox politicians would lose their jobs if not for the Faustian bargain they foster and oversee. The rabbis, however, speak not out of self-interest, but out of what they claim is a judgment of reality, through God’s eyes. Well, here is a sliver of reality as one ultra-Orthodox sage, Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch, recently articulated it:
“If an army [unit] has to fight somewhere [and] they can wait a half hour till after Shabbos [Sabbath], or… can start an hour before Shabbos ends, so, if the head of the platoon is… not a shomer Shabbos [observes the Sabbath], and if he is a leftist who is against Shabbos, it’s very hard for him to comply” (YouTube, Q&A Keren Olam HaTorah with Rabbi Moshe Hirsch).
Wow. For one thing, had the esteemed rabbi ever debriefed just one combat soldier, he would have learned that a platoon commander doesn’t decide whether to wage battles, nor do commanders of battalions and brigades. But much more importantly, the generals who do make such decisions are forbidden to desecrate the Sabbath. That’s Israel’s military law, of which Rabbi Hirsch appears clueless.
This is besides the fact that there is no IDF officer who is “against Shabbos,” and that’s besides the bizarre labeling of someone who is “against Shabbos” as “a leftist.” Had Rabbi Hirsch – a member of United Torah Judaism’s Council of Sages – been familiar with reality, he would have known that Israeli right-wingers can be as militantly secular as Avigdor Liberman, and left-wingers can be as devoutly observant as Rabbi Michael Melchior.
Yet the real tragedy lies not in all this ignorance but in the rabbi’s unawareness that the war we are fighting is a war of self-defense, the kind of war for which Jewish law allows, and in fact demands, that the Sabbath be desecrated; the kind of war that Jewish law does not merely allow, but demands, that everyone join, even a groom and a bride, as noted here last year (“While soldiers died,” June 14, 2024).
Even more ominously, another sage, Rabbi Dov Lando, reportedly called Modern Orthodoxy’s soldiers “confused” and claimed they “have their own Torah.” Had this man’s judgment of reality been assisted by one meeting with rabbis like Ya’akov Medan, Shlomo Riskin, Shlomo Brin, Re’em Hacohen, or hundreds of other Modern Orthodox luminaries, he would have known that he and they study the same Torah, that service in the IDF does not preclude observance, and that the two, in fact, coexist happily.
But alas, ultra-Orthodox rabbis don’t bother studying reality. And so, like so many rabbis before them, they will meet reality when it blows up in their faces; when their grand deal of taking from the state this much and giving it this little – falls apart.
And when their deal collapses, and they stare at empty coffers and mass conscription, ultra-Orthodoxy’s sages can be counted on to say that calamity befell them because the Jewish people didn’t study enough Torah – and not because they, the sages, even in our most testing hour, would not study the facts, revise their dogmas, admit their misjudgments, listen to the people’s wrath, hear their insult, feel their pain, share their grief, and join the war for the survival of the Jewish state.
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land. www.MiddleIsrael.net