As I was walking down to
Hebron this morning, my elderly friend Zechariah Nahari reminded me that yesterday
was the end of shiva for Shalom Nagar, an 86-year-old Kiryat Arba
resident. Zechariah, as a fellow Yemenite and family friend, was at the
ceremonial meal held (by non-Ashkenazim) on the seventh day.
Shalom, a”h,
had two claims to fame as far as I am concerned. First, he was the policeman
who, in 1962, at age 26, hanged Adolph Eichmann, Hitler’s architect of the
Holocaust. Chosen by lottery from among 22 policemen, and the only one of the
22 who did not want to do it, he pushed the button that caused the trapdoor to
fall away, leading to Eichmann’s death. When you google pictures of Eichmann in
his glass cage at his trial, the policeman on the left with the mustache is
Shalom Nagar. This was the only case of capital punishment in Israel’s history
as a modern state.
Second,
he was the uncle of Rabbi Uzzi Nagar, who has been teaching us Daf Yomi for 14
years in Me’arat HaMachpeila.
Shalom,
the uncle, born in Yemen in 1936, arrived in Israel as an orphan at age 12,
served in the paratroopers, and then joined the prison service. For many years,
he was irreligious, but as he advanced in the prison services and became head
of Ramla Prison, he returned to his faith. Throughout his 25 years of
retirement, he studied in one of Kiryat Arba’s many kollels. If you google
Shalom Nagar, you will see a man in his eighties with a beard and peyos.
When Rabbi
Uzi Nagar, the nephew, completed high school, he went straight into the air
force for three years, and then he obtained a BA in engineering from the
Technion, Israel’s MIT. As a student in the Technion, he met his wife Michal,
and together they decided to devote their lives to Torah. Rav Nagar studied in
an Ashkenazi Kollel in Jerusalem for seven years and then became a Torah
educator. When I began Daf Yomi, Rav Nagar had already been teaching Daf Yomi
for five years, so he is now approaching the end of his third teaching cycle.
* * *
I have decided to deal with a hot
potato, the chareidi draft. Despite
the present war, the Knesset has carried on with its refusal, going back 70
years, to pressure chareidim into
joining the army. Yet the “activist” Supreme Court has now for the first time
gone over the heads of the Knesset and ordered the army to send out thousands
of draft notices to young chareidim,
regardless of their yeshiva status. The chareidim,
who largely have not enlisted voluntarily, are under pressure from their rabbinical
leadership to tear up the draft notices. What is going to happen? Will boys be
arrested? Will chareidim leave Israel
for abroad?
I see the reverence with which the Where What When – and Baltimoreans in
general – relate to Israel’s soldiers and the reverence with which they
simultaneously relate to chareidim in
Israel, and I unhesitatingly share both views, as do many of my neighbors in
Kiryat Arba, my home. A person is the sum of his experiences. I grew up as a
religious Zionist, but as a TA boy and a person who grew up in Shearith Israel,
many of my emotional associations are chareidi.
My beloved Rebbe Flamm, my sixth grade rebbe from whom I learned so much, was chareidi. Rabbi Blumberg and Rabbi Tapick
and Rabbi Krasner and Rabbi Milikowsky and Rabbi Katznelson and Rabbi
Rottenberg – all of them were and are chareidi.
In Israel, learning in religious
Zionist yeshivot, I came into contact with Harav Chaim Yaakov Goldvicht, zt”l,
who in his younger days had been very close to the Chazon Ish. I also learned
from Rabbi Dr. Chaim Brovender, from Yeshiva University, who became attached to
the chareidim and lives in
Mattesdorf. And finally, in the early years of my career as a translator, I
translated much of the Chofetz Chaim. That, too, influenced me.
As a religious Zionist, I do think
the chareidim should do the army, but
they should not be forced, and they should approach that mitzva with great
caution, lest they lose what they have. They fear their children losing their
faith, and for them, that is a genuine fear.
Also, there is much more we stand
to lose if mistakes are made. Rabbi Brovender, who served in the Israeli army,
told his students the following story:
When
I had just received semicha from Rav Solveitchik, I thought a talmid chacham was someone who, if locked in a room with nothing but
a page of gemara he has never learned, would be able to figure out that page.
When I arrived in Israel, Rabbi Elefant took me under his wing. He brought me
to a Jerusalem kollel where there were 200 men sitting and learning, and every
one of them knew Shas and poskim cold.
By the same token, five years ago I translated a book
by Baruch Marzel of Hebron, a disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane, Hy”d. Here
is a quotation from his book, Ve’dibarta Bam, expressing in a manner
similar to Rabbi Brovender the challenge faced by religious Zionists:
Entering
the Mirrer Yeshiva in Jerusalem on any regular weekday, you will find, wherever
you turn, tens and hundreds of anonymous Torah scholars whom nobody has ever
heard of, and of whom can be asked a question on any spot in the Talmud. If any
one of them had belonged to the religious Zionist camp, he would immediately be
crowned as the great Torah luminary of the coming generation.
At the same time, I chose to move
to Israel, influenced at age 16 by Rabbi Chaim Druckman, a disciple of Rabbi
Tzvi Yehuda Kook of the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva. So, I have also chosen to make my
life in religious Zionist Judea and Samaria, where the army is viewed as a holy
mitzvah to be participated in by all Jewish men. Our students who go to the
army do not become less religious. Sometimes they become more religious.
* * *
I want to have my cake and eat it
too. Part of me does want the chareidim
to do the army, but I am conflicted. I know the treasures that the chareidim possess, and I do not want
those treasures to be jeopardized in any way. Some prophecies are
self-fulfilling. If they fear what the army could do to their children, that
fear might be warranted. I want the chareidim
to remain exactly as they are. I want them to continue to have the eidelkeit
(gentleness) that I have
come to know, and I want them to maintain their scholarship, which allows both
their large-scale achievements and the one-in-a-thousand stellar scholar to
reach unimaginable heights.
And knowing that their own rabbinic
leadership is dead set against their army service, I sense that they view that
combination as impossible. But what soldiers they would be if they could go!
Fortunately for me, no one is
asking me my opinion (except perhaps the editor of the WWW), so nothing depends on my answer. And fortunately for me, for
the past 40 years, in the political realm, the religious Zionists to whom I
belong have had an almost perfect record of protecting the chareidim from increasingly brutish attacks.
During the 1980s, when the Likud
first asked the rabbinical council of the religious Zionist hesder yeshivot whether the religious Zionists would agree to pressuring
the chareidim into army service, the
response was (and I am just paraphrasing), “We will not participate in such an
act. There are different ways of serving G-d. The chareidim have their way, and we have ours, and who is to say which
is better?” I remember that response, and I remember it being quoted by the Jewish Observer magazine.
Today, 40 years later, following a
horrendous war, I do not know if those rabbis would respond in precisely the
same way they did then, but the fact remains that throughout all of those
years, there has been no political pressure on the chareidim from the Knesset.
From the Left, however, came
attacks on the chareidim, crocodile
tears about the state of chareidi
education, as though chareidim were
unpolished rubes who do not know the three R’s. But anyone who has had contact
with chareidim knows that they are
much better educated, more refined, much better readers, and much more
interested in the world than the vast majority of Israeli society.
I believe that the pressure from
the courts and from the Left is not to convince the chareidim to serve in the army – many of them really do not want
the chareidim in the army. Rather, it
is to sabotage the coalition and to get rid of Netanyahu – finally.
* * *
All that said, my own uncertainty,
my schizophrenic feelings, and my angst are shared by many. Thus, for many
years I translated the articles written by Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a disciple of
Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook and one of the most prominent rabbis to come out of the
Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva. One article that I remember from Rav Aviner was a
beautiful comparison of the Jewish people to a symphony orchestra, with each
group of Jews – the chareidim, the
religious Zionists, and yes, the secular – each making its own type of music
and contributing to a beautiful harmony.
But another article that he wrote
contained an imagined conversation between a chareidi father and his young son on Chanuka.
Daddy, how did we beat the Greeks?
With the help of G-d, obviously.
And who was G-d helping?
The Hasmoneans, as is well known.
Who were they?
Al HaNissim calls them “holy
priests.” They were great saints.
Weren’t they soldiers?
Yes… They were soldiers… Yes.
And they fought with weapons?
Yes…with weapons.
So, they were secular or National
Religious?
Who says! They were chareidim!
Chareidim went to the army?
So, they went.
Why did they go?
To save the Jewish People,
obviously.
So why don’t we go?
No need. The Torah we learn
protects us.
So, we don’t need an army?
No! The Torah protects us.
And back then, the Torah didn’t
protect us?
Certainly it protected us. That’s
how they won – thanks to the Torah.
So why did they fight with weapons?
Because… thanks to the Torah… they
won with weapons.
So why shouldn’t we go to the army
and win thanks to the Torah?
No need. The secular and the
National Religious go, and they win thanks to our Torah.
So why didn’t the Hasmoneans sit
and learn Torah so that the secular and National Religious of those times could
win, thanks to the Torah?
There were none. Back then,
everyone was chareidi.
The Hasmoneans weren’t National
Religious?!
And this was published by the same
rabbi who used the metaphor of the symphony orchestra. Rabbi Aviner’s point is
a simple one: The Maccabees were warriors, and they were saints, and that is
the goal. That is what has to happen. That is what G-d expects of us. Rabbi
Kook foresaw a hundred years ago that this would happen. This is obvious.
But the challenge is not just for
the chareidim. It is not just that
the chareidim will return to being
warriors. The rest of the country must return to being Torah scholars. It is a
challenge for the religious Zionists, and it is a challenge for the traditional
public and for the secular as well. It just so happens that the Supreme Court
is only bothering the chareidim. The
spotlight is on them because of the war. But we all have to become Maccabees,
holy priests who learn Torah on a high level.
Right now, the religious Zionists are
learning Torah on an increasingly high level, more and more proving that army
service does not have to jeopardize Torah learning. (This is where my comments
on Rabbi Uzi Nagar at the beginning of the article come in.) The question is, how
is this going to happen? How will the chareidim
become Maccabees? One way that I do not think it will happen is through fines
and incarceration ordered by the Supreme Court. Everyone knows
that various chasidic Admorim, in particular the Gerrer Rebbe, used to send some of
their chasidim to the army, but after Ya’ir Lapid and Naftali
Bennett, in 2013 to 2014, threatened sanctions against those who did not go to
the army, even those chasidim stopped enlisting. Right now, there is an impasse.
* * *
The answer is hard to foresee. But
so what? Everything involving the progression of the Jewish people
toward redemption is hard to foresee. We make predictions, and sometimes we are
right, and sometimes we are wrong.
When I was in seventh grade, I
wrote an article for the school newspaper at TA, a short story describing the
Messiah coming. In my story, shofars went off all over the world, and shuls
flew through the air towards the Land of Israel. Who knows? Maybe that will happen.
In the meantime, as far as the
future of secular and traditional youth, I have to report to you that the
biggest hit song in Israel right now, the song sung at all soccer games, has
the refrain: “Hashem Yitbarach always loves me and always does only good for
me. More and more and more good for me! He does only good for me.”
And I should also point out that
each day that goes by, the religious Zionists learn Torah on a higher and
higher level. The new Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Kalman Ber, arrived in
Kerem B’Yavneh a year after I left; he served in the armored corps (tanks).
Today, he is a highly revered Torah scholar. In fact, he was the first choice
for Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, not of the religious Zionists – they wanted Micha
Levi – but of the chareidim.
There is a Jew in Kiryat Arba named
Aharon Granot (Granevitch), a Gerrer chasid.
His father fought in Israel’s War of Independence as part of the Etzel. Aharon
himself left Bnei Brak and moved to Kiryat Arba so he could learn Torah in
Hebron and join the army, and that is what he did. After a prominent career as
a chareidi journalist, he has during
the past five years started a new project, Osei Chayil. Nowadays, when chareidi boys want to join the army,
their families often throw them out of the house. Having a son in the army can
ruin the shidduchim prospects for
other children in the family. Such boys then become soldiers, but they are
virtually homeless. Their parents disown them, and they lose their religious
belief. What Aharon did was to start a program to find these boys, virtually
adopting them, giving them a pleasant place to call home, and over the course
of time, helping them to return to faith.
It is a wonderful thing that Aharon
is doing. He has so far offered 75 boys homes, and he sees the boys through
settling on a career and marriage. He also tries to reunite them with their
families. Yet I tell this story not to say that progress is being made but to
point out how far we are from a solution to this issue.
One thing I can say about chareidim volunteering for army service
is that it looks like it will come from below, not from the rabbinic leadership.
And perhaps in a hundred years, all of the Jewish people will be in Eretz
Yisrael, learning Torah on a high level and serving in the army. Perhaps some
will be wearing hats and jackets and others will not, but G-d willing, all will
be serving their G-d and their country together, and they will all come to this
of their own free will.
We must have patience. In the end,
we will all be Maccabees together once again.
