“Finally

A prayer of unity is always on our lips yet here in Eretz Yisrael a depressing new divide is forming between us and a certain potion of the secular community as well as a small sector of the national-religious community that has joined them. It’s important to understand that what is developing is not a true ideological clash between the two sides that seems impossible to resolve. Indeed that clash does exists. But that basic difference in outlook really has nothing to do with this latest attack on chareidi Jewry and on the yeshivah world in particular. I purposely wrote “a certain portion of the secular community” and “a small sector of the national-religious community ” because in fact if you manage to have a sensible conversation with a secular Israeli whose sole source of information is the news media that feed his brain day and night he might not agree with you but he’ll understand your position.

“Look at how hatred can foist senseless opinions on people” I said to my not-yet-religious friend. “Look at how foolishly some of these chilonim are acting declaring open and total war against us.” In general the aggressors are people who control the news media who are in turn activated by outside forces with the purpose of disintegrating the delicate fabric holding our society together.

Those of us who live inIsraelknow who those outside forces are and what their goal is: to cause as much social unrest as they can in order to further their dream of replacing the Jewish State with a state of all its citizens. One of the means they use is fear-mongering. The chareidi population they say is growing at an alarming rate. True our numbers are growing baruch Hashem but listening to the biased lectures and position papers of these professors and politicians you could think we are an apocalyptic threat poised to bring down the secular establishment within a few decades because according to them the chareidi community only studies Torah and doesn’t work.

Just the other day Naftali Bennett the rising young star on the new political constellation was talking about “hundreds of thousands” of Torah students and “hundreds of thousands” of chareidim who don’t work. What fantasy-land is he living in? They way things are going Bennett and his fear-mongers declare the secular population will very soon be a minority and that minority won’t be able to go on carrying the entire state on its shoulders. Certain figures in the media are experts are magnifying these fears for one primary purpose: to trigger a search for ways to stave off this perceived threat or as one prominent columnist put it ways to shrink the chareidi population. Both openly and in veiled terms they have declared that their real intention in imposing the draft on bnei yeshivah and pressuring Torah students to go to work — all under the banner of “sharing the burden equally” — is to secularize the chareidim although they prefer to call it “integrating them into Israeli society.” This is being presented as a logical way of warding off the imaginary collapse they are expecting within a few decades the doomsday scenario they have foisted upon the average citizen through ceaseless propaganda brainwashing and pushing of panic buttons.