A few weeks back I wrote of the importance of the chareidi community offering a coherent vision of our role in anIsraelin which we are no longer a small minority but a substantial percentage of the population. Since then the need for such a vision has become more and more evident as we see strands of arguments often advanced by various chareidi spokesmen twisted out of shape and used against us.
Last week for instance Moshe Halbertal a HebrewUniversityprofessor of philosophy wrote a long piece in Ha’aretz in which he acknowledged that chareidi leaders were quite right to view Zionism at its inception as totally alien to their world view — as a thoroughgoing attempt to redefine Jewish identity. He even acknowledged the wisdom of chareidi leaders today in refusing to cede any authority to the government to regulate chareidi education. He opposed as too costly and unlikely to succeed all efforts to force more chareidim into the army and even opposed any attempts to punish individual chareidim with the loss of national benefits such as child allowances for refusing to serve in the IDF. But from these sympathetic premises he concluded that the State should cut off funding of chareidi yeshivos.
Yesh Atid MK Ruth Calderon’s maiden speech in the Knesset posed a similar type of challenge. I remember hearing a brilliant chareidi lecturer defend the deferment for yeshivah students more than 30 years ago on the grounds that the rest of the population is not fulfilling its national obligation of Torah study. In her opening speech Calderon sought to turn that argument on its head by envisaging an Israeli society in which all Israeli young people study Torah and engage in military or civilian service.
When Calderon the founder of several secular “batei medrash” speaks of Torah study she does not mean the form discussed by Rav Chaim of Volozhin in Nefesh HaChaim. But my point has to do with the rhetorical skill with which she appropriated traditional chareidi arguments.
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