Basic Law on Torah Study Is Shattering Israel’s Social Contract

At a time when our soldiers are risking their lives on the front lines and paying with their lives, the government of Israel is choosing to spit in their faces and advance a law that legitimizes institutionalized draft evasion. This is not the way of Judaism, and this is the hour of truth for the national religious public, a betrayal of mutual responsibility.

We are in one of the most complex, bloody, and difficult periods Israel has ever known. Day and night, our sons and daughters, the best of this nation, are risking their lives on various fronts. They leave their families and their peaceful lives to defend the home of us all. At this time, when many Israeli citizens sit alert in shelters and bereavement knocks at our doors, what does the government of Israel choose to do? It chooses to advance a despicable law that tears Israeli society apart.

The “Basic Law: Torah Study” is not a law intended to strengthen the world of Torah, it is a law meant to grant institutional exemption, encourage the draft evasion of an entire population, and enshrine in a Basic Law the unimaginable gap between those who give everything and those who are exempt from everything. It is unthinkable. It is an unforgivable moral disgrace that the State of Israel would dare, in its statute book, to compare sitting in the safe and protected environment of the study hall, important as it may be, with the risk to life and physical sacrifice of thousands of soldiers and female soldiers under enemy fire. The blood and sweat of our fighters are not equal to sitting under a safe roof.

This legislation tramples brutally on mutual responsibility, that sacred value on which our society was founded. It completely crushes the most basic contract between the state and its serving citizens, a contract according to which everyone, without exception, bears the burden of survival.

This is not the way of Torah.

Alongside the national and social harm, there is also a deep distortion of Judaism itself. The people of Israel do not live in the desert, we live in the Land of Israel, in a demanding existential reality surrounded by enemies. מאז ומעולם the people of Israel have relied on and lived through a combination of three pillars, the Torah of Israel, the Land of Israel, and the people of Israel. One cannot stand and survive on only one leg while abandoning the rest. I support Torah study, which is the foundation of our spiritual and cultural existence, but Torah cannot be used as a sanctuary from national obligations. This is not the way of Torah. This is not the way of Judaism, which has always known how to combine “the book and the sword,” to sustain both Torah and work together. Leaders of the Jewish people throughout history knew how to combine study with defense of the homeland, and never used Torah as an excuse to flee shared responsibility.

It is time for different leadership.

This is a real moment of truth. I call from here to all members of the current Knesset, to my colleagues in the national religious public who bear the burden of combat with supreme heroism and pay a heavy blood price, and to anyone who holds dear the existence of this state, oppose with all your strength this improper and disgraceful move. Do not lend a hand to legislation that will bring social and moral disaster upon us. We must not remain silent in the face of this distortion. Our response to this madness will come in deeds.

In the next government that we will form under MK Avigdor Liberman, we commit to putting an end to the absurdity, we will pass a real and equal conscription law that will strengthen the IDF, preserve it as the people’s army, and restore sanity to the State of Israel.

The author is the mayor of Givat Shmuel and a member of Yisrael Beiteinu