One Response to “Links for the Week Ending 2/28/2013 – Collecting Outstanding Balances, Practical Chareidi IDF Participation, BTs Need to Create”

1. Judy Resnick
   March 5th, 2013 @ 1:38 am

   The issue of Chareidi participation in the IDF is one where “first glance” and “the real story” are genuinely worlds apart.

   First glance, it’s all those Chareidim dodging their responsibilities to serve their country.

   The real story:

   Plenty of Chareidim who already serve in the IDF, most famously in the Nachal Chareidi battalion, but also in the Israeli Air Force as mechanics;

   Secular Israelis who are avoiding the draft;

   More Chareidim who want to serve in the Nachal Chareidi than the IDF is ready, able and willing to accommodate;

   The top brass of the IDF saying privately that the army of the 21st century doesn’t require all those boots on the ground, and they frankly don’t want or need to take on all of those Chareidim;

   The reality of all draftees having to show up at their local induction center and TAKE A TEST (those of you folks out there who remember lehavdil the Vietnam War and its draft dodgers please remind us how easy it is to flunk a test if you really want to, just write the same thing over and over in every blank space);

   The sad reality of many Chareidim not having enough knowledge of Ivrit (having spent their school and home years speaking and reading and being taught only in Yiddish) or lacking other basic skills such as mathematics that are needed before they can undergo any kind of Army training;

   Whether National Service really needs all of those Chareidim helping out in prisons and old age homes and as volunteer firefighters, or whether they will end up in make-work projects;

   Whether the Jewish State really needs every man right now to close his Gemara and pick up an Uzi to fight Amalek, or is this a deliberate ploy like in bad old Czarist Russia to conscript Torah scholars so as to destroy the remnant of the faithful.

   The real story is far different from the first glance; the battle is more ideological than real.

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