Tablet Magazine There’s an oft-repeated story of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, paying a visit in the 1940s to Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz, known as the Chazon Ish, a prominent Haredi rabbi living in Bnei Brak. The Chazon Ish, it is said, took off his glasses so he wouldn’t have to properly see the socialist interloper, after which they got down to the business of figuring out what the role of the ultra-Orthodox would be in the new Jewish state.
The Chazon Ish quoted a story from the Talmud to make his point. When two wagons (or camels, in another version of the story) meet on a narrow mountain pass, who shall give way—the “full” wagon laden with goods, or the “empty” wagon? The rabbi’s point couldn’t have been clearer: He expected the “empty” wagon of secular society to defer to the “full” wagon of a religious tradition spanning millennia.
As is well-known, Ben-Gurion granted the small ultra-Orthodox community in Israel an exemption from army service in order to rehabilitate the Haredi “community of scholars” of Eastern Europe wiped out during the Holocaust. Ben-Gurion, it’s believed, predicted that the ultra-Orthodox community would slowly disappear anyway, melding into the assertively modern Zionist project. The opposite, however, has happened. This “community of scholars” numbered 400 in 1949. Today the figure for exemptions among army-age ultra-Orthodox men is estimated at 50,000.
Finance Minister Yair Lapid and many other Israeli politicians are now intent on reversing Ben-Gurion’s edict, spurred on by a Supreme Court ruling early last year that declared the Haredi draft exemption unconstitutional. Many of Lapid’s campaign slogans, like “Equal Service for Everyone,” squarely targeted Haredi Jews, who comprise 10 percent of the Israeli population, about 800,000 people, and 15 percent of the Israeli Jewish public. In mid-April, in his first speech as finance minister, the charismatic but untried politician entered into a heated exchange from the Knesset podium with the ultra-Orthodox caucus. “You’re pushing yourself into a corner,” Lapid said [1]. “No one hates you. The only thing that happened is that you’re not in the [governing] coalition. It’s called democracy. … I don’t receive orders from you anymore, and the state doesn’t take orders from you anymore. We’re done taking orders from you.” [...]
Yet the ultra-Orthodox, for the most part, don’t seem interested in the proposals currently being floated by secular politicians. In mid-May, a demonstration took place in central Jerusalem outside the main army conscription office. An estimated 30,000 ultra-Orthodox men took part, and events quickly spiraled out of control. Rioters threw rocks at security personnel and lit trash cans on fire; nearly a dozen police officers and demonstrators were injured, and several arrests were made. It was seen as the opening gambit in what could be a summer of serious internal unrest.
The most interesting aspect of the demonstration, however, was the fact that it was organized by an extremist, Jerusalem-based faction of the Lithuanian Haredi movement. Rabbi Shteinman and his moderate faction, which greatly outnumbers the extremists, refused to participate. It seemed that, despite the rhetoric, there was still some hope of striking a peaceful compromise.
Israel’s political class is hoping that the difficult socioeconomic conditions of the Haredi community will be the prime motivator for the necessary changes. “The No. 1 daily problem—not talking about the coming of the Messiah—but day-to-day problem for the Haredis, is making a living,” Brig. Gen. (ret.) Meir Elran, one of Israel’s foremost experts on military-social affairs, told me recently. “They need to see that at the end of the process they’ll be able to make a living. It’ll be the only thing that convinces them—they don’t care about the army, or Zionism, or the state. They care about making a living, honorably.”
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