The Orthodox Jew in the Israeli Army

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Tuesday, September 26, 2006

There are two Orthodox Judaisms that are competing for the loyalty of adherents and which have two conflicting understandings of the Jewish sacred canon. This canon may be cited for legitimating "proof texts" or as a rhetoric which presumes to represent the canon but in fact is a subtle but real deflection from that canon. Often, "Tradition" is cited to justify positions that are inconsistent with Oral Torah requirements. Hence, the Tradition of culture inertia is not the Tradition of Torah. Take for example the idiom "Torah Yiddishkeit." Tradition of culture is social glue and, by dint of social inertia, is respected. When culture tradition conflicts with Torah law, the Orthodox Jew ought to bends her/his beliefs and modifies behavior so that Torah law is preserved. Rabbi Jacob Neusner argues that "Judaism" refers to the "religion of the Jews." The Judaism of the Dual [Written and Oral ] Torah is that Judaism recorded in the literary canon with its encoded norms that have defined the trajectory of subsequent successor Judaisms. Thus, since the Torah is not given in Yiddish, "and a Torah Yiddishkeit" religion, even if "obedient" to the Halakhah, privileges one culture idiom over another. Ironically, the Dual Torah privileges Hebrew –and not Yiddish–as the language of the Jews. [Sifre to Deuteronomy 46]

Because I am a pluralist who fiercely defends that autonomy that the Torah provides when it does not command or forbid, I concede that there are in principle a finite set of alternative legitimate Jewish options, especially with regard to learning and to parsing Judaism's canon of sacred text. I prefer the historical/philological approach to Torah study that is taught at Yeshiva University's Bernard Revel Graduate School and at Israel's modern Orthodox Bar Ilan University to the so-called conceptual approach espoused in the yeshivot, where the culturally canonical rabbis are authorized to read their values and biases into the holy text rather than of committing themselves to the values that are recorded in those texts, understood according to the rules of philology and cast in the context of history. The concept that the learned rabbi formulates becomes the filter by which the Talmudic text must be processed and understood. In contrast, the modern Orthodox Jew will apply the best method of study available to decode the canon and then apply its norms.

The great Bar Ilan Talmudist, Rabbi Professor Isaac Gilat, opposed the admission to Bar Ilan University of those who refused military service because, as a modern scholar committed to Orthodoxy, he maintained that it is the holy book and not the parochial impulse that determines Jewishly valid opinion. As we will show, The Dual Torah law is very precise and clear on this issue, and the plain sense of the canonical norm is rejected by those whom claim to be the "most" Orthodox.

The insight whereby a rabbinic elite formulates new and contemporary Torah based upon "intuition"—because textual evidence is absent—is called "Daat Torah." It is, however, necessary to distinguish between the Daat Torah [religious opinion] of the Torah, or religion that God reveals in the Dual Torah canon, and the so-called Daat Torah of people who claim understand the secret meaning of Torah, which is conveniently congruent to the needs and policies of its community. For this Orthodox subgroup, their rabbinic elite represent authentic "orthodoxy," or correct belief. Unlike the Judaism of the Dual Torah, in which there is no human being who is above review, questioning the religious intuition of the living sage is the moral equivalent of questioning the Torah given by God to Moses at Sinai. Direct recourse to texts on the part of one who is not a member of this elite is misguided at best and heretical at worse because the questioning offender presumes to be able to read the canon. I strongly suspect that Orthodoxy's parochials oppose modern scholarship applied to Judaism's canonical library not because the method denies revelation [it cannot deny revelation because the revelation act is not given to test] but because the method empowers the learning Jew with the ability to make an autonomous reading and religious response to the Torah canon. A similar critique was made of Maimonides' magisterial code, which empowers precisely because it informs. One Rosh Yeshiva taught that only great rabbis have a right to religious opinions, and "regular" rabbis are no more than policemen. In a private communication to an Orthodox educator, this Rosh Yeshiva counseled that education should not encourage students to be creative. Ironically, it is the community rabbi and not the yeshiva teacher, who decides the law. The Jewish protocol is no different than secular law, according to which the professor describes the law, but the judge prescribes how the law is to be applied. According to the Orthodox Judaism of the Dual Torah, axioms articulated by sages that are not found in the Torah, when presented as Torah, are misrepresentations of the Torah that tolerates neither additions nor subtractions. Concepts based on "intuition" rather than textual demonstration inevitably reflect the culture bias of those who advance these concepts. Maimonides, Idolatry 1:1-2 identifies this kind of "leadership" in order that it may be identified and resisted. mEduyot 2:2 proclaims that when the Law neither commands nor forbids, the law implicitly authorizes. It is insufficient to claim that an act [the locus classicus is the issue of women acting as kosher slaughterers, which the Talmud permits and some medievals and moderns forbid] violates some people's sensibilities. It claimed that since the act is neither practiced nor remembered, it must be forbidden. Dual Torah Judaism, the Judaism that Orthodoxy officially endorses, explicitly rejects this claim.

Army service in Israel is the legal controversy that exemplifies the tension between the culture of Jews and the religion of the Jews. It is claimed that it is morally and religiously wrong to draft yeshiva men and any women in the Israeli army. In order to sustain this claim, citations from the canon are required. Secularists contend that those who seek exemptions are either traitors or parasites, and modern Orthodoxy regards the exemption to be morally intolerable and religiously inconsistent with common sense and the commonly accepted Dual Torah canon.

It has been proclaimed that it is "Torah opinion," or Daat Torah, that yeshiva students must be exempted from Israeli military service. We are also taught, also as Daat Torah, that women may not be drafted into the Israeli army. And we are further informed that the learning of Yeshiva students protects the State of Israel. However, bSota 44b and Maimonides, Kings, 7:4 rule that in an obligatory war, a war to preserve the state and Jewish population of Israel, we draft the groom from his room and his bride from his side." [literally, the wedding canopy].

The Dual Torah's position regarding on military service is thus relatively clear. Judaism distinguishes between optional or political wars and commandment or defensive wars. There are exemptions available for the optional or political wars. And the yeshiva student who wishes to enlist may do so, but may not be conscripted. With the loss of the breastplate oracle whereby God agrees to such a war, it is no longer permitted to engage in optional or political wars. Thus, the Dual Torah rabbis employed exegesis to declare that political wars are immoral. For the Romans, a defensive or retaliatory war is a just war, and they have the right to provoke to war those whom they wish to conquer. The claim that in our time that the learning of Torah of the yeshiva protects the State of Israel is therefore without merit. Clearly, this principle could only apply when conscripting for the now defunct political war. The Judaism of the Dual Torah hardly views the self-serving spinning of the Torah canon favorably.

Dual Torah opinion may not be proclaimed without demonstration by any individual, no matter how otherwise pious or learned, but only by the Great Sanhedrin when it is sitting in session. The claim that an opinion is Torah [a] without demonstrating how that it emerges from the Dual Torah documents and [b] when it is in apparent and undefended contradiction of norms recorded in those documents, is rejected because, for all of its pretense, violates the claim Torah practice and principle. The sin of the rebellious judge is not arguing in dissent, but advocating the acting upon that dissent against the Dual Torah. If the desire of Hamas and al Qaida is to destroy Israel, we have an obligatory war for which no exemptions are religiously licit.

When asked by a member of my community how it can be that the holy texts of Judaism do not comport with "accepted practice," I suggested that the need to be accepted by peers and to be approved by the community elite is a much more powerful force than a belief informed by learning or conscience. For the Jew in the pew, belonging to and behaving according to socially accepted norms are more important than believing according to the Divine mandate and acting consistently according to that mandate. Rabbi Alfred Cohen suggests that "authentic Jewish leadership is not constricted by the niceties of academic precedent, but acts from a broade and deeper appreciation of halakhic norms, which may take precedence over other considerations." [Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society 16 (Fall 1988), 42. In other words, some within the professing Orthodox rabbinate will ignore laws that, if put into practice would be hurtful to the community. Challenging this doctrine would render the challenger persona non grata in the community because of the insolence of the challenge and the embarrassment wrought by the arrogant airing of dissent. It is not for naught that Rabbi Saul Berman affirmed that it takes courage to be modern and Orthodox.

The Daat or opinion of Torah is recorded in Torah documents. Until and unless we are told why the Talmudic law, faithfully codified by Maimonides, must be suspended, the Talmudic law remains in force. The sociologist Samuel Heilman has shown, in his Defenders of the Faith, that one's ties to Orthodoxy might be undermined if one is accountable not to rabbis, but to military officers, whose discipline is military rather than theological and who will not enforce the ritual requirements of Right Wing Orthodoxy amongst the soldiers. This position, which socially understandable, is Jewishly unacceptable.

The appeal for the exemption of the pious from the national defense of Israel is premised upon a Copernican shift in the authority sourceof Jewish value. The locus of Torah authority has shifted from the object of the holy book to the inspired, unassailable intuition of the holy person. Advocates of this position deny anyone not accepted into their ideological elite to claim access to the holy books, what those books mean, and how the norms encoded in those books are to be applied. No one may parse the mind of Masorah [authentic Tradition] or the intention of the Divine Father except them. Even though "a Torah was commanded to us by Moses, an inherited [Tradition] legacy for the Congregation of Jacob [my emphasis]" we are told to submit not to our biased reading of the holy book to holy people, who according to their view are free of bias and unlike the Great Sanhedrin, are deemed to be virtually infallible. When people who claim to be so spiritual, holy and demand of the Jewish people that we suspend our judgment, conscience, and learning, we are constrained to ask the following questions:

1. Where are we taught that we must suspend our judgment?
2. If a rabbi appears to contradict the Torah, do we have a right to expect an answer and not have to suffer an insult or a put down regarding our inferiority?
3. How will Judaism be seen if the pious need not dirty and bloody their hands in war, but secularists and modern Orthodox have to die for those who seek exemptions?
4. And in the case of a political war, which today cannot be fought because, as noted above, the priestly breastplate is not available, in which the truly deserving students are exempt, how modest and pious is it to suggest that one is really worthy of an exemption?

If Abraham feared God, he was only allowed but expected to question God regarding the destruction of Sodom. If God may be questioned by Abraham, rabbis who are not sitting in the Sanhedrin are subject to review against the benchmarks of the public norms recorded in the Dual Torah canon.

Before Orthodoxy complains about the deviations of those who are not Orthodox, it would do well obey the rules as they are recorded in the canon without a spin that will be seen as self-serving. If we believe in God and in the Torah, defending the State of Israel with one's body, and not just with learning, is mandatory.

At stake in this conflict is the essence of authentic Jewish piety and the soul of Orthodoxy. People are conditioned to refer to the Haredim as the "fervently" Orthodox, implying that only those who go beyond the letter of the law serve God authentically and with the fire of fervor. Jewish piety is called "Yir'at Eloqim, fear of God. When a Jew recites a benediction, she or he praises "our God who is the King of the Cosmos." Because the authentically pious Jew does revere God, he or she cannot show deference to opinions one knows to be wrong. The Biblical Haredi trembles before God [Isaiah 66:5] and not people who mistake their intuition with God's just word. But an Orthodoxy which tolerates no dissent, even when dissent is based on a Torah informed conscience, privileges people who tremble before people over those who take God seriously.

The conflict regarding Orthodox Israeli military service defines the distinction between to competing claimants to Orthodox Judaism. One Orthodoxy defines propriety on the basis of values recorded in the Dual Torah canon and which are applied to current realities. Tradition for this Orthodoxy is legal. The other Orthodoxy, which is more vocal, describes itself as fervent which is authenticated by its presenting itself in everyday life as fervently extra strict and counter culturally anti-modern. These two Judaisms , Modern and Harei, are competing for the souls of their offspring, the respect of the non-Orthodox majority, and for recognition of its own adherents that it in fact presents the right belief, the proper behavior prescription, and that it is the community which one would wish to belong.

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