Natan Slifkin's Blog, page 14

Israelopathic Israelis

One of the most curious phenomena surrounding Israel is the existence of Israelis who really, really hate it. It’s a pointless distraction to discuss whether this is exactly the same as antisemitism or not. I prefer to use the term Israelopathy, meaning a pathological and irrational obsession with, and hatred of, Israel. Often it shares the same features that Sharansky describes as characteristic of antisemitism - delegitimization, demonization, and double-standards.

I’m not talking about Jews in...

Rabbis on the Inside

A very significant article appeared in Makor Rishon recently, presented an interview with three charedi rabbis. Here is an AI translation, lightly touched up by a friend. It’s a long article but crucial reading.

Disconnection, detachment, historical consciousness, and national missed opportunities: Three Torah scholars from the heart of the Lithuanian yeshiva world speak openly and critically about the concepts that cause the Haredi society to entrench itself in its opposition to enlistment, and ...

Crocodile Tears

In the Agudah convention last week, Rabbi Uri Deutsch addresses the topic of how Torah Jews in America should feel at this stage in the war. He says that they should not feel too upset, and they should follow the example of charedim in Israel, for whom life is essentially back to normal (I would personally like to point out that for charedim in Israel, the war never really changed their lives to begin with). At minute 45 - I had to listen to it twice to ensure my ears weren’t deceiving me - Rabb...

No Right to Refuse

Several months ago, there was an episode of the Headlines podcast about achdus. There was a serious problem with how the entire discussion was about how achdus means getting along with people, without any mention of how achdus requires concern for others and mutual responsibility - specifically with regard to army service. I wrote to R. Ari Wasserman, who hosted the show, and in response he put together a new episode discussing charedim and army. You can listen to the episode at this link.

R. Wa...

GI Yosef

I came across an irresistible toy for sale in a local store. It’s an IDF action figure! As a kid, I was never into GI Joe - Star Wars was more my thing. But this is special!

The figure, picture here alongside a sefer that I’m learning, isn’t just a mass-produced toy soldier with an Israeli flag added to it. It’s part of a set called Giborei Yisrael, “Israeli Heroes,” created specifically as an Israeli approach to war. And there are several figures available, each with background stories, represen...

The Belz of Change

The alarm bells in Israel were ringing long before October 7th shattered assumptions about security. A third of Jewish first-graders were in charedi school systems that were opposed to secular education and professional careers, let alone army service. Poverty in the charedi sector was creating disaster not only for that community, but also posed a threat to the entire country. As Jonathan Rosenblum pointed out years ago in Mishpacha magazine, a growing community that is undereducated and undere...

How Many Learners?

How many of the approximately 66,000 draft-age charedim should be enlisted?

The question has to be broken down into an ideological question and a practical question. To deal with the latter first: enlisting 66,000 charedim is simply not going to happen in any circumstances. It’s just impossible. You can’t force people who are totally opposed to fighting for the nation into doing so, and there is no point in even trying. Many of them would rather go to prison.

What can be done is to incentivize ar...

The Political Spectrum regarding Israel

Above: What AI generated as an image for this post.

There is a spectrum of views regarding Israel and the Palestinians. In this post, I divide it into seven categories. At the extremes are extreme ideological positions; in the middle, there are less extreme positions, tempered with practicalities. Of course, one could create further categories within this spectrum based on finer distinctions; you could create hundreds if not thousands of categories! But I think that while this list could certainl...

The Partition Plan

Today is the anniversary of the Partition Plan for Palestine, which was proposed by the UN after Transjordan had already been allocated to the Arabs. It gave a slightly larger area to the Jews, in anticipation of the millions of refugees from Europe, but most of that land was deserts and swamps.

Jews celebrated, even though it was much less than they hoped for and would be difficult to defend, and formally accepted partition.

Arabs mostly rejected any form of partition; the General Secretary of th...

Charedi Draft-Dodging: The Movie

Some charedim recognize that they should be sharing the burden and mitzvah of protecting the nation. And they may feel a need to leave yeshiva and join one of the frameworks for charedim that are being set up by the army. And so a certain organization has created a video to dissuade them, and to encourage them to call a helpline which will assist them in avoiding army service. Here it is:

In case you can’t follow the Hebrew, the gist of it is that if you join the IDF, you will be ordered around a...