On Chareidi Draft Dodging

A friend sent me this tweet, itself a comment on the above Hamodia article titled, “Learning from Past Mistakes” on why Chareidim needn’t serve in the army and why the national religious camp should genuflect to Chareidi supposed idealism and whatever. The article is bad enough without wasting time on translation.

What follows is my dawn response to same friend who thought it deserved a wider audience, and so here goes.

The twitter response to the article is kind. It's difficult to read the article as its entire premise is fundamentally false. The reason there's so much sympathy with fallen soldiers is because it's so cheap. It’s of the NW and Flatbush variety. Terrible, yemach shemom and what's the date on the milk?

You cannot care at the same level if everywhere around you life has barely stopped and your worry is where to take the kids out, or which Swiss mountain for the better off. Just look at the local streets in London full of able-bodied Israeli youngsters having the time of their life, schnoring or visiting for simches while their compatriots have fathers, sons and brothers away for prolonged periods and all that that entails and many dealing with the grief and burden that their loved ones and breadwinners will never be returning. And this is before the ideological differences that's automatically wary of expressions of too much empathy.

Then the article also tries chanife of the smarmiest kind. "Dear Brothers" and trying to offer ideological comradeship as if fighting in battle is saying Tehilim in Kerestir rather than say paying your taxes which few of them do. As if all wars are like the ones in chumesh: Hashem says, Moshe does and it's all over in a handful of psukim.

The idea that living in a country carries fundamental responsibilities irrespective of bungling and corrupt politicians, mistakes that cost lives, wasted resources and bad execution is alien to their groupthink because it's never taught and they see it nowhere in practice. Their gedoilim are models of perfection, their politicos shelichei derachmono and their way of life God ordained. And even when they wink and joke about it, that's in itself a luxury.

Most have never experienced a life where your education and career choices, your kids' schools, the clothes and hat you wear, even the colour of your shoes and choice of your bedmate are up for debate. They have no idea what it means to have a choice in the simplest and most intimate issues in life, to make your own decisions and to pay the price if you get it wrong. So from where should the idea come of strapping on a gun, compromising on food choices and never mind kashrus and chumres, minyan, mikveh, dress and everything these mollycoddled communities take for granted while provided to them and facilitated by others? Why should they think that they must surrender not just the only lifestyle they've ever known but also risk their life and limb for issues they barely understand beyond some crude headlines?

And so they distort and distract and claim credit for how much they care. Why shouldn't they care if caring is all they have to give?