I don’t think that anyone in Israel will ever forget last night. To be in fear of attack is one thing; to actually know that hundreds of UAVs and missiles are already in the air, on their way over to you, is another. I doubt that anyone outside of Israel can fully grasp the surreal feeling of dread and helplessness that we experienced. Almost nobody went to sleep. We readied our emergency rooms and obsessively checked the news as aircraft endlessly flew overhead. We all figured that today would be a day of chaos. Somehow, despite all the booms and explosions, in the early morning eventually ..read more

Although several brigades have been pulled out of Gaza, many thousands of soldiers still remain, fighting to defeat Hamas and get the hostages out. Meanwhile, thousands of other soldiers are defending the northern border and preparing for war with Hezbollah. Then there’s the Iranian threat, which has gotten significantly more serious, and which the IDF is preparing for. And it was also revealed that an enormous amount of weapons have been smuggled into the West Bank. With conflict and the potential for further conflict on so many fronts, the IDF has to very carefully plan how to allocate it ..read more

There’s a popular slogan in Israel that appears on car stickers, jewellry and suchlike: Ein Li Eretz Acheret, “I have no other country.” The phrase comes from the title of an iconic and extremely moving song written by Ehud Manor, with music composed by Corinne Allal, and originally recorded in 1986 by Gali Atari; we will mention those names again later. Its opening lines and chorus are Ain li eretz acharet, gam im admati bo’eret, “I have no other country, even if my land is burning.” A neighbor of mine, who was experiencing considerable war anxiety about the land burning, told me that he d ..read more

My eldest daughter had a hard day yesterday. First, she went to the funeral of one of the four soldiers who was just killed, Amitai Even-Shoshan, who was a friend of hers. After the funeral, she went to the azkarah commemorating one year since the murder of her friend from midrasha (seminary), Maya Dee hy”d. These are not the only people that she knew personally who have lost their lives this past year. This is not how I grew up. When I was growing up, the only funerals that I attended were those of my elderly grandparents. In England, it was almost inconceivable that someone I knew would h ..read more

I. Rabbi Dovid Kornreich, whose article about Israel I critiqued the other day, claimed that my post contained errors and asked me to report three corrections that he regarded as particularly important. Since, in the past, I was extremely upset that both Rabbi Meiselman and Rabbi Kornreich issued various slanderous falsehoods about me and did not retract even when these were pointed out, I decided to post Rabbi Kornreich’s points here. I will leave it to readers to decide whether his points are correct and/or substantive. First, Rabbi Kornreich said that contrary to what I read in his Linke ..read more

Hooray, it’s parashat Shemini! My favorite parasha discusses a wealth of animals, both in the list of eight reptiles that transmit impurity when dead, and in the laws of kosher and non-kosher creatures. And for this post, I’d like to talk about bats and penguins. Which, conveniently, were on hand for me to take a selfie with just now. The Torah gives a list of birds that are not kosher; whatever is not mentioned, is ipso facto kosher. At the end of the list of non-kosher birds is the atalef, which has long been universally understood to refer to the bat. This seems problematic – the bat is ..read more

If it weren’t for the fact that Rav Tzvi Friedman, leader of the extremist Peleg Yerushalmi faction, declared that it would be better that his grandchildren would eat pork or be killed by Hamas rather than join the IDF, this would be unbelievable. From the Kikar Shabbos website (translation is via Google translate): “In light of the government’s harsh decree to draft yeshiva students into the defense forces, a number of distinguished Rabbonim and askanim (community activists) have met to devise strategies to save the world of Torah. There is still hope that the accursed law will be revoked ..read more

How big is the gulf that separates charedim from the rest of Israel? Consider the following poster: The poor mother cannot sleep at night, out of fear that her son will be drafted. Oy!!! Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of mothers around the country cannot sleep for other, more serious reasons. Then there’s Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch, one of the leaders of the Litvishe charedi world. In a speech in which he equated not receiving free money for yeshivos with “cancelling the right to learn Torah,” he also declared as follows: “We need mesiras nefesh!” Mesiras nefesh?! Mesiras nefesh has a rea ..read more

Following the government’s failure to submit a workable proposal regarding charedim and the army, the legal basis for their exemption has been cancelled. This does not mean that the 66,000 exempt charedim are going to be drafted next week. But the immediate significance of this is that the government is no longer allowed to be giving them money to be in yeshiva. Predictably, the response from the charedi world is hysteria and absurd rhetoric and conflating “Torah” with “allowing every charedi male age 18-24 to avoid army,” and pretending that having a hundred thousand people in yeshiva (or ..read more

It’s Judgment Day for the charedi draft issue. Cabinet Resolution 682 allowing the state not to draft Haredi men is about to expire. The government has not stood by its commitment to present the court substantive proposals for tackling the issue, and it has requested a 12-hour extension in order to do so. The court has not yet responded. I think that I’ve covered most of the issues relating to this - the obligation for every community to participate in sharing the responsibility for national defense (and the economy), the lack of Torah basis for claiming that learning Torah is a substitute ..read more