SPIRITUALITY IS NOT AN EXCUSE

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This week, thousands of Israelis found themselves trapped in traffic as Haredi demonstrations brought major highways and railway lines to a standstill. Routes 1, 4 and 6 were blocked.

Traffic on the Ayalon Highway ground to a halt. Trains were stopped, passengers forced to get off, and people attempting to reach Ben-Gurion Airport were stranded. Inevitably, there were clashes with police and confrontations with frustrated motorists.

In one particularly tasteless display, protesters wore yellow stars modelled on those imposed on Jews by the Nazis, except that the word “Jew” had been replaced with “deserter.”

The demonstrations were organized by the extremist Haredi group known as the Jerusalem Faction, in response to the arrest of Haredi draft evaders and those who surrounded the private home of the Deputy Chief Justice last week.

To be clear, the protesters did not represent every Haredi Jew, or even every Haredi opponent of military enlistment. But the position they espouse is not confined to this small vocal group. Haredi politicians and rabbinic authorities repeatedly assert that military service threatens the spiritual identity of Haredi young men and must be avoided at all costs.

The army, they say, is not merely physically dangerous; it is religiously dangerous. A young man immersed in Torah study would enter the IDF spiritually refined and emerge diminished. His standards will decline, his outlook will change, and his commitment to Torah will weaken.

Truthfully, this concern is not imaginary. Military environments are not centers of spiritual contemplation, and the IDF is a vast organization containing people of every religious level and outlook. There are legitimate questions about religious accommodations, mixed environments, modesty and the preservation of a soldier’s Haredi identity. For those who prize a life removed from modernity, allowing teenagers to join the IDF is a serious risk.

But behind these concerns lies a larger claim: that spiritual elevation may justify withdrawal from the physical responsibilities of Jewish national life. After all, it is argued, the Jewish people cannot survive without a class devoted exclusively to Torah and spiritual pursuits.

This argument is front and center in the fight over the universal draft, but Parshat Shlach Lecha suggests that it is not as pious as it sounds. The conventional understanding of the spies sent by Moses to scout Canaan is that they were frightened by what they saw and decided that entry into the land was beyond the abilities of a recently freed slave nation. They saw fortified cities and powerful warriors, and lost their nerve.

But these were not ordinary men. The Torah describes them as distinguished leaders. They had witnessed the Exodus, crossed the Red Sea and stood at Mount Sinai. They had seen Pharaoh and his army destroyed without the Jewish people firing a single arrow. Perhaps their objection was not simply that war was frightening. Perhaps they believed that war was beneath them.

The Jewish people in the wilderness occupied an extraordinary spiritual position. They ate manna from heaven, drank miraculous water and travelled beneath the Clouds of Glory. Their clothes did not wear out. They were free to devote themselves to Torah under the exalted leadership of Moshe Rabbeinu.

Entering the Land of Israel would end all that. Manna would stop falling. Fields would need to be ploughed and crops harvested. Governments would need to be formed, roads constructed, and material disputes adjudicated. And before any of that could happen, the Canaanite nations would have to be confronted in battle.

Men who had stood at Sinai would be required to carry swords. People who had heard the voice of God would have to plan ambushes, storm cities, and kill enemy combatants. The spies may have recoiled not only from danger, but from the possibility of spiritual descent.

Was this what was to become of the nation that had experienced divine revelation? Were they really going to exchange the study halls of Torah for the mud, blood and moral ambiguity of war?

Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschütz, in his Ya’arot Devash, offers an important insight into this mentality. He describes early pietists who chose to live in caves and isolated places, distancing themselves from human society and its temptations.

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai famously spent years in a cave, enabling him to attain extraordinary spiritual heights. There is genuine holiness in withdrawal. A person who separates himself from worldly distractions can achieve levels impossible amid the noise and compromises of ordinary life.

But the Ya’arot Devash then turns to Yosef. Yosef was confined in prison, cut off from normal society. In theory, it was an ideal environment for spiritual isolation. Yet Yosef desperately wanted to leave—not because he sought comfort or freedom, but because he understood that the ultimate objective was to live within God’s world, accept its responsibilities, confront its dangers, and elevate it.

The cave may be spiritually safe, but the safety of the cave is not the destiny of the Jewish people.

This was the challenge the spies failed to understand. Their spiritual world in the wilderness was authentic and magnificent, but it was never intended to be permanent. Indeed, it had become a mirage that warped their thinking.

The Torah was not given so that the Jewish people could remain indefinitely at the foot of the mountain, protected from the world. It was given so that they could enter the world and transform it. That meant farming, conducting business, establishing courts, caring for the vulnerable, building a society—and, when necessary, defending that society by force of arms.

War is ugly. Even a justified war is tragic. Soldiers encounter death, cruelty, fear and moral confusion. No serious person should romanticize the battlefield. But when an enemy threatens Jewish lives, refusing to fight is not spiritual refinement. It is abandonment.

The men fighting on Israel’s borders today are not engaging in some grubby secular activity from which Torah Jews should remain unsullied. They are protecting Jewish mothers and children, synagogues and yeshivot, Shabbat tables and Torah scrolls. Without them, there is no protected world of Torah study.

Haredi objectors claim that the IDF threatens their spiritual existence, while relying on that same IDF to protect their physical existence. Soldiers are asked to enter Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, leaving behind wives, children, businesses and studies, while Haredim claim that their own contribution is too spiritually precious to interrupt.

Torah study is unquestionably a protection for the Jewish people. It is not a decorative luxury. But the Torah never contemplated a nation in which you can claim spiritual exemption from the duty to defend everyone else. When the Greeks overtook the Temple under Antiochius, even the priests, led by Matityahu and his sons, took up arms and went to war.

This does not mean that every yeshiva student should be pulled from his Gemara tomorrow morning and placed in a combat unit. Israel needs carefully designed Haredi frameworks, genuine religious safeguards and respect for Haredi culture.

But an exception cannot encompass an entire population, and concern about spiritual risk cannot become a universal license to transfer physical risk to other Jews.

Perhaps this is why the generation of the spies was punished so severely. Their mistake was wrapped in the language of spiritual preservation. They wanted the miracles, purity and uninterrupted Torah existence of the wilderness. But God had not asked them to preserve the wilderness. He had asked them to enter the land.

The question is not whether military service may involve spiritual danger. The question is what God expects when danger arrives at the Jewish people’s door. The story of the spies gives a stark answer: you cannot claim to be too holy to fight a war when that war must be fought.