Drafting the ultra-Orthodox is a diversion. It’s more important for their kids to learn math and English
Prospect Magazine in the UK has posted my portrait of the crisis facing Israel’s haredim – and all the rest of us.
“The system just isn’t relevant to life,” says Asher Gold. He wears black trousers, a black velvet skullcap, and a pale lavender shirt, one shade from white, one shade away from the standard dress of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish male. The other four young men at the table are more circumspect about dissidence; they wear white shirts. The café where they’ve chosen to meet me is in a courtyard one flight down from street level in a Jerusalem commercial district: a place both public and removed from sight, appropriate for scathing words.
Gold, 25, is talking about the accepted course of ultra-Orthodox life in Israel, in which men devote much or all of adulthood to religious study rather than to making a living. “At some stage a person looks at the situation and says, ‘This just cannot continue,’” he says. “‘No one is throwing loaves of bread from heaven. You have to go to work.’”
“The manna,” says Elimelech, another of the men, “isn’t coming down.”
“There was an ideal society, a society that can’t exist in the real world, and yet it existed,” says a third.
“People lived in a utopia,” says Gold, “until the reality shattered.”
Other Israelis would dismiss the assertion that ultra-Orthodox society was ever a utopia, noting that the manna that feeds it comes not from heaven, but from the government, and that too much is still falling. But they would not disagree that ultra-Orthodoxy as lived in Israel has become unsustainable.
Ultra-Orthodoxy is a subculture whose members live by a stringent version of Jewish religious law and belief and who seek to keep surrounding society at arm’s length. The means of being a people apart include dressing distinctively, living in self-segregated neighbourhoods and maintaining separate schools, where sacred texts are the main subject of study. Today’s Ultra-Orthodox Jews, or haredim, marry early and have many children. In Israel, where the military draft is universal for other Jewish men and most Jewish women, the ultra-Orthodox have been largely exempt.
This summer the issue of everyone bearing an “equal burden” for national defence has boiled over in Israeli politics. Yet the conscription argument may be a diversion from the real economic and political crisis. The haredi community is overwhelmingly poor, underemployed, and dependent on the rest of Israel. It is also growing rapidly, creating an ever-larger weight for wider society to carry. Unless ultra-Orthodox education changes and haredim are integrated into the workplace, the Israeli economy could collapse. “We could lose the country,” as a leading Israeli economist, Dan Ben-David, warns.
At the margins of ultra-Orthodox society itself, a sense of impending economic disaster is growing. Yet a change of direction is fraught with challenges. It requires haredi society to brave integration. It requires the state to spend more money, not less, on the ultra-Orthodox in the near term. The longer the change is delayed, the more politically difficult it will be to carry out. …
Read the rest here.
If one kept some form of universal service, military with other options, and trained those in the latter group, maybe this latter could act as a halfway house for the Ultra Orthodox. One could also have exemptions based on needed quotas, and balance the military vs other option by pay and years of service (maybe less time for military service). Reducing exemptions over years could phase in the process, limiting immediate oppostion. Perhaps, so long as choice is the final pivot, the Court would allow such a scheme. Equal burden is retained in principle, but paths for the U O are created, recognizing their backgrounds. But this would be expensive, and the unspoken part of your piece is the general stress of the present middle class, which will require funds as well.
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The settlements are a population and ideological escape valve for the State and the U O themselves; but they are defining a de facto greater Israel policy which produces an ever more militaristic State. Bibi says “we will never have a Jew lose his home” becomes Greater Israel expunging of resident Bank Palestinians. Without altering these social fault lines, apartheid complete seems inevitable.