Bob Dylan’s Forgotten Pro-Israel Ballad

In 1983, the American Jewish musician, who turned seventy-five yesterday, composed and recorded a song about the Jewish state, entitled “Neighborhood Bully.” While the song was written in the context of Israel’s war in Lebanon, the lyrics remain relevant. Gabe Friedman writes:

The [song] equates Israel with an “exiled man,” who is unjustly labeled a bully for fending off constant attacks by his neighbors. Dylan released the song on his second studio album, Infidels, in the wake of his brief born-again-Christian phase during the late 1970s and early 1980s . . . :

Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one.
He got no place to escape to, no place to run.
He’s the neighborhood bully. . . .

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized.
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He’s the neighborhood bully.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Arts & Culture, First Lebanon War, Israel

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society