Israel’s Response to the Mount Meron Tragedy Shows Its National Spirit

On Thursday night, a stampede left 45 people dead and many more injured at Mount Meron in the Galilee. They were among some 90,000 mostly ḥaredi pilgrims who gathered at the burial place of the 2nd-century sage Shimon bar Yoḥai for a traditional celebration of Lag ba-Omer. For several years, public-safety experts, government officials, and others have warned that the pilgrimages are dangerously overcrowded, and called for better regulation. Herb Keinon notes that there is much blame to go around, but finds in Israel’s response an inspiring patriotism:

After the initial shock of the scope of the tragedy seeped in, the concern of some when they heard the news was that in today’s Israel—a country where the divisions between the ḥaredi and non-ḥaredi communities have rarely been greater—this would be viewed as a sectoral tragedy, a ḥaredi tragedy, not a national one.

But that didn’t happen. The country, as it knows how to do in times of tragedy, rallied together. Flags were flown at half-mast for the victims, one or two of whom may not even have recognized the authority of the nation standing behind that flag. A day of national mourning was declared. Somber music was played on the radio. The voice of a seasoned radio presenter, . . . Esti Perez, cracked when she read the names, ages, and places of residence of the victims.

These deaths were not mourned only by the ḥaredi “tribe,” but by the whole nation. People from each of Israel’s “tribes” went out and donated blood, and people from each of Israel’s “tribes” shed tears when they heard the heartbreaking stories and saw the gut-wrenching images. Despite the super-charged and even hateful rhetoric of recent months, despite the deep divisions highlighted by the coronavirus, mystic bonds of brotherhood still bind people here—something that provides badly needed solace at trying times such as these.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Haredim, Israeli society, Lag ba'Omer

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