The New Middle East (34 page)

Libi told me:

We need the men to sit and study because that’s our army. We feel the reason we’ve been able to survive is because of these thousands of men sitting and studying daily from morning to night like my husband. Every man who gets up from his bench and goes to work feels like someone just left the army. We’re talking about a spiritual army versus a physical army [but] how do I explain to people who are not from a religious background that my husband sitting and studying is equal to your husband fighting in Gaza? But we saw it in the Six Day War. It was so obvious that there were miracles. We didn’t do it because we had a great army. Even today we need a lot of miracles, but it is hard for the secular community to see that, and so the Haredim not being in the army has caused a lot of ill will within the community.

Libi was born in America. She only came to Israel in 1980. The Haredi community she left behind in the States deals with these issues differently. Only in Israel do nearly
all
the ultra-Orthodox men spend their days doing nothing but study Jewish law. In the US and the UK the percentage of Haredi men in the workforce is the same as in the rest of the population.
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The Haredim in the West don’t feel any less pious for working, and neither are they considered to be any less pious by the wider community. In fact many of Judaism’s most revered rabbis, people held in high esteem by the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, during their lifetimes also had jobs.

Becoming a rabbi means studying well into your thirties. It requires dedication, and if you are among the few who make the grade then you have a useful and hugely respected role in the wider society. But of course not everyone can become a rabbi. So the vast majority of those men who fail reach middle age with absolutely no skills to do anything else. Unlike the women, their secular education ended after primary level, so they are totally unemployable. Each year Israel produces tens of thousands of middle-aged men who are not only a waste to the labour market but a drain on the economy. And as the demographics rise, so too does the loss to the state.

But Nilli, who does believe more Haredi men should also work, says the prejudice against the Haredim in Israel makes the job of working in the secular society harder than it is abroad.

When we moved into our first apartment as a young couple the upstairs neighbour came down and shouted: ‘You are stealing my money. Your food is my income tax.’ That was our welcome! One time in a company I worked for, a guy came for an interview and when the manager saw the tzitzit while the guy was sitting in the waiting room, that was it. ‘I don’t want a religious Jew in my company’ he said.

‘But you were in his company,’ I said to her.

‘Yes, but I’m a woman. He didn’t want a man because he thought this guy hadn’t served in the army. He didn’t even ask him, he just assumed he hadn’t served in the army.’

The people of Israel recognise the value of preserving their faith. The concern of the majority secular community is that they think too many people are doing it and not all of them should be. They will accept a select group of gifted individuals being supported by the state while they learn the tenets of the faith inside out. But they think too many ultra-Orthodox men are simply learning the Torah so that they need not do anything else. The essence of this clash has changed over the last few years into a huge debate in the country about the exemption, or rather constant deferment, of ultra-Orthodox men doing their national service in the IDF. In 2012 14 per cent of Israeli young men were given an exemption from their national service because they were ultra-Orthodox studying in a religious school, a yeshiva. That figure was likely to be 20 per cent by the end of the decade if changes to the law weren’t made.

At the creation of the state of Israel Ben-Gurion was asked by religious leaders to give an exemption from military service for 400 ultra-Orthodox men so that they could study the Torah. He was persuaded by the fact that as the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox communities were decimated by the Nazis in the Holocaust, there was value in allowing them to carry out their studies uninterrupted because it was good for the Jewish state, and the number he was asked to exempt was not huge. He agreed and the exemption stood. By 2012 that number had gone up to around 37,000 exempted from serving.
³⁰

The special exemption was formalised for five years in 2002 by what became known as the ‘Tal Law’. It was passed by the Israeli parliament and it allowed full-time religious students to indefinitely defer military service. The ‘Tal Law’ was extended again in 2007. By the time it came up for a further extension in 2012 the mood of the country had radically changed. The High Court ruled that the law was unconstitutional. Haredi youths are now technically subjected to the draft, though it has still not been fully enforced. However the mood of the country means that over time it probably will be.

The politicians have pointed towards the demographics and the need to be able to secure the nation by having enough fighters. They picked the security issue because nothing focuses minds in Israel like being told there is a lurking threat. The army agrees it is important, but more for society than security.

‘It’s not very important from a military perspective. Some more battalions of fighters is useful but it’s not the main issue,’ one of Israel’s top soldiers told me at his military HQ in Tel Aviv. ‘From the wider national perspective, to bring solidarity in Israeli society, to create the symbol of an army of all the people, that is very important. From an economic point of view it’s important that they are not left separated [from society] in these ghettos where they don’t get the same education as everyone else.’

He was articulating exactly what the Haredi leadership
say
are the motivating forces behind the push to draft their young men into the IDF: dragging them into the mainstream. That is why the rabbis are fighting against the draft.

I asked this commander whether it was a good idea for the Israeli army to have lots of soldiers in it who don’t believe in the state they are supposed to be willing to die to defend.

‘lt won’t come to that,’ he said.

We won’t have a situation where those who don’t want to serve will be serving in the military. You hear the rabbis saying: ‘We will all refuse to serve,’ but that doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground. There is transition going on among the Haredim. They still have their black and white suits and hats, but they are much more like Israelis than it may seem. It’s been changing and it will take years, maybe a few decades, but it has started to happen. They don’t have a choice and if we are patient and clever it will be a positive process, though there will be the occasional crisis.

The crisis that led to the nation’s soul-searching over the issue started with a song. In September 2011 nine Haredi officer-course cadets who formed part of the small number of special IDF brigades that take only religious soldiers walked out of an official concert to mark the 2008 war in Gaza. They did so because one of their fellow soldiers began to sing a solo. It was not that the singing was bad, it was that the voice belonged to a woman. They considered listening to her to be a contravention of religious law, and so they left. Half of the cadets were dismissed for disobeying orders to stay where they were. Their actions caused uproar in the secular society, where women share the burden equally with men when it comes to military service. One rabbi said he and other religious leaders would order their young men to continue to leave these events, ‘even if they are faced by a firing squad for doing so’.
³¹

The controversy shifted into a broader row about the role of the ultra-Orthodox, which in the end led to the shape of the new coalition that was formed in 2013. Things might have turned out very different if the IDF had marked the Gaza war with a disco instead, because like everything else in the country the issue of women singing is complicated.

Yoel Weber explained: ‘There is a phrase in the Talmud [a compilation of Jewish law] which says “the singing of a woman ignites passion”.’ That was why the men felt compelled to walk out. But, as Weber explained, the influence of modern technology has even made it difficult to interpret ancient Jewish laws.

There is a religious discussion about whether we are allowed to hear women singing on a tape, because we don’t know what the women look like. The original [Jewish law] is related to the women being present, so if we are just hearing a tape and we don’t know the women then that’s a whole new question, because then there is nothing to relate that urge to. But there is the issue of what if it’s a popular singer like Madonna. We know how she looks, we know how she moves. [At this point he did a brief jiggle in his chair which suggested he did indeed know her moves.] So we can relate to her, so when we hear her singing we might have in our minds the fantasy. So that’s a big discussion.

While the Haredim busy themselves trying to work out how to manage and hold back the secular culture that permeates into theirs, the secular world is trying to force them into submission. The numbers in the Haredi community are growing fast, but so is the determination by the secular world to sort the issue out before the ultra-Orthodox become too big and politically powerful a group to stop them.

Yoel Weber says his community is constantly under attack from what he calls ‘radical secularism’. And they are having trouble defending themselves because the modern world’s most dangerous, most potent weapon sneaks past the Haredi barricades down a broadband line.

‘The Internet is a very dangerous thing. There’s a big fight going on against the Internet,’ Weber said. Because he is a writer, he needs access to the Internet, but he does his best to avoid its insidious threat to his way of life. ‘The reason I have my computer right in the middle of the house is so it can’t control me too. If it’s in the middle of the house I can’t do whatever I feel like doing. I have a big problem. I try not to open those sites . . . the Internet is very very dangerous.’

While the Haredim do not pretend to be immune to the temptations of the modern world, they believe it is their religious duty to struggle inwardly and outwardly against these influences so that they can follow God’s true path. But even within the conservative Haredi mainstream the religious spectrum is broad. Nilli, Libi and Yoel are highly respected members of their communities, and their views reflect that broad spectrum. Nilli and Libi are leading a transformation in their own communities without, they believe, damaging their fabric. They are going out into the secular world to confront its preconceptions. By contrast, in Yoel’s community it is frowned upon if a woman even drives a car unless it is absolutely necessary.

‘I don’t think that even though my wife cannot drive that I respect her even one single per cent less than anyone else whose wife drives,’ Yoel told me.

‘Does your wife want to drive?’ I asked.

‘No, she doesn’t want to drive.’

‘So this is not being imposed on her?’

‘Nothing is being imposed!’ he said in a slightly exasperated tone.

There are those who are outcasts, who are rebels in the [Haredi] community, and when they got married nobody knew they were rebels. And then she says to her husband: ‘I want to drive’ and he says: ‘What do you mean you want to drive!’ and the husband says: ‘No, you can’t do it.’ But my wife was brought up [to understand] her position in the family and with the values that she has, and she doesn’t do that.

I suggested to him that perhaps paradoxically his community seemed to have more in common with the social values of very conservative Muslim societies in the region like Saudi Arabia than with the secular Jews just down the road.

I don’t take that as an insult. I have no problem with that because to my way of thinking conservative social values are the right way because it was that way in the past. The only problem is when you take your social values and shoot people and blow up buses. I have no problem with the social values of the Muslims if they are law-abiding, quiet people. If people decide they want to live religiously, to live with Sharia and the Koran or the Torah, who are you to tell them not to?

‘If you are asking me,’ said the Hebrew University’s Professor Alexander Yakobson, ‘if the ultra-Orthodox are on their way to making Israel some kind of Jewish variant of the Islamic Republic of Iran, then my answer is the state of Israel is on its way to make the ultra-Orthodox part of modern society, at least most of them.’

And the state of Israel also has plans to integrate the other marginalised section of society, the country’s Arabs, who have as much trouble as the Haredim working out their relationship with a state they too wish had not come into existence. There are attempts to force them as well to do some kind of national service, though this would not be military.

Perhaps the only comfort the ultra-Orthodox can take when it comes to their place in the social pecking order is that they are not at the bottom. That place is reserved for the Palestinians living inside the internationally recognised boundaries of Israel. These are often families that have lived on this land continuously for a lot longer than the vast majority of Jewish families living in Israel today. They are drawn from Arab communities that lived in Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel and who did not flee or were not driven from their homes during the brutally violent birth of the new nation.