The Chief Rabbi's comments: Tone deaf and damaging - comment

Eight months after a WhatsApp group of doctors formed to encourage “relocation” from Israel because of the judicial reform debate, Israel’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef on Saturday night encouraged the emigration of yeshiva students if the state obligated them to serve in the IDF.

Both threats were arrogant, and both stemmed from the same mistaken premise: that those threatening to leave are doing anyone a favor by staying here.

Just as the country could get by – maybe not as well, but it could get by – if a few hundred or even a few thousand doctors left because others would inevitably come and take their place, so could the country manage if tens of thousands of yeshiva students packed up and sought study halls elsewhere especially if those yeshiva students are not enhancing the country’s security by physically defending it.

What the doctors and Yosef speaking for the yeshiva students failed to grasp is that it is a religious and historical privilege to be counted among the generation that returned to Israel after two millennia. With all its problems and faults, Israel is also a vibrant, thriving, exciting, good place to live – which is why so many have chosen to uproot themselves from other lands to come here. It is also the only place on Earth where the country’s pulse, calendar, rhythm, and soul are Jewish.

From crisis to crisis 

For 75 years, the country has crept from one crisis to the next; the doors were wide open, yet most of the people did not rush for the exits. Why not? Because both in terms of day-to-day life and in terms of feeling a sense of doing something significant, Israel has tremendous appeal.

Israel of 2024, with nearly 10 million people, of which 7.2 million are Jews, is not Israel of 1965, a country of 2.6 million people and only 2.3 million Jews when it was viewed as a national failure and tragedy when people emigrated. Today, there is a strong sense that if people want to leave, they should go – no one is keeping them here.

Yosef, in his more than ten years as Sephardi Chief Rabbi, has uttered more than a few divisive comments. Few, however, were as tone-deaf and potentially damaging as his comment on Saturday night.

“There are yeshiva students who go to reserves, and [while there] not all of them can learn Torah,” Yosef said. “They were all able to be kollel students exempt from the army. The tribe of Levi is exempt from the army. They are not taken under any circumstance, no matter what. If they force us to go to the army, we will all leave Israel. We will buy tickets and leave.”

The secular population, he continued, “needs to understand that without Torah, without kollels, without yeshivot – there is no existence, there would be no success for the army.” He added that the success of the soldiers is only due to the study of the yeshiva students.

This comment threatening mass emigration came three years after Yosef advised against making aliyah, unless to a religious neighborhood.

“When I visited the Tunisian Jewish community, I was asked to rule whether or not Djerba’s Jews should immigrate to Israel,” Yosef said in 2021. “I told them it depends on where they would live. If they are going to live in an Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood or next to [the Tunisian ‘Kisei Rahamim’ [yeshiva in Bnei Brak], then they should immigrate to Israel. But if they are to live in a place like Herzliya or another one of the secular locations… they should stay where they are.”

One year Yosef counseled Diaspora Jews to stay in place unless they were going to live in a religious neighborhood, on another he advised yeshiva students to leave the country if commanded to defend it.

His statement Saturday night was especially tone-deaf in that it was said as the country continues to bury soldiers – including those who study Torah – killed while fighting enemies of the Jewish people. On the same day Yosef made his comment, Maj. (res.) Amishar Ben-David, a father of five from Eli who studied in the past in Bnei David yeshiva in Eli, was killed in Gaza.

How painful it must be to the relatives of the fallen to hear a rabbinical leader say that it is okay for their loved ones to fight and die for the country but that others need not do so. How insensitive. Does this type of comment breed unity or solidarity? On the contrary, it destroys unity and solidarity, which is what makes it so damaging.

Solidarity is a sense that we are all in this together. Yosef’s comments send the exact opposite message: we are not all in this together. Some need to risk their lives for the collective, while others simply do not.

His words are damaging on another plane as well: they reinforce a dangerous sense among Israel’s enemies that Israel is falling apart and losing its resolve. If the country’s chief rabbi threatens that tens of thousands of people will leave, can Israel’s enemies be blamed for coming to this conclusion: “Hold on, keep applying pressure, and eventually the Zionist entity will dissolve from within.” Iranian, Hezbollah, and Palestinian newspapers all highlighted Yosef’s comments on Sunday.

Yosef’s comments also create a false binary reality. In the world he described, either there are yeshivot and kollels and no army service for the ultra-Orthodox, or army service and no yeshivot or kollels.

There can, however, be both. For starters, most people when talking about haredi conscription are not talking about drafting all the yeshiva students eligible for the draft, but rather the thousands who claim to be studying Torah full time, when in actuality they are not.

Secondly, even in the unlikely eventuality that everyone would be drafted, the ultra-Orthodox youth will be free to study in yeshivot until army service, and then return to the study hall once their service is over.

Nobody, unlike the impression Yosef created, is trying to close down yeshivot or uproot Torah in Israel. Rather, what those keen on haredi conscription after October 7 are trying to do is provide the IDF with enough soldiers to ensure that Israel – where Torah is studied at a level unprecedented in all of Jewish history – is also not uprooted.