Israel will be marking Shavuot – the festival commemorating the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai – with a new state budget that prioritizes the study of Torah above all else.
A budget that dedicates billions of shekels to tens of thousands of adult men who devote their lives to study and to schools where hundreds of thousands of children are taught nothing meaningful but Torah and Talmud.
A budget presented by a finance minister who has pronounced that his chosen economic theory is the promise in Deuteronomy 11: 13-14 that “if ye shall hearken diligently unto My commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give the rain of your land in its season, the former rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.
A budget the prime minister and the propaganda machine that takes its orders from him have decreed any criticism of is tantamount to antisemitism.
The criticism, if you dare make it, is stark and obvious: This budget encourages a large and growing proportion of Israeli society to not participate in the workforce, or even acquire the basic knowledge and skills that will enable it to do so in the future.
On current demographic and economic trends, the budget is leading Israel to an unsustainable and disastrous future.
A shrinking working public will have to pay the taxes and bear the burden of Israel’s security and economy – until they refuse to do so. Skilled workers will emigrate and those who remain will revolt. Israel will lose the edge that allowed it initially to survive in a hostile region and, ultimately, prosper. Unless it is torn apart by civil strife before that happens.
There is a historic Jewish values-based criticism of the budget as well: That it is not actually prioritizing Torah, certainly not any historically recognized version of it. That, with the exception of a tiny elite of scholars, Torah was never meant to be studied to the exclusion of other subjects and skills or instead of being gainfully employed. That to force others to finance your Torah study against their will is a desecration of all that the Torah stands for.
This is a bastardized and unprecedented version of Torah study, peculiar to the post-Holocaust ultra-Orthodox community in today’s Israel and a result of its dysfunctional and polarized coalition politics.
At no point in Jewish history did any Jewish community force its members to underwrite a large group of full-time Torah scholars. Torah was studied by those who also worked or were supported by a wealthy family or benefactors. Those who had neither and were still determined to devote themselves to scholarship accepted a life of self-inflicted poverty, often on the verge of starvation.
The late Prof. Menachem Friedman coined the term “society of learners” – an entire community devoted to study. This is a unique sociological phenomenon created by the Haredi leadership’s mission after the Holocaust to “rebuild” what had been destroyed in Eastern Europe, and the social and political conditions of modern Israel.
Even ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Diaspora, most of whom work full-time, are quietly critical of what has been created in Israel.
“I’m certain this wasn’t what the Hazon Ish intended,” an American Haredi rabbi told me last week. He was referring to Rabbi Avraham Yeshayah Karelitz, the leader of the “Lithuanian,” non-Hasidic stream of ultra-Orthodoxy who in 1952 demanded from Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, that the Haredim be granted autonomy to continue studying Torah and leading their insular lifestyle in the new Jewish state. He used the famous parable of the “empty cart,” which he likened to secular Israelis, which must make way for the “loaded cart” (the Haredim).
Since Karelitz died in 1953 – eight years after the Holocaust ended and five years after Israel’s foundation – when there were only a few hundred full-time students in a handful of struggling and privately funded yeshivas, it’s impossible to say what he would have thought. Back then, he got what he wanted from Ben-Gurion: an exemption for his students from military service.
Would he have demanded – as his successors have now – funding for hundreds of thousands of students? Who knows? Besides, today’s Israel is such a different place to the one 71 years ago when he and Ben-Gurion met.
Whether or not Karelitz envisaged today’s state-funded society of scholars, this is where Israel is today. And unless there’s a political upheaval in the near future and we have a government that is prepared and capable of radically changing tack, this is the Israel that every right-wing/religious ruling coalition will continue building. So the criticisms, while valid, are immaterial.
What this means is that Israel is now in the process of intentionally creating the world’s first post-work society. But unlike this future society predicted by thinkers like Oxford University economist Daniel Susskind in his books “A World Without Work” and “The Future of the Professions,” it won’t be automation and artificial intelligence that create an economy where most people will not have or need a job. It will be religious and nationalist politics.
Theoretically, exempting the Haredi community may not necessarily bankrupt Israel. Not only is Israel unique in having a large and growing chunk of its population being paid to remain out of the workforce. At the same time, it has by far the highest proportion of the workforce of any country in the world – around 10 percent – being employed in the high-tech sector.
Those 10 percent of Israelis create over half of Israel’s exported goods and services. Ironically, these are the Israelis who are most opposed to continuing to finance the Haredi community. And they are the ones who, if they stick around and continue working and developing Israeli technology, will ensure the success or failure of Israel’s post-work society of scholars.
Never in the long history of the Jewish people have so many people learned so much Torah. And never have so many Jews paid for them to do so, against their will. Every Shavuot, we reaffirm our acceptance of the Torah afresh. If the Torah is to be believed, Moses originally delivered the Torah on the 2,448th year of the creation of the world. Now, 3,335 years later, it’s the Israeli high-tech sector which is delivering the Torah once again to the Jewish people.
The Learners or the Earners – Which Israel Will Prevail?
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24.05.2023
Israel will be marking Shavuot – the festival commemorating the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai – with a new state budget that prioritizes the study of Torah above all else.
A budget that dedicates billions of shekels to tens of thousands of adult men who devote their lives to study and to schools where hundreds of thousands of children are taught nothing meaningful but Torah and Talmud.
A budget presented by a finance minister who has pronounced that his chosen economic theory is the promise in Deuteronomy 11: 13-14 that “if ye shall hearken diligently unto My commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give the rain of your land in its season, the former rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.
A budget the prime minister and the propaganda machine that takes its orders from him have decreed any criticism of is tantamount to antisemitism.
The criticism, if you dare make it, is stark and obvious: This budget encourages a large and growing proportion of Israeli society to not participate in the workforce, or even acquire the basic knowledge and skills that will enable it to do so in the future.
On current demographic and economic trends, the budget is leading Israel to an unsustainable and disastrous future.
A shrinking working public will have to pay the taxes and bear the burden of Israel’s security and economy – until they refuse to do so. Skilled workers will emigrate and those who remain will revolt. Israel will........
© Haaretz
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