Of all the aspects of the threatened draft of Eretz Yisrael’s bnei Torah one must be addressed before all others. Before we consider whether there is any way to explain our worldview to secular Israelis in terms they can understand and accept there is a far more important question to ponder: Do we shlomei emunei Yisrael accept and understand it? Do we perceive why this is evil? Do we appreciate just how great a danger this poses to our nation?

The unfortunate answer to a very large extent is that we do not. There is a huge perhaps unprecedented misunderstanding about this issue. This is evident simply from the conversations one has and hears as well as from numerous other developments. A sampling:

• A magazine produced by and for Torah Jews features a young chareidi woman’s account of her army service under the title “The Courage to Serve.” To enlist in defiance of not only family and a community where one “never truly fit in” but also of a psak of yehareig v’al yaavor indeed takes courage — not of a good sort.
• A frum website features a chareidi army battalion officer’s 12 questions for — scathing indictments of really — Eretz Yisrael’s frum community. It is an astounding exercise in blame the victim a specimen of cycle-of-violence-style moral equivalence that when aimed at Israel by the New York Times we all recognize as a perversion of logic and fact. But somehow its author’s background in Ponevezh and as a rosh kollel is supposed to give him carte blanche to perpetrate such distortions. It does not.
• A kippah-wearing politician whose policies seek quite simply to end the chareidi community as we know it visits these shores for a victory lap after an electoral win that will prove far more short-lived than he knows — and is received with high honor in shuls headed by talmidei chachamim and filled with ehrliche Yidden.

We must attain clarity on what is at stake and what precisely we believe. Let us begin with that on which both sides agree. Former Mossad head Ephraim Halevy recently stated that whileIran is “a formidable enemy” it does not represent “an existential threat” toIsrael. Rather it is “the growing haredi radicalization” in Israeli society that “poses a greater threat than … Ahmadinejad.”

Let us ignore for now if we can the breathtaking demonization of fellow Jews that statement represents. The man is right — Ahmadinejad is not the problem. There is indeed a threat different not only in degree but in kind an existential one facing the Jews inIsrael but it is not that slithering Persian snake and his mad pursuit of a nuclear device with which to bring about his dream of a world without Jews. It is there of course that the meeting of minds with Halevy ends and a gaping chasm wider than all the universe opens between him and us.

The great catchphrase that has all the wise men all the ostensible nonconformists and original thinkers shaking their heads and clucking their tongues in unison is “share the burden.” By this they mean the burden of defending our nation with the implicit assumption that we can all agree on who it is that poses the threat against which we must defend.

We dissent. The crux of the matter is not who protects our nation but who threatens it. And now stand warned: I will pronounce what is for many Jews an insufferable heresy. True we live today in such a wonderfully open pluralistic Jewish world in which “Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai” and the “multiplicity of voices” strewn across every Talmudic folio are invoked endlessly to permit the airing of the most outrageous of views in Judaism’s name. As a result there’s very little anymore that’s still regarded as blasphemous but I’ll now say something that remains so: Nevuchadnetzar couldn’t destroy the Beis HaMikdash nor can Ahmadinejad destroy Eretz Yisrael. Only Jews those most spiritually potent of creatures whose “feet are planted on earth but whose heads reach the highest heavens ” can.

There I said it. Actually I didn’t say it — Rav Chaim Volozhiner did in his Nefesh HaChaim (1:4). But please understand: In speaking thus Rav Chaim the Vilna Gaon’s prime disciple was stating an axiomatic truth of the Judaism of the ages. He was expressing a principle so fundamental to the Judaic worldview that it leaps from the pages of every sefer in Tanach and every masechta in Shas: Spiritual reality underlies — indeed gives rise to — physical reality and thus is the far more real of the two with the latter mirroring the former.

Welcome to Jewish reality — also known as reality period — where spiritual causes bring about material effects both positive and negative; where the “action” all takes place in the spiritual realms with the ensuing this-worldly results substantive as they seem to the human eye being mere afterthoughts. Our deeds ours alone activate spiritual forces on high that in turn determine the course of human affairs.

Whatever your views may be on the particular issue of the Israeli draft if you identify as a genuinely believing Torah Jew you subscribe to this way of seeing the world and it informs the way you live your life. It is why you insist on not working on Shabbos and Yom Tov believing that G-d will bless your household for declaring Him Master of your destiny; it is why you pray thrice daily for all your needs; it is why you trade the so-called “high cost of Jewish living ” as expressed in money time and convenience for the riches of a spiritually elevated life that connects you to the Eternal One and through Him to eternity.

And so if we are to be religiously consistent it is through the prism of this irreconcilable divide over the fundamental nature of reality that the attempt to draft bnei Torah must also be viewed. What most threatensIsrael’s future existence? The Torah is unequivocal on this: Not an Iranian mushroom cloud but Jews — fervently religious ones ultra-secularist ones and everyone in between — acting un-Jewishly.

Incidentally one need not be a benighted chareidi his big tomes of Talmud in tow to believe that Israel’s fate is bound up with its inhabitants’ conduct — one can even be say Yair Lapid. Not unlike a Southern Baptist preacher the television-anchorman-turned-statesman has only the Bible to guide him yet he has famously and admirably stated that he believes our claim to this land to be based on the Divine guarantees made therein. Well now they say “talk is cheap ” but ought he not to be held to his words?

So we open the Torah and read: “You shall observe all My decrees and all My ordinances and perform them; then the land to which I bring you will not disgorge you” (Vayikra 20:22). Let’s charitably assume for the moment that “all My decrees and all My ordinances” doesn’t G-d forfend include things like Shabbos kashrus and tefillin (save perhaps for women in certain venues). But surely at a minimum it refers to the litany of sins set forth in the immediately preceding verses: adultery homosexuality niddah and all the rest.

So when we read that a leading publication in America’s homosexual community has declared Tel Aviv to be the single best travel destination — worldwide — for its members what are we to think? What does the estimable Mr. Lapid think of his country serving as a blight unto the nations? Does he ever ponder what the Author of Leviticus thinks of the fact that just minutes from the Lapid abode in Ramat Aviv thousands of women including many minors are bought and sold every day of the year in broad daylight for unspeakable purposes — or can’t he spare a minute from plotting the next child subsidy cut?

And what guarantees Israel’s safety? Jews acting like Jews and doing those things that Judaism teaches bring blessing and peace and sustenance and every manner of good fortune into the world. And among these our Sages teach none can remotely compare to Torah study for the protective merit and abundance of blessing it affords. Moreover wonderful as initiatives like Daf Yomi are for their contribution to the contemporary profusion of Torah learning there’s no gainsaying the Chazon Ish’s clear pronouncement: kol segulos haTorah lo ne’emru ela al amalah all of the manifold benefits that Chazal ascribe to limud haTorah follow only from the ceaseless toil-filled plumbing of its depths which occurs in the yeshivos hakedoshos and virtually nowhere else.

So let me understand: Now as this fragile little country whose 65-year history has been a string of wondrous miracles faces the apocalypse being feverishly readied by the lunatic of Teheran now is the opportune time to drag talmidei chachamim from their shtenders with brute physical or fiscal force in a grand social reengineering scheme? Now with the returns of the Zionist project in and the result a country where hundreds of thousands of goyim mingle freely with millions of Jews who cannot identify let alone recite the Shema; where a procession of proud practitioners of abomination can wend its way through Yerushalayim’s holy streets; where a million potential lives have been snuffed out since the state’s founding; where Jewish women are held captive by Arabs and other Jewish women desecrate the makom haMikdash with impunity — and all the while vicious enemies encircle us — is this the moment to allow the squelching of the amal haTorah that stands between us and a violent vomiting out of the inhabitants of this most spiritually sensitive of lands?