W

hile we’re hearing shouts about the terrible gezeirah of forced army conscription and how bochurim are being hauled off yeshivah benches, it’s worthwhile to take a look at a few statistics to reaffirm the truth — that Torah study is flourishing in Eretz Yisrael

As the State of Israel enters its 71st year, please permit me to point out a few basic facts — although I know that facts aren’t so popular today, especially when they interfere with the agenda some group or other wants to put over on the public. And because of the fact that plain facts are so unpopular, we’re drowning in a sea of opinion, commentary, and impassioned slogans.

So, for the sake of presenting a realistic picture of where the Torah community stands in the midst of all the hype, here are a few basic facts regarding the lives of chareidi Jews in Israel.

Let’s start with the army, going back to Ben-Gurion.

David Ben-Gurion, founder of the modern Zionist state who had little love for authentic Judaism or the chareidim (the adukim, as they were called back then), nevertheless exempted 400 yeshivah bochurim from military service, despite the nascent state’s dire need for soldiers in those desperate times. The exemption was in response to a direct, emotional appeal from a delegation of gedolei Yisrael, who came in person to plead with the new prime minister to allow the yeshivah students to continue learning. This is well-known. But Ben-Gurion did not grant the request because he recognized the importance of Torah study to Eretz Yisrael’s security. He granted it because it didn’t matter to him.

He had no problem making a few elderly rabbis feel good by allowing a few hundred young men to sit and learn, because he believed that the whole concept of yeshivah bochurim, and “sitting and learning Torah,” would soon be a thing of the past. As he once said, “The young people are ours. The older generation of religious people will pass away, and the youth will be with us.”

After meeting with the rabbanim, however, he went to another room where Reb Elya Moshe Genichovsky, a Knesset member from the Mizrachi party, was waiting to speak with him. In the course of their conversation, Ben-Gurion mentioned that he had just met with the delegation of rabbanim and had agreed not to conscript the yeshivah students. He summed up the matter with an interesting remark: “I won’t be the one to destroy Yavneh and its sages.” Ben-Gurion, it seems, was inspired with an idea that contrasted with his basic world view.

How do I know that he really made that uncharacteristic statement? Because I heard it straight from Reb Elya Moshe himself. When, as a young man, I was given the task of gathering material for Pe’er HaDor, the four-volume biography of the Chazon Ish, Reb Elya Moshe was one of the hundreds of people I interviewed.

Decades later, in an interview for the Hebrew-language Mishpacha, I had the opportunity to ask Shimon Peres for the inside story about Ben-Gurion’s stance on drafting yeshivah bochurim. Peres, who had been Ben-Gurion’s trusted secretary at the time of that pivotal meeting, told me the following:

“Ben-Gurion’s position then, and my position to this day, is that it is inconceivable that of all the nations of the free world, only the State of Israel should not allow freedom to study Torah for all those who desire it.”

Rav Moshe Tennenbaum, the legendary director of Vaad Hayeshivos, was a confidant of the Chazon Ish. At the same time, he was among those who had Ben-Gurion’s ear, and it was he who arranged the famous encounter between the two. He told me that the Chazon Ish once remarked to him, “When Ben-Gurion comes to the World of Truth, he won’t understand why they’re honoring him. It will be because the Torah in Eretz Yisrael stands upon the breath of his mouth.” (Rav Tennenbaum told me that, even as the Chazon Ish said this, at a certain point in their meeting, he turned his gaze away and would no longer look at Ben-Gurion’s face.)

Interestingly enough, years later, after he had retired from politics and retreated to a pastoral life on Kibbutz Sde Boker, Ben-Gurion several times expressed regret for ever having exempted yeshivah bochurim from army service.

Many years ago I asked Rav Moshe Sheinfeld, a well-known author and thinker who frequented the Chazon Ish’s home and would often express the gadol’s views publicly, how he explained the contradiction between Ben-Gurion A and Ben-Gurion B.

“It’s very simple,” Rav Sheinfeld told me. “Ben-Gurion hated the chareidi Jews. But as long as he was in power, Chazal’s dictum that ‘The heart of kings and ministers is in Hashem’s hands’ applied to him. Hakadosh Baruch Hu controls how a leader will stand on a crucial issue. And we have the Torah’s promise that Torah will not be forgotten, which the Chazon Ish discussed in his famous letter stating how the Torah is now returning to Eretz Yisrael. So Ben-Gurion didn’t have free choice in that matter. But once he was no longer prime minister, he was just plain Ben-Gurion again, and all his anti-Torah ideology resurfaced.”

Mishpacha’s Hebrew-language reporter Shimon Breitkopf compiled a number of facts on this topic, in honor of the state’s 70th birthday:

• In the year 1940, there were 28 yeshivos in Eretz Yisrael.
• In 1948, the year the State of Israel came into being, there were 62 yeshivos.
• Fourteen years later, in 1962, there were already 150 yeshivos. Now, 56 years since then, more than 1,600 yeshivos and kollelim are active in Eretz Yisrael. By the time you read these lines, there may be a few more.
• More than 60,000 talmidim are learning in yeshivah gedolah today, and the number of kollel yungeleit has passed the 75,000 mark. And this is not counting the younger teenagers learning in yeshivah ketanah.

These are numerical facts relating only to the current status of Torah learning in the Zionist state, which partially funds this vast network of yeshivos. Breitkopf brings further data regarding other aspects of life among the chareidi minority, which now numbers close to a million. For example, despite all the street posters protesting another “terrible decree” every week, a recent poll commissioned by the government revealed that 97% of the chareidi population say they are satisfied with their lives here in Israel.

Chareidi life, and limud haTorah in particular, is flourishing in Eretz Yisrael. No political entity will succeed in breaking this truth, and certainly not in putting an end to Torah study. Of course budgets might be cut, and trouble might be made. But no person or group will be able to inflict serious injury on the Torah world, and those who truly desire to devote themselves to learning will be able to do so. For the Torah itself promises that “it shall not be forgotten from the mouth of his progeny.”

What has moved me to spend a column dwelling on the repetition of simple facts and statistics? In many conversations I have had recently, in particular with Jews from chutz la’aretz, I’ve noticed that a smokescreen of “facts” seems to be clouding their perception of chareidi life here as it actually is. So the next time you hear cries of alarm about the dreadful gezeirah of forced military service in this terrible Zionist state, remember the facts about Torah life in the Holy Land. Just to keep things in perspective….

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 708)