We hear a great deal these days about “a nation divided.” The phrase is almost always aimed at our politics – the trench line between the conservative Right and the liberal Left.
But this division is far older than any Knesset coalition. From the moment the Torah was given to the Jewish people over 3,300 years ago, there have been those who follow its laws and those who, for whatever reason, do not. That was by design.
God created the world as an arena of free choice, and so a Jew has always been free to keep what is written in the Torah or to set it aside.
In that same book, God states plainly that He is giving the Land of Israel to His people – and that this eternal inheritance carries with it a long list of responsibilities, both in the land and beyond it.
The birth of the Jewish state forced a question that had never before had to be answered: What, exactly, is this new entity sitting upon the sacred soil that God gave to the Jewish people?
Should it be a wholly secular state, indifferent to the imperative that placed Jews in this particular place, or a state governed in every detail by Torah law?
Wisely, neither extreme prevailed. Israel built a body of civil law to protect its citizens and to function as a lawful, orderly society. And the state and its people alike understand, in their bones, the necessity of security – of defending our borders against the hostile nations that ring us.
But here is what tends to go unspoken. That same Torah which gives us our claim to the land also commands us to study it day and night – and our tradition holds that this study is itself a form of national defense.
“Were it not for My covenant of Torah, studied day and night,” God said through the prophet, “I would not have set the ordinances of heaven and earth” (Nedarim 32a, on Jeremiah 33:25).
When the Sages asked what it was that let our feet stand firm in war, they answered: the gates of Jerusalem, where the people were engaged in Torah (Makkot 10a, on Psalms 122:2).
The world endures, Reish Lakish taught, in the merit of the breath of the children who study in the study hall (Shabbat 119b). The very first thing on which the world stands, the Mishna tells us, is Torah (Avot 1:2).
None of this is fringe or sentimental. It sits at the foundation of who we are as a people, no less than our right to the land itself flows from the same divine source. And yet, for all of that, the State of Israel has never once enshrined Torah study in law as a recognized role of its citizens.
Honoring both sides
Consider the resulting asymmetry. A yeshiva student who does not report for conscription can now be arrested. But the state has no framework at all for acknowledging that the man bent over his Talmud late into the night is contributing anything to the nation’s survival.
One form of national service – the sword – is honored, enforced, and rewarded. The other – the study that underwrites our very claim to be here – is treated as nothing more than evasion.
I am not arguing that Israel should start jailing Jews for failing to keep Shabbat; free choice, as I said, is the design of creation. I am arguing that a nation should not brand the man who is doing the one thing his tradition tells him keeps that nation alive as a deserter.
I know the strongest answer to this, and it is not a secular one. In a defensive war – a milhemet mitzvah, a war of no choice – the halacha says that all go out to fight, “even a groom from his chamber and a bride from her canopy,” and serious authorities hold that this binds Torah scholars, too.
That argument deserves to be met honestly, not waved away.
But our tradition also gave us a different model, older than any of today’s slogans: Zebulun went out to the world to trade and to fight, and provisioned his brother Issachar, who sat and studied – and the two of them shared a single reward (Bereshit Rabbah 99:8).
That is not an exemption; it is a partnership. It is a people that understood it needs both the border and the beit midrash (study hall), and that neither one is a freeloader upon the other.
This is precisely what the proposed Basic Law: Torah Study can begin to restore. By declaring Torah study a foundational value of the Jewish people and recognizing sustained devotion to it as genuine service, the law does something no arrest warrant ever could: it separates the sincere learner from the mere evader.
Today the two are indistinguishable – everyone is thrown into the same category of “draft dodger” – and that is exactly why the system is frozen.
As long as every observant Jew watches his brother hauled off to jail with the same contempt, whether he is a genuine scholar or not, no observant Jew can stand aside and let it happen.
Recognition changes that calculation entirely. Once the value at the heart of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) life is honored rather than criminalized, many of those who are not, in truth, immersed in full-time study may find they are willing to step forward and serve because their world’s core commitment has been affirmed, not put on trial.
Coercion has produced a decade of standoff. Acknowledgment might produce what coercion never has.
The Basic Law is not the whole answer, and it should not be the last word. It would be worthier still if it explicitly prized the combination of Torah and service in the ranks.
But it is a real step toward the balance that every honest party to this argument claims to want: a state that honors both those who guard its borders and those who guard the wellspring that gives those borders their meaning.