Those professional holy men

As I noted in a previous post, the Israelite Samaritans do not have professional holy men, i.e. all of their cohanim work and the young men of the (Holon) community serve in the IDF.

Unfortunately, sadly, apropos yesterday's demonstration in Jerusalem, this is not the case with us. It must be a gross distortion of Torah that so many healthy Jews use their Torah study as crowns to aggrandize themselves & as spades to dig with (see 4:7). Our eldest son (11th grade) is now going through the preliminaries vis-a-vis his eventual induction into the IDF for what should be at least 3 years of compulsory service. I served in the IDF reserves for 11 years (during which time I was in Lebanon, on the Egyptian border & in the Jordan Valley). How is it that our son and thousands of his peers should be the hewers of wood & drawers of water (to use a Biblical metaphor) for thousands of other(wise healthy) Jews who use (desecrate!) their Torah study to claim privilege for themselves??!! How is it that, when our son is inducted, my wife & I will have to live with the existential dread that the next knock on the door could be two officers from the Adjutancy Corps when other parents can rest assured that their children are safe & sound, far from harm's way, in some u-o'dox yeshiva? (Ditto for my wife/u-o'dox wives back when I was still doing annual reserve duty.)

Defending the Land of Israel and the people who live therein is holy work! The difference between the young man or woman in the IDF and the comfortable u-o'dox yeshiva student is that while the former are living up to the courage of their convictions (and may, God forbid, pay the ultimate sacrifice), the latter's convictions require no courage (and very little, if any, sacrifice).

No, I turn my back on the mentality that sees Torah-learning as the foundation of an aristocracy that claims privilege for itself (they're doing it for us, you see, and we should be grateful!) and deems itself worthy of material support from others' pockets. Quoth Abraham Lincoln's second innaugural address:

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces
 

Torah is life, life in this world, not apart from it in some cloistered study hall or in a privileged corner of it, but everywhere, even (especially!) in IDF service.

nb