Meeting top rabbi, Huckabee says Israel needs both Torah scholars and soldiers

Israel must have scholars studying Torah as well as soldiers, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee tells Rabbi Dov Lando, chairman of the Degel HaTorah party’s ruling Council of Torah Sages and one of the most prominent rabbinic leaders of the so-called “Lithuanian” stream of ultra-Orthodoxy.

“Let me express to you that I do understand that as important as it is to have soldiers, you must also have scholars, scholars who remind you who you are, why you’re here,” says Huckabee, who is also a Baptist minister. “And soldiers to keep and protect that that God has given them.”

“If only there were many Jews that understood that,” Lando responds in Hebrew, using an interpreter.

Huckabee was responding to a statement read in Hebrew by Lando, who told the ambassador that religious Jews in Israel are in “dire straits” over potential arrests for their refusal to heed IDF enlistment notices.

“The community of Torah and mitzvah-observant people here in the Holy Land is currently in dire straits,” says Lando, “as the legal system issues arrest warrants against yeshiva students studying Torah for the ‘crime’ of studying Torah.”

Any harm to Torah scholars harms all Jews and their right to exist, continues Lando.

He also expresses his “appreciation and respect” for US President Donald Trump and the American people “for their firm stand as a kingdom of grace for the right of the people of Israel in the land and around the world, and especially in the recent war with Iran.”