From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Shas chair after Haredi draft ruling: The Torah is Israel’s ‘secret weapon against all enemies’
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
The Torah is Israel’s “secret weapon against all enemies” and “no power in the world” can stop the Jewish people from studying it, Aryeh Deri, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, declares.
Responding to the High Court of Justice’s ruling that there is no legal basis for excluding ultra-Orthodox men from the IDF draft and that those who are eligible for service must be drafted, Deri links the contributions of those who study Talmud full-time to those fighting in Gaza and in the north.
“The Jewish people survived persecutions, pogroms and wars only thanks to maintaining their uniqueness, the Torah and the commandments. This is our secret weapon against all enemies, as promised by the creator of the world,” he says, calling yeshiva students “the ones who preserve our special power and generate miracles in the [military] campaign.”
In a show of defiance to the court, Deri adds that “there is no power in the world that can cut off the people of Israel from studying the Torah and anyone who has tried this in the past has failed miserably. No high-handed ruling will abolish the community of scholars in the land of Israel, which is the branch on which we all sit.”
