When hundreds of students enthusiastically sing and dance about dodging the draft, while thousands of others protect those same students by spending more and more time in the IDF because of a manpower shortage... something has gone seriously wrong.
When institutions that receive millions of shekels of government money actively undermine the State of Israel by encouraging and celebrating draft dodging... something has gone seriously wrong.
When a minister in the Knesset is involved in creating a hotline that is used to tell people who have received draft notices to ignore them entirely... something has gone seriously wrong.
In this episode, I spoke to Sam Sokol to learn more about the Chareidi political echelon's attempts to enshrine military exemptions into law, and how in the meantime, some Chareidi institutions are literally committing felonies in the service of discouraging military service.
There is a lesson for all of us in this, too. As I assert at the end of the episode: if you are absolutely convinced of the rightness of your ideology such that you won’t listen to anyone else, and when that ideology effectively becomes the most important thing in the world, not only does it become a type of idolatry, but it also can potentially lead you to actions that are immoral, unethical, and illegal. And when you have no respect for the institutions that support you, and engage with them only in order to get from them without any expectation of giving anything back, you may end up doing actions that are immoral, unethical, and illegal. In my opinion, this is a tragedy embodied by some leaders in the Chareidi world.
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