The Fire Didn't Start With the Law — How the Torah is really being burned today in the daily slander of those who learn it.
By: Menachem Nabet
I've seen so many laments over the burning of the Torah by Apostomus on the Seventeenth of Tammuz, and the tying of that event to current affairs and to the Basic Law on Torah study that was passed in the Knesset. I resolved to take my life in my hands and say something I'll surely catch flak for (as I always do) — but I can no longer stay silent.
If there is a burning of the Torah today — long before this foolish law — it begins in the place where Torah learners in the State of Israel are slandered and cursed from every side, day and night. True, the situation is not simple, the social challenges are complex, public patience is running out — but the prevailing discourse in Israeli public life today, and, to my sorrow, to a grossly exaggerated degree within the Dati Leumi (national-religious) public, is a discourse of contempt for the Torah and contempt for those who learn it.
The fact that people say "our Torah is more beautiful," or "we are the real Torah," or "we are the proof of a Torah that is both this and that" — none of it changes the fact that today people, preachers, and rabbis never stop belittling the Torah and its learners.
The Gemara reproaches the fools who rise before a Torah scroll but not before Torah scholars, and I always wondered to myself what the Gemara was getting at. Today I understand it well: that very often, out of speech that is ostensibly in praise of the Torah, one can belittle Torah scholars day and night — in the name of "the real Torah." Such a thing exists. Well-known rabbis today turn Torah scholars into the greatest criminals in the country, into the source of every problem, engaging endlessly in their disparagement, speaking of them as the lowest of scoundrels — and always, always in the name of the Torah. What folly.
This week I was at a large siyum celebration for young yeshiva boys moving up to yeshiva ketana. Their Talmudic literacy, their immersion in the language of Torah, is beyond compare to any other display — and all of it with fine character and derech eretz. When they spoke, they spoke about the importance of Torah and the importance of good middos, with grace and charm. Their mastery — children of fourteen — of entire masechtos, of reading Rishonim and Acharonim, of grasping the give-and-take of Abaye and Rava, was so impressive, so far from what I know in the places where people "break their teeth" over this, that at some point something in my heart cracked and broke. These are the criminals of the State of Israel? All these fine, precious boys are vilified in today's State of Israel as the lowest criminals and lawbreakers? This is the most maligned community in the country; this is "the enemy of the state"; this is the object of loathing for assorted rabbis. So yes — failing to rise before Torah scholars is not [merely] failing to rise before a Torah scroll; it is far worse.
I am not against criticism, I am not against change, I do not think the way things are currently done in the Charedi yeshiva world is good, I do not think there is much political or moral wisdom here — and yet, in my eyes the State of Israel has truly become a place that exhausts its energies chasing after Torah learners, slandering them and turning them into nobodies, into trash. It is horrifying. Anyone with love of Torah cannot see this and stay silent, and certainly cannot cooperate with this ceaseless campaign of demonization. All the thousands of clever pilpulim about "a Torah of life" and "the Torah of Eretz Yisrael" and so on and so forth are worth nothing when they are occupied day and night in the constant slander of Torah learners and Torah lovers who do not share the same worldview.
How do we know that there is antisemitism in the world today, when the criticism we hear from the overwhelming majority is not against Jews but against Israel's policies, against Zionism, against "the Zionist regime," against "the genocide regime," and so on? The answer is that even if you have vast quantities of criticism, in the end, if the people you demonize day and night are the Jews living in Israel — that is antisemitism. Things are not merely ideas and criticism floating in the air, but a concrete attitude, in the actual world, toward real people.
In exactly the same manner, the contemporary hatred of Torah learners and Torah scholars appears — each time shifting its shape, shedding one form and putting on new garb. Sometimes it comes as an outcry against a Torah of "draft-dodgers," sometimes against an "unproductive" Torah, sometimes against a "primitive" Torah, sometimes against a Torah of "askanim," sometimes against a Torah that "innovates nothing," sometimes against a Torah of "pilpulim," sometimes against a Torah "without derech eretz" — thousands of claims and counterclaims in the spirit of "What benefit are the rabbis to us?" But in the end, after all the criticisms, the more justified and the less justified alike, we are left with a relentless campaign of demonization against Torah learners. Torah learners in the State of Israel are today's criminals. To think that there are gangs of criminals — robbers, thieves, extortionists, murderers, of every kind — and yet the most "criminal" group in Israeli consciousness today is all those boys born into Charedi society who cling to the Torah and its study: this is unbearable. Whoever has love of Torah, sees this, and is not shaken by it — either the Torah has become for him merely a commercial instrument of ideologies, or his senses toward the Torah have gone numb.
And none of this has any bearing on criticism of the public and social conduct around the issues at hand. When the State of Israel has reached a point where police run manhunts after boys who sit and learn Gemara, because of their worldview — that is a badge of shame for the State of Israel and a bankruptcy of the love of Torah, far more than any Basic Law that a few politicians pass.