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The early approval of the Basic Law on Torah Study is remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the Knesset’s history, where political surrender was masked by sacred rhetoric.
This legislation concerns power, finances, and avoidance rather than Torah. It represents a hurried attempt to convert a coalition crisis into a constitutional shield for draft evasion, precisely when soldiers and reservists are shouldering an unsustainable national burden.
The bill cleared its first reading on Wednesday with 56 votes in favor and 43 opposed. Members of Likud, Dan Illouz and Yuli Edelstein; New Hope’s Sharren Haskel; and the Religious Zionist Party’s Moshe Solomon crossed party lines to vote against it. Solomon later faced political repercussions for refusing to support what he described as a moral injustice, stating he could not meet the families of the fallen and support a law suggesting that Torah study and military service need not coincide.
The initial draft reportedly aimed to equate long‑term Torah scholars with active IDF soldiers. Following intense criticism, that explicit comparison was withdrawn, according to reports.
Nevertheless, the remaining language remains dangerous, declaring Torah study a core value of Jewish heritage and a fundamental right in Israel, and asserting that the state regards those who commit to long‑term study as making a significant contribution to the state and the Jewish people.
Torah belongs to all of us
Honoring Torah study is not offensive; Torah does not belong to any particular haredi party, rabbi, or political broker. It belongs to the entire Jewish people and has shaped Jewish law, memory, culture, and moral imagination for millennia. Consequently, employing it cynically to preserve a privileged, draft‑exempt existence is a desecration.
The insult is compounded by the timing: Israel is more than two and a half years into a war that has exhausted its soldiers, drained its reservists, and bereaved families nationwide. The IDF has repeatedly warned of a severe manpower shortage, and the High Court has urged the state to enforce the law against draft evaders and revoke benefits that cannot continue without a draft framework. Rather than confront this reality, the coalition seeks to reinterpret the moral equation.
Anyone outside the narrow political machinery can see the situation. The haredi parties seek to limit damage before elections and maintain their standing within their communities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose coalition is on the brink of collapse, appears willing to concede almost anything to them in exchange for time. Reports of a broader package that includes the election date, daycare subsidies, and other haredi demands further clarify the picture.
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett warned the haredi public that the bill would cause serious harm to Israel and its citizens, arguing that without a functional economy and a strong army, Israelis could not survive. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, reacting after MK Moshe Gafni invoked the Warsaw Ghetto, recalled that his father had lived in the ghetto and his grandfather died in a concentration camp due to the lack of a Jewish army. He described the bill as not Torah, but a payment for evasion.
Torah bill ‘a desecration of everything holy’
Yoaz Hendel went further, calling it a desecration of everything holy. He is correct. Thousands of religious Israelis who study Torah also serve, demonstrating daily that devotion to Torah and responsibility for the state are not opposites. The claim that its study necessitates permanent exemption is not piety; it is politics.
Arguments can be made against the state and about the relationship among religion, coercion, and citizenship. However, there is no legitimate moral justification for residing in Israel while opposing the very institution that protects your life and your children’s lives.
This bill will not strengthen Torah; it will cheapen it. It will turn sacred language into a loophole and a people’s inheritance into a sectoral bargaining chip. A government that truly cared about Torah would not use it to divide soldiers from students, mourners from politicians, and Jews from one another.
The Knesset should reject this bill before it becomes law and stains the Torah it claims to honor today.
