June 28: Who Is Running the Country? Let’s See…

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The Big Story

A note to readers: The Scroll will be on vacation for all of next week. Happy Fourth of July to all of our American readers, and we’ll see you here again on July 8. 

Nobody can say they weren’t warned. For years now, various “conspiracy theorists,” “far-right extremists,” and other disreputables—lately joined by Special Counsel Robert Hur and reporters at The Wall Street Journal—have been observing that President Joe Biden struggles to complete a coherent sentence without a teleprompter, remember who or where he is, or walk without assistance (let alone ride a bike). But until last night’s debate, Democrats could, if they tried hard enough, sustain the fantasy that concerns about Biden’s mental acuity were overblown, the product of misleadingly edited “cheap fakes” and Russo-Republican disinformation. For instance, here was MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough in March, following a multi-hour discussion with the president:

Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And fuck you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I’ve known him for years. … If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it. 

At the CNN presidential debate on Thursday evening—for which Biden took a week off his presidential duties to prepare—the truth came out, and it looked like this:

In another memorable exchange, Biden—in response to a question on the Democrats’ single best issue, abortion—brought up the murder of Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant before pivoting to the claim that “a lot of young women” are being “raped” by their “in-laws” and “brothers and sisters”:

And so on. Biden recovered a bit later in the debate (and Trump lost his early focus), but the damage was done. As prediction markets swung wildly in favor of Trump, morale in the mainstream press came to resemble the Führerbunker circa April 1945. Here was The New York Times opinion page on Friday morning:

We couldn’t fit them in the screenshot, but there were two more liberal Times columnists—Frank Bruni and Nicholas Kristof—calling on Biden to drop out of the race. 

But as funny as “The Best President of My Adult Life Needs to Withdraw” is as a headline, last night’s performance by the Ghost of Joe Biden raised an obvious question: Who is running the country? Because it’s hard to believe it’s this guy. 

Barack Obama, after leaving office in 2016, purchased a mansion in Washington, D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood, becoming the first ex-president other than the dying Woodrow Wilson to remain in the nation’s capital, where he and his surrogates stage-managed the shadow “resistance” to Trump from 2016 to 2020. Obama orchestrated Biden’s primary victory in 2020, personally convincing his leading challengers to bow out of the race, and then stuffed the incoming administration with his own loyalists—including the bizarre appointment of Obama’s former national security advisor, State Department official, and lifelong foreign policy specialist Susan Rice as the Biden White House’s “Director of Domestic Policy.” Never one for modesty, Obama also—as David Samuels observed in Tablet last August—made sure to drop O.J. Simpson If I Did It-style hints about how a hypothetical surrogate presidency might work:

That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.

The scene at a Democratic fundraiser earlier this month, in which a youthful-looking Obama physically guided a doddering Biden offstage, thus revealed more than Sleepy Joe’s decrepitude. 

Obama’s role as the not-so-hidden hand behind the Biden presidency—which, to repeat, is staffed by core Obama loyalists such as Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, Michael Ratney and, until recently, Robert Malley—helps explain the administration’s otherwise incomprehensible approach to Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. It is also why, as Tablet’s brain trust told The Scroll via email, we should be skeptical of the fevered speculations that Biden will soon be dumped in favor of Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, or Michelle Obama. It would create a mess, and for no reason—since what matters isn’t the person in that role. What matters is the person controlling the whole thing. And that’s not going to change. 

Why? Because, as Tony Badran explains, “Four years ago, Barack Obama introduced a novelty to the American system from the Third World: the Bouteflika Presidency.” 

Bouteflika as in Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of Algeria from 1999 to 2019, who spent his fourth and final term in office confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak or appear in public, and “governing” via “letters” bearing his signature. Tony continues:

That is what people would call a “shadow presidency,” whereby you have a ceremonial figurehead in the Oval Office who’s clearly incapacitated, and actual power resides elsewhere. The difference between the original Third World concept and Obama’s adaptation of it is that in the Third World (or the Soviet Union for that matter), the people aren’t quite sure who the “hidden hand” is behind the throne. And that’s part of the point. The less you know, the less sense of control over your fate and daily life, the better. That’s the purpose of it. You control nothing. You know nothing. You live at the whim of an invisible power, which you can’t even identify. 

Barack Obama did away with that part. Instead, at every turn, he made sure to make it crystal clear: “It’s me. I’m in charge.” And it’s not just that he implied it, by, say, showing up at the White House and lapping up all the attention and intentionally ignoring the mummified corpse that they brought out to entertain the guests. It’s that he actually felt compelled to articulate it, more than once, in his own words, on camera: My setup is this, I put a figurehead out front with an earpiece, and I tell him what to do. To be sure, he also staffed the administration with his people, with whom he communicated directly at Kalorama, in DC, where he, for the first time in American history (save for the incapacitated Wilson), stayed in 2020. People like Susan Rice and the intel ladies. 

But the right misunderstood and misinterpreted this novelty. Instead, they dug themselves a hole on Obama’s behalf. They surrendered to the original Third World paradigm that Obama adopted, and exonerated him. They fostered the belief in the invisible, almighty “Deep State.” The true “hidden hand” of the dark world of intelligence services and secret police. The reality is much simpler. Barack Obama has been practically shouting it off rooftops any chance he gets. The mummified corpse is not a bug. It’s a feature. You’re not voting for “Joe Biden.” You’re voting for me.

Plus, as Lee Smith put it in an email to The Scroll, the idea that Biden will now be quietly put out to pasture rests on the premise that this is a normal election with a level playing field. But it’s not. As Lee writes:

We have to start with the fact that within two weeks the Democrats will put the opposition leader under house arrest, if not jail. Without that context, you can’t understand what happened during the debate or what has been happening in our country since, let’s say, 2015, when Biden’s then boss Barack Obama legalized the nuclear weapons program of an anti-U.S. terror state that embodies antisemitism. It’s astonishing when you think of it—who could will so much harm on America by doing such an insane thing, and a man twice elected to lead this country? The reason it didn’t seem obviously insane is because of a massive propaganda campaign targeting the common sense of the American people to make giving a nuclear bomb to an enemy regime seem normal. For the last four years, those same journalists and experts have been telling us that Joe Biden is physically sound and intellectually sharp and anyone who dares to register visible reality and make judgments based on it is a conspiracy theorist. 

In Lee’s view, the media “panic” about Biden’s performance is something akin to a tactical retreat. Having had their lies about Biden’s mental sharpness exposed in front of a national audience of tens of millions of people, journalists must now make grudging concessions to reality, lest they lose their last shreds of credibility:

Dem activists and journalists are not freaking out, they are re-credentialing themselves as professionals. With elections come an enormous number of people whose careers, and prestige, are wrapped up in this political institution. So what happens when these things are all broken to advance the interests of the party? For instance, what if an election was so marked by fraud that it rendered all those jobs irrelevant? Let’s say, hypothetically, an incumbent president got 10 million more votes in his reelection campaign, but the challenger still defeated him thanks to massive ballot fraud. I mean, if you’re a pollster, how do you do your job going forward? Do your polls account for fraud, how much of it, based on what numbers? It can’t account for it, so what was once a real job profession means nothing. You’re simply an apparatchik who makes the show look real. That’s all we’re watching—the Democratic Party’s extensive political apparatus re-credentialing itself. See, when the situation demands it, we at CNN can notice when Biden can’t finish a sentence.

We also wouldn’t dismiss the hypothesis that what we saw last night and this morning was a “preference cascade,” in which Biden’s media allies pretended to go along with the spin as long as they believed that everybody else believed it—only to realize, all at once, that nobody believed it. Lee goes on:

The idea that the party bosses—i.e., Barack Obama—will replace Biden is based on the idea that the election is 100% on the natch and that the party has to fight for every vote and is now worried independents might have been scared off by the debate. But if party bosses really thought like that, they wouldn’t have run the same candidate with the same debilitating mental and physical issues four years ago. But let’s say ballot fraud is not a part of the party’s 2024 campaign. Who do they run? What if they lose? What if they actually got Michelle Obama on the ballot? She could lose, meaning that, as in 2016, voters will have rejected Obama’s legacy. No, as Tony explained very clearly, Biden is Obama’s avatar, and moving out Biden is tantamount to replacing Obama. I’d only add one thing to what Tony said: Yes, the shadow presidency is designed to signal that Americans have no control over their political lives and they must accommodate themselves to the new reality imposed by Obama, and to further reinforce that message, the regime is going to put the opposition leader under house arrest, if not jail him.

That may be, but all of the lawfare and propaganda in the world may not be enough to push this version of Biden over the finish line. We noted this week that even prior to the debate, Biden’s job approval rating was in the mid-30s, while Trump, fresh off 34 felony convictions, was posting clear leads in poll after poll. By Friday morning, the Polymarket prediction market was showing Biden trailing not only Trump but also the combined odds of Newsom, Harris, Michelle Obama, “Other Democratic Politician,” and RFK Jr.

But whatever happens in the election, it will be difficult for Americans to unsee the extent to which the press has been carrying water for a walking corpse over the past four years. As Tablet Literary Editor David Samuels tells The Scroll via email,

Over the past decade, we have seen a set of once separately-credentialed and self-supporting, and therefore self-policing and more or less honorable professions such journalism, publishing, academia and the law embarrassingly become creepy, lower-level apparatchiks in Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. The thing which members of this class miss is that no one believes a word any of them say. Their attempts to credential or regulate social reality only testify to the extent of their own petty personal vanity. I personally pay zero attention to Lawrence Tribe’s legal opinions, the same way I couldn’t care less what Thomas Friedman or David Ignatius or any newspaper or magazine editor in American has to say about foreign policy or any other subject—because no one does, because they’re all so obviously in the tank. Their job isn’t to explain anything, but to give people permission to say the most obvious things about their own realities without being denounced as capitalist-roaders or imperialist wreckers, or whatever the big thought-crimes are these days.

How and why an entire social layer beclowned itself so completely in the space of maybe a decade, destroying such massive amounts of social capital in the process, is a great subject for a book by a modern C. Wright Mills or Tom Wolfe. The boom would start in the 1990s with the Clintons and include massive social phenomena like the rise of the internet, the collapse of the 20th century information pyramid, the ease with which large information platforms can be gamed by large state actors. It would also tell the story of how the Democratic Party—once the tribune of America’s broad middle class—took on the job of mediating between America’s ruling oligarchy and its bureaucratically-ordered clients. 

So far, the few fumbling attempts to tell this story all fail for the same reason—which is the authors’ need to repeat dozens of obvious lies in order to seem “credible” to their peers. Its like reading medieval theologians explain the mysteries of the Holy Ghost—which of course is the role played by Barack Obama, ie He Who Can Never be Named. Why can’t he be named? I dunno. You tell me.

For more on Obama, read David’s interview with Obama biographer David Garrow here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Nissim Leon and Menachem Butler present the Sephardic rabbis’ letter on Haredi conscription

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The Sephardic Rabbis’ Letter

Decoding a rabbinical broadside against drafting Torah scholars into the IDF

By Nissim Leon and Menachem Butler

In the midst of the war in Gaza, a number of Sephardic rabbis in Israel signed a lengthy letter on April 7 calling for opposition to the drafting of yeshiva students into the army. In the past, such letters were primarily presented to the public by the Ashkenazi side of the Haredi community. In cases where letters emerged from the Sephardic Haredi community, they were usually signed by figures distant from the leading rabbinic elite. Neither was the case here.

This letter was signed by prominent heads of Sephardic yeshivas, well-known halachic authorities in the religious community in Israel. Attesting to its significance, the letter included the signatures of members of the Council of Torah Sages of Shas, the Sephardic Haredi party that is part of Israel’s government coalition. This is not the place to address the paradox between opposition to the draft and support for the war. We will only note that from the signatories’ perspective, yeshiva students are also drafted, in this case, for the spiritual protection of the soldiers. Our focus here is on what the signatories of the letter have in common, and what the letter might tell us about what is happening inside one of the most stable parties in Israel—the Shas party.

Shas was established in 1984 to serve as a political home for yeshiva students of Sephardic descent, meaning those whose families originated from Jewish communities in Arab countries and North Africa. The connection between the world of Haredi yeshivas and these Jewish communities has a long history. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, there was a relationship between emissaries from Haredi yeshivas in Eastern Europe and Jews in Morocco. After World War II and the Holocaust, this connection became an important channel for the rehabilitation of the yeshiva world, especially for yeshivas originating in Lithuania.

In the young State of Israel, the connection between the shattered remnants of Ashkenazi yeshiva life in Europe and Sephardic refugees created a very complex reality of diversity within the Haredi yeshiva world. On the one hand, the Haredi yeshivas wanted to include students of Sephardic descent; this significantly helped in obtaining budgets and, of course, in what was seen as the spiritual rescue of these students, many of whom came from low-income families. On the other hand, the students’ ethnic origin was emphasized in a way that differentiated them from their Ashkenazi peers in the yeshiva. The Lithuanian yeshiva, which for many years prided itself on being an ideological melting pot, thereby became a site of ethnic segregation.

Cultural segregation in the yeshiva world based on countries of origin reflected the broader reality in Israel, where the divide between Israelis of Ashkenazi and Sephardic origins found expression in the new class structure that developed in the country. However, while in the society at large there was some chance for mobility, in Haredi society, this mobility was almost entirely blocked. Ethnic distance was attributed to deep mental and cultural differences. Thus, a constant ethnic-class tension emerged in Haredi society between Ashkenazim and Sephardim.

What bridged this divide was the commitment to Haredi ideology, at least as expressed by the leadership of those referred to as Gedoylim (Torah giants)—leading heads of yeshivas, halachic authorities, and leaders of central Hasidic communities. At the core of this ideology was the belief that the Haredim, primarily the Torah scholars among them, were the last Jews, whose religious path must be guarded at all costs, whether through separate organization, turning Torah study into a way of life (mainly in the fields of Talmud and Halacha), or through maintaining distance, or at least managing relationships with anything suspected of deviating from that way of life—including Zionism and the State of Israel.

Yet ideology and reality are often worlds apart. Haredi society, encompassing both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, split between those who engage with the State of Israel and those who reject it. On one side stood the mainstream faction, organized in Haredi parties such as Agudat Yisrael, and on the other, the extremist factions that distanced themselves from Zionism and the State of Israel.

The mainstream Haredi faction was long willing to cooperate politically with the Zionist state. Historian Hillel Cohen argues that events like the 1929 massacre in Jewish communities in Mandatory Palestine, including Haredi communities like Hebron, significantly contributed to the willingness of mainstream Haredim, those identified with Agudat Yisrael, to show solidarity with Zionist forces. The establishment of the State of Israel and its emergence as a sovereign entity led the mainstream Haredi society to institutionalize early agreements with Zionist organizations regarding religion and arrangements with the state. However, one major obstacle was the issue of conscription.

When it came to the conscription of women, there seemed to be an initial agreement between Haredi factions and the state about an organized exemption. The question of practical procedures lingered, but was gradually resolved over time. Today, the matter is almost taboo in Haredi society. However, the conscription of men into the army remained a relatively open question, subject to political agreements that over time required legal resolution.

A significant turning point in these agreements was marked by the rise of Israel’s right-wing political parties to power in 1977. As part of the agreements between representatives of the mainstream Haredi faction and the new government headed by Menachem Begin, the agreement to have learning quotas was replaced with an arrangement whereby any young man in the Haredi community studying in an organized framework would have his military service deferred until the end of his studies. Thus, a new and significant pattern was created almost overnight, as Haredi society transitioned from a society with a growing sector of learners to a society of learners, where the measure of good Haredi practice became Torah study for as long as possible.

This arrangement generated intense opposition from non-Haredi Jews in Israeli society. However, ruling parties, both on the right and left, greatly benefited from their partnerships with the Haredi parties. These partnerships were relatively transactional, separate from principled stances on core policy issues that tore Israeli society apart, and they mainly ensured coalition stability as long as the issue of military conscription did not come to the fore.

But the conscription issue managed to impose itself on the political agenda. A series of civilian petitions to the Supreme Court, requesting the termination of the arrangement with the Haredim and the court’s demand for the political system to legislate the matter properly, fueled a series of political crises and reignited the secular agenda. Alongside questions about the public status of the Sabbath, the issue of conscription took on special significance. Parties from the right, left, and especially the center, which sought a secular and national character, positioned the conscription of Haredim as a fundamental issue—one that was even said to be key to the survival of the state.

However, Israel’s coalition system, and, in particular, the right-wing parties that saw their relationship with the Haredim as a commitment to religious sentiment, did not allow for the advancement of legislation to conscript Haredim. The motives for this blocking maneuver no doubt ranged from sincere (the importance of Torah study, the marginal usefulness of Haredi military recruits as front-line troops, and the fact that similar exemptions were given to Muslim and Christian Arabs) to the purely selfish. Thus, despite the Supreme Court’s demands, the conscription issue was deferred from one government to the next until this past March, when the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling stating that yeshivas whose students are not conscripted cannot receive state funding.

It was this ruling—or the anticipation thereof—that gave birth to the Sephardic rabbis’ letter.

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The Sephardic rabbis’ letter expressed opposition to a new reality that was born overnight, whereby the “society of learners,” transitioned from reliance on an orderly political arrangement for deferring the military service of young Haredim, to the brink of criminality. What makes the letter potentially so significant in the Israeli political and social context, though, is that it also seems to challenge many common views about Sephardic Haredism and the politics of Shas.

Firstly, Sephardic Haredism, particularly that associated with Shas, is generally thought to have a positive stance toward military service members even as it opposes, much like Ashkenazi Haredim, conscription from the Haredi yeshiva world. The Sephardic rabbis’ letter, issued in the midst of a war in which many traditional and Shas-supporting citizens have been drafted, takes a clear-cut position that could be interpreted as unpatriotic.

Secondly, for many years, Shas seemed like a party united around a clear, well-known, and authoritative spiritual leadership. The letter undermines this assumption as some of the signatories are members of the party’s Council of Torah Sages. The letter is also not addressed to any authority—not to the Supreme Court, nor to any political entity. On the one hand, this can be seen as a “pure,” principled stance. On the other hand, the ambiguity of the letter’s intended addressee strengthens the possibility that it could be more than a critique of the Supreme Court ruling, potentially indicating a growing rift within Shas. We will now detail these points, starting from the political level and moving to the ideological and social levels.

Some of the signatories are closely tied to the longstanding and evolving spiritual leadership of the Shas party, which is involved in managing the war: Its political leader, Aryeh Deri, serves as an observer in the war cabinet, a privilege granted to a very limited number of politicians in Israel. Consequently, the letter may reflect a crack in the spiritual leadership of the party, which has been one of the most stable entities in Israel’s political system for nearly 40 years. The rift may be ideological, indicating genuine concern about the Supreme Court’s decision. Still, it reveals unrest within Shas’ spiritual leadership. Since the passing of Shas’ spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the party’s de facto leadership has shifted to its political leadership under Aryeh Deri, who has served as the political regent of the party for over a decade. The rabbis’ letter may be an attempt to delineate the boundaries of this political leadership, addressing an internal rather than an external audience.

One of the signatories, Rabbi Moshe Maya, presented as the elder of the party’s Council of Torah Sages, the sovereign body in Shas, already hinted at his discontent regarding the absence of a spiritual leader in the party. In a rare interview in August 2022 with a Haredi media outlet, he said: “We need to find a leader. Today, our generation needs a leader to guide everything […] Shas was calm, everything went smoothly because we had Haham Shalom [Cohen (1930-2022)] and everyone listened to Haham Shalom […] There’s a problem, who will be the leader […] Israel is not left a widow. The Holy One, Blessed be He, will provide the leader, even those you didn't think of.” Thus, the letter initiative could be a continuation of this critique but in the form of policymaking.

This raises another question: In a party where the political leadership in recent years has held a dominant position, how did a number of rabbis, important as they are, dare to challenge the experienced politicians who in theory control their purse strings? It could be that grassroots activists were dissatisfied with a particular party decision. To voice his grievance, one of these activists may have turned to the ideological side of the party and figured how to mobilize it against the political leadership on the sensitive issue of conscription.

Another possibility has to do with the change in the party’s power dynamics that has taken place in the last two election cycles. For many years, Shas knew how to bridge the gap between Haredi leadership and a traditional but non-Haredi Sephardic public. It did this through the promise of a social revolution and a powerful grassroots movement of religious revival that essentially established its local power base.

However, it is no secret that for over a decade, and indeed since the late leadership of Rabbi Ovadia, Shas has been losing electoral power. The institutionalization of the party and the erosion of its revolutionary message threaten the charisma of its leaders. The rise of the Likud party under Benjamin Netanyahu and its nationalist message, alongside the emergence of the Kahanist party Otzma Yehudit, have also eroded Shas’ strength, portraying it as a compromising party more concerned with religious and rabbinic matters than national security. Another significant factor has been the rise of a Mizrahi middle class, educated, semisecular, and seeking to continue its upward mobility, away from Shas’ Haredi line. All this has led Shas’ political leadership to seek new sources of electoral support. Recruiting them is essential to the party’s electoral stability within a political system that has been in an ongoing crisis since the 2019 general elections.

On the one hand, Shas aligned itself with Netanyahu’s leadership, respecting the traditional Mizrahi public that sees Netanyahu as a strong leader. On the other hand, it sought to secure its own position by recruiting Sephardic communities and rabbis who, for many years, especially under Rabbi Ovadia’s leadership, distanced themselves from Shas. These are very large communities located in Haredi cities like Modiin Illit and Elad that Deri succeeded in recruiting over the past decade, but that do not lend their support to the party without compensation—as became evident last year with the renewal of the party’s Council of Torah Sages with figures from this particular Haredi echelon.

The Sephardic rabbis’ letter was the realization of this change, transforming the renewal of the council into a renewal of Shas’ ideological line. The letter featured names like Rabbi Yehuda Cohen and Rabbi Shlomo Yedidya Zafrani, which may not mean much to the average Israeli citizen, let alone to people outside of Israel, but they do mean a lot to a broad public of Sephardic Haredi yeshiva students and their families.

But what so deeply troubles these Sephardic rabbis? Certainly, the fundamental question of conscription into the army is distressing. However, the rabbis’ stance is no different than that of Ashkenazi Haredi rabbis. This issue could have been resolved through a joint letter from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic rabbis, yet that is not the case.

One likely reason for the stand-alone letter therefore is these rabbis’ desire to set a boundary on what can be termed the function of Sephardim in Haredi society—namely, the use of the Sephardic Haredi community as a kind of safety net for the Ashkenazi Haredi society of learners. The Sephardic society of learners includes a very broad margin of what can be called “soft Haredism,” which means a public of baalei teshuva (returnees to the faith) and those who are in the process of increasing their commitment to religious practices and beliefs, whose children do not always attend yeshivas and often deviate from the Haredi path. Given this fact, there is a significant fear that the Sephardic Haredim will become targets for fulfilling the army’s quotas and recruitment goals. This is what the Sephardic rabbis are looking to prevent.

In conclusion, the Sephardic rabbis’ letter is not just another letter. It is an event of significance in the Haredi society in Israel, or at least in the society that Shas has been courting for many years. In soccer terms, the signatories have issued a “yellow card”—a warning—to the political leadership of Shas. The letter reminds them that the new spiritual leadership of Shas seeks to influence the agenda and wants to sharpen the ideological line of the Haredi party. At the same time, the letter is a “yellow card” to the Ashkenazi Haredi leadership, to dissuade them from continuing to envision the Sephardic public within Haredi society as a sort of insurance policy for their arrangements. The rabbis’ letter clarifies that there is a strong Sephardic Haredi yeshiva world, and it will protect its own interests in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Finally, there is of course also an ideological element. No longer trailing behind the Ashkenazim, the Sephardic rabbis have now placed themselves at the forefront of the historic struggle between Haredism and Zionism. In the past, this struggle was against the “new Jew,” whose influence the Sephardic preachers saw in the secular “kibbutz.” Now, the adversary is Israel’s activist Supreme Court.

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Appendix: The Letter

28 Adar II 5784 [7 April 2024]

Clear Instructions in the Face of the Conscription Decree

In these days, when the people of Israel need supreme protection, we must strengthen ourselves with complete faith that only the Torah protects the people of Israel and is the secret of our existence throughout the generations. As we have already seen at the beginning of the year [in the war that broke out on the Sabbath of Simchat Torah], “Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman stays awake in vain,” and all reliance on “my strength and the might of my hand” has proven to be a broken reed, while all protection and miracles are only due to the study and observance of the Torah. We pray every day that the Lord will protect all Jews who are in danger and in enemy territory, and that they will return safely to their homes to serve the Almighty.

And behold, to our deep sorrow, precisely in these difficult days, the state authorities have decided to ignite strife and discord and wage war against the Lord and His Torah with various decrees, with the deliberate intention of assimilating and integrating the Haredi community into secular culture, heaven forbid. Therefore, we hereby clarify the view of the Holy Torah:

A) Anyone with a modicum of sense knows that their ultimate intention is to secure agreement on various compromises—by creating tracks and civil service programs “adapted for Haredim.” This insidious plan aims to infiltrate through a process and stages of targets and quotas and increasing tracks, gradually acclimating the Haredi community to it, with the goal of bringing the Haredi community under their control and reducing the number of Torah observers, as they themselves have stated.

B) The greatest sages of the Torah, led by Maran Rabbi Ovadia Yosef zt”l (in a letter from Tishrei 5761 [October 2000]), have already instructed that even a young man not in a framework of studies is forbidden to go to the army or any of the various tracks. And this Torah shall not be replaced. It is well-known and widely recognized that even all the frameworks and tracks defined as “adapted for Haredim” have led to the abandonment of the yoke of the Torah and to severe transgressions of the Torah, heaven forbid.

C) Additionally, in the joint assembly of all the Councils of Torah Sages (Adar 5774 [March 2014]), it was unanimously decided that no compromises on the issue of conscription are permissible, and there should be no negotiations with them on this matter at all. Foreseeing the consequences, aside from the fact that every compromise will lead to further compromises, every compromise will bring ruin for generations. Therefore, the great sages of past generations have ruled not to enter into negotiations with them at all. And certainly, it should not be considered to agree on quotas, targets, or civil service tracks, etc., even for weak students. The law is that one life is not sacrificed for another.

D) In this time of persecution, we instruct the entire Haredi community and Torah scholars, the upholders of the world, to be strong and courageous, not to fear and not to be dismayed. We are trained through all generations to give our lives for the observance of the Torah and Judaism, as our forefathers did in all generations, and even now we will not shy away from going to prison and enduring all types of sanctions. We are ready to give our lives with all might and courage for the sake of upholding our holy Torah, according to the laws detailed in times of persecution as explained in the Shulhan Arukh (Yoreh De’ah 157).

And now, in this crucial period when, as part of the decree, they also take away the livelihood of Torah scholars to pressure them to leave the world of Torah, we hereby call upon all generous members of our people to support the yeshivas and kollels with their funds and with all their might, and they shall be blessed with wealth, prosperity, and all good things. As Maimonides wrote in the Epistle on Martyrdom: “The nation has already been praised before the Almighty for enduring the hardships of persecution, etc., and it is like a whole burnt offering on the altar.” And one suffering in distress is greater than a hundred who are not in distress, and we have nothing left but this Torah.

And thus we have come to sign:

Moshe Tzadka, Maran Rosh Yeshiva of Porat Yosef; Moshe Maya, Elder of the Council of Torah Sages; Yaakov Toufik Aviezri, Rabbi and Av Beit Din of Beitar; Reuven Elbaz, Rosh Yeshiva of Ohr HaChaim, Member of the Council of Torah Sages; Yehuda Cohen, Rosh Yeshiva of Yekirei Yerushalayim, Member of the Council of Torah Sages; Shlomo Yedidya Zafrani, Av Beit Din of Keter Torah and Nasi of Iggud Amalei ha-Torah; Massoud Ben Shimon, Rosh Yeshiva of Or Elitzur, and Av Beit Din of Bnei Brak; Yaakov Chaim Sofer, Rosh Yeshiva of Kaf HaChaim; Benayahu Shmueli, Rosh Yeshiva of Nehar Shalom; Ben-Zion Mutsafi, Rosh Yeshiva of Bnei Zion; Baruch Shraga, Rosh Av Beit Din of Jerusalem; Yitzchak Bracha, Rosh Yeshiva of Ateret Yitzhak; Shimon Cohen, Rosh Yeshiva of Porat Yosef HaAtika; Shmuel Toledano, Rosh Yeshiva of Brit Yaakov; Eliyahu Toufik, Rosh Yeshiva of Be'er Yehuda; Ben-Zion Atun, Rosh Yeshiva of Reishit Chochma; Menashe Toufik Aviezri, Rosh Yeshiva of Be'er Yitzhak; Ovadia Yosef [grandson of the late Rishon LeZion], Rosh Yeshiva of Ohel Yosef.

Letter translated from the Hebrew by Menachem Butler and Nissim Leon.