The preliminary passage of Basic Law: Torah Study should be remembered as one of the ugliest moments in the Knesset’s long history of dressing political surrender in sacred language.
This is not a law about Torah. It is a law about power, money, and avoidance. It is a last-minute effort to turn a coalition crisis into a constitutional shield for draft evasion, at the very moment when soldiers and reservists are carrying an unbearable national burden.
The bill passed on Wednesday in its preliminary reading by 56 votes to 43. Likud MKs Dan Illouz and Yuli Edelstein, New Hope MK Sharren Haskel, and Religious Zionist Party MK Moshe Solomon broke ranks and voted against it. Solomon later paid a political price for refusing to lend his hand to what he called a moral injustice. His explanation was the only honest one: He could not look bereaved families in the eyes and vote for a law implying that Torah and military service need not meet.
The original version reportedly went even further, seeking to equate the status of long-term Torah learners with that of IDF soldiers. After fierce criticism, that explicit comparison was removed, according to reports.
But the remaining wording is still dangerous. It declares Torah study a fundamental value in Jewish heritage and a basic right in Israel, and says the state views those who dedicate themselves to long-term study as making a significant contribution to the state and Jewish people.
Torah belongs to all of us
There is nothing offensive about honoring Torah study. Torah is not the property of the haredi parties, their rabbis, or their political brokers. It belongs to all of us. It has shaped Jewish law, memory, culture, and moral imagination for millennia. Precisely because of that, using it as a cynical instrument to preserve a chosen and privileged life outside the draft is a desecration.
The insult is sharpened by the timing. Israel is over two-and-a-half years into a war that has drained its soldiers, exhausted its reservists, and bereaved families across the country. The IDF has repeatedly warned of a severe manpower shortage. The High Court has pushed the state to enforce the law against draft evaders and revoke benefits that cannot legally continue without a draft framework. Instead of confronting that reality, the coalition is trying to rewrite the moral equation.
Everyone outside the narrow political machinery can see what this is. The haredi parties are trying to minimize damage before elections and preserve their standing inside their own communities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing the collapse of his coalition, appears ready to grant them almost anything in exchange for time. Reports of a broader package involving the election date, daycare subsidies, and other haredi demands only sharpen the picture.
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett warned the haredi public that the bill would gravely harm Israel and them, saying that without a functioning economy and army, Israelis simply will not be able to live here. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, responding after MK Moshe Gafni invoked the Warsaw Ghetto, said his father sat in the ghetto, and his grandfather died in a concentration camp because the Jewish people had no army. He called the bill what it is: not Torah, but money for evasion.
Torah bill ‘a desecration of everything holy’
Yoaz Hendel went further, calling it a desecration of everything holy here. He is right. Thousands of religious and Torah-learning Israelis serve, proving daily that devotion to Torah and responsibility for the state are not opposites. The claim that its study requires permanent exemption is not piety; it is politics.
There are arguments to be made against the state, and arguments to be made about the relationship between religion, coercion, and citizenship. But there is no legitimate moral excuse for living here while fighting the very branch that protects your life and the lives of your children.
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 cared about Torah would not use it to divide soldiers from students, mourners from politicians, and Jews from one another.
The Knesset should bury this bill before it becomes law and stains the Torah it pretends to honor today.
