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PDF FormatThe success of such programs is driven by the fact that haredi men are surprisingly well-suited for work in high tech, particularly as programmers. Despite some significant gaps in their education, their many years of talmudic study, which stresses not only logic but also independence and study in pairs, or havruta, have prepared them well for the intellectual demands of the job. “They definitely have self-study skills,” says Meir Komer, who is in charge of a computer-programming course catering to the religious community at Machon Lev, a technological college in Jerusalem. “They learn in havruta and need much less frontal teaching than others. Gemara prepares them well for programming.” Laser Rotshtein, managing director of JBE, a high-tech company in Jerusalem that has hired fifty haredi programmers, agrees. “The system of havruta learning helps them in programming,” he says, adding that while students require intensive remedial training in English, the deficit in mathematics is not so difficult to overcome. “Boulian algebra is relatively easy for someone who has learned Talmud.” Rotshtein is not the only employer who is pleased with the quality of his haredi workers. Shlomo Pe’eri, head of manpower at NDS in Jerusalem, a Rupert Murdoch-owned company that produces smart cards for satellite and cable television, also gives high marks to his company’s haredi employees. “Our haredi workers have no trouble adjusting,” says Pe’eri. “They work well with others and carry their weight. We’re very satisfied with their work.”62
Hillel is a rising star at JBE. He studied computer programming at Machon Lev after trying unsuccessfully to earn a living as a teacher of four- and five-year-olds; he moved around to Safed, Beersheba, Migdal Ha’emek, and Jerusalem, never earning more than a few hundred dollars a month, and never being paid on time. In addition to his regular programming duties at JBE, Hillel’s pet project has been to create a three-dimensional model depicting Maimonides’ calculations on the rotation of the new moon. “I taught myself three-dimensional trigonometric algorithms,” he says, as he demonstrates the angle of the moon in relation to the earth at different times of the year. “Without this model it’s very difficult to understand what Maimonides is after. I wanted to break down difficult concepts to a level people could understand.” Hillel took on the Maimonides project because “I wanted even my secular work to have a holy dimension.” But purely secular applications also have a spiritual dimension, he believes. “Until you get involved in some kind of secular activity, you’re not actualizing your Tora.”
No less important than the personal satisfaction Hillel has gained from his “secular activity,” however, is the fact that he is also received well in his community—an indication that the taboo on work has been significantly eroded in recent years. “The guy who sits next to me in shul in Beitar [a religious community south of Jerusalem] asked me how to get into computers and then went and signed up at Machon Lev,” he says. “Many people, from all walks of haredi life, ask me questions about work. People even stop me on the street. There are people who are literally hungry; they are suffering.” Those who suffer most, he says, are those who have to pay rent because their parents could not afford to buy them apartments, and as a result are taking one interest-free loan to pay another. That was the life Hillel knew for years—hunting down new sources of loans, getting calls from the bank manager about his overdrawn account and from the local grocer about his monthly bill. Now, he says, “I have a chance to live instead of just worrying about meeting my basic needs. I can give to others financially. People look at you differently when you earn a salary.”
Vocational training, however, is not the only indicator of change. Another is a new flexibility in the attitude of a number of leading rabbis towards military service. The most striking example is the establishment in January 1999 of the Nahal Haredi, a military unit aimed at accommodating the particular needs of haredi soldiers, including Tora study sessions, stricter standards of kashrut, and minimized contact with female soldiers—a program that could never have gotten off the ground without the backing of leading figures, most notably R. Steinman.63 The three-year tour of service offers recruits the opportunity to fill in the gaps in their secular knowledge and earn high-school equivalency diplomas. Even before they finish their first stage of active duty, two teachers are sent to their outpost to teach math, Hebrew, and other basic subjects. After their first eighteen months of service, which include a four-month basic training program, they are sent for a year to work in a community and to learn a trade. Some of these soldiers have ended up at Machon Lev. “When a person feels that he is worth something, then he’s motivated to do better,” says R.Yoel Schwartz, a rabbi in Jerusalem’s haredi neighborhood of Me’a She’arim, and one of the Nahal Haredi’s supporters.
The number of haredi inductees is still quite small, attracting only a few hundred out of the thousands of potential recruits who come of age each year. However, because of the backing it has received from some rabbis, it has become a matter of significant controversy within the haredi community. “The Lithuanian rabbis are afraid that the Nahal Haredi will become highly popular,” writes Shahar Ilan. “They are concerned that not only will the shababnikim enlist, but so will the regular, less successful yeshiva students, who will jump at the chance of going out and earning a decent living.”64 Both advocates and opponents of the Nahal Haredi believe that if army service becomes legitimate, the result could potentially be a flood of students leaving the yeshiva; Dudi Silbershlag estimates that as many as 40 percent of yeshiva students might sign up. For now, however, the importance of the Nahal Haredi is mostly symbolic, a signal to the wider haredi community that alternatives to full-time Tora study are gaining legitimacy, and that the army need not be a hostile environment for haredi recruits.
A more significant indicator of the new openness to change has been the acceptance by several leading rabbis of the proposals put forth by the Tal Commission in the spring of 2000. In December 1998, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in the case of Ressler v. Minister of Defense that the Defense Ministry had exceeded its authority by granting unlimited deferrals and exemptions of military service to yeshiva students. The court allotted the Knesset one year to pass legislation that would set forth rules governing the exemption of yeshiva students; if it failed to do so, the Ministry of Defense would be obligated to begin drafting them. (The one-year period has since been extended several times, most recently by an act of the Knesset.) In August 1999, Ehud Barak, acting in his capacity as defense minister, appointed a commission to investigate the issue and propose relevant legislation; the commission, headed by retired Supreme Court Justice Tzvi Tal, a religious Zionist who favors military service, included representatives of the haredi community, as well as the defense and legal establishments.65
After a careful investigation of the social, economic, and political implications of drafting yeshiva students, the Tal Commission presented its report in April 2000. For the committed Tora scholar, the commission’s main proposals amounted to a formal legalization of the present situation: An unlimited number of full-time yeshiva students would be allowed to defer their army service indefinitely, but would be obligated to complete their service as soon as they chose to end their full-time study. What was to change, however, was the introduction of a “year of decision,” according to which a yeshiva student who had deferred his army service could, at age 23, take a year off his studies to pursue work or vocational training without being drafted. If, at the end of that year, the student chose to return to full-time yeshiva study, he could continue deferring his military service indefinitely. Otherwise, he would serve a shortened tour of a few months of army duty, and would then be free to pursue his career or studies as he saw fit.66 The idea behind the year of decision was to allow the serious students to continue their study, while offering a relatively painless way out for those whose principal reason for being in yeshiva was to avoid military service.
Predictably, the proposals met with strong opposition from secular activists, who had seen the court’s ruling and the subsequent appointment of the Tal Commission as an opportunity to compel at least part of the haredi community to shoulder the burden of defending the country, and who now saw the commission’s findings as nothing less than a sellout. MK Yosef Lapid, head of the anti-clerical Shinui party, declared the proposed law to be a “shirkers’ law,” with Meretz MK Mussi Raz chiming in that the Tal proposals “essentially say that haredi blood is redder than secular blood.” Nehemia Stressler, the respected economics editor of Ha’aretz, moaned that “the injustice cries out to the heavens,” while Moshe Negbi, then Ma’ariv’s legal affairs correspondent, called the proposed law “repugnant.”67A student protest movement called Awakening (hit’orerut) arose in response, and the poet Yehuda Amichai went so far as to declare that “the struggle against implementing the Tal recommendations is equal in importance to the struggle for the independence of Israel.”68
