As a rabbi, I am supposed to feel affirmed by a law declaring Torah study a foundational value of the Jewish state. Instead, I feel betrayed.
I have devoted my adult life to Torah. I do not regard it as an artifact of our past, admired from a respectful distance. Torah is the architecture of Jewish civilization. It taught us how to sanctify time, how to order a society, how to carry a portable homeland through 2,000 years of exile.
Without Torah, there would be no Jewish people. Without the Jewish people, there is no State of Israel.
That is precisely why what the Knesset has done is so offensive. It has taken something sacred and turned it into a political instrument, borrowing the majesty of Torah to provide constitutional cover for an arrangement in which one growing segment of society expects others to defend it. This is not the elevation of Torah. It is the exploitation of Torah.
This is not abstract for me. I have congregants, between 18 and 21 years old, wearing the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces right now. Torah study received constitutional recognition this week. The soldiers protecting the state did not.
So when the Knesset declares Torah study a foundational value while protecting a system in which tens of thousands of other young Jews remain outside the burden of national defense, I do not hear a neutral affirmation of Jewish learning. I hear a message: your sacrifice is necessary, theirs is sacred. That message is morally indefensible.
Here is what actually passed. The Knesset voted 63 to 52 to give Torah study quasi-constitutional status, the first time a single value of this kind has entered a Basic Law. The operative sentence is almost banal: Torah study is a foundational value in the heritage of the Jewish people and the state.
The danger is not in what the law says but in why it was written. An earlier draft would have classified long-term yeshiva study as a form of national service, equivalent in law to standing guard on the Lebanese border.
That clause was stripped out, but its purpose survived in what remained: a legal shield, built for a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world facing court rulings, in 2017 and again in 2024, that blanket draft exemptions cannot continue indefinitely.
Pushed through the House Committee rather than the Constitution Committee, over its own legal advisers’ objections, it faced a High Court petition within hours. Israel’s Basic Laws are supposed to articulate the enduring principles of a divided nation. They are not supposed to be a drawer a coalition partner opens whenever it needs shelter from judicial scrutiny.
The timing compounds the insult. In the same legislative season, the Knesset extended compulsory IDF service to 32 months because the army cannot sustain its obligations without more soldiers. One population is told its learning now carries the state’s highest legal protection. Another is told to give more of its youth.
That is not a scheduling accident. It is a statement of priorities from a coalition that knows whose children will keep standing at the post.
Corrupting Torah values
I want to be precise about who this insults, because the easy version of this argument casts it as secular Israel against religious Israel. That framing is too shallow. The deepest insult falls on observant Israelis who serve – men and women who have already proven with their bodies that the choice between serious Torah and serious service is false.
They study Daf Yomi between deployments and put on tefillin before training exercises. National religious men make up roughly 13% of Jewish men in their late 30s and early 40s, yet in 2024 they accounted for nearly a third of reservists in that age group. These Israelis never needed a Basic Law to tell them Torah matters.
What this law tells them, in the cold language of constitutional hierarchy, is that the man who never reported for duty now belongs to a protected category and their own devotion earns another deployment.
Maimonides names this corruption directly: turning the crown of Torah into a spade for personal advantage. A law declaring Torah study foundational does not offend me as a rabbi. A law built to shelter draft-age men from a war their neighbors are fighting, dressed in the language of Jewish heritage so a court might hesitate to touch it, profanes the very tradition it claims to honor.
Yair Lapid called it spitting in the face of IDF soldiers; more tellingly, Likud’s own Dan Illouz called it a desecration of God’s name – a chillul Hashem, which is not a political misstep but a theological injury.
Torah study is indispensable to Jewish life. It is not the same as defending the state. A page of Talmud cannot intercept a missile. It is also bad Torah.
Judaism has never required us to pretend otherwise – the same tradition that sanctifies study insists that study lead to action, and asks, in the Book of Numbers, “Shall your brothers go to war while you remain here?” That question is 3,000 years old. It has not become less urgent.
Patriotism is obligation, not sentiment. Sharing the burden is a foundational Jewish value too. So is lo ta’amod al dam re’echa – do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.
A Jewish state that forgets that commandment has not elevated Torah. It has hidden behind it. Every soldier standing guard tonight already knows the difference, even if the Knesset has decided it no longer does.
Israel gave Torah study a constitution. It should have given its soldiers a covenant.
The writer is the rabbi of the Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska. Follow him on X: @steveneabraham.