My fellow Jews, I stand in unentitled judgment.  I am writing to take religious exception to the Haredi religious exemptions.  First, however, two admissions: one, I’m American and have never served in the IDF.  I hope to make aliyah next year, but I’m hearing-impaired since youth, so we’ll see.  If Tzahal will take me, I’m in.

Second, I am not Haredi, but some of my finest teachers have been, both in the US and during my stays in Israel.  I now wish to speak directly to them.

Friends, the Knesset’s unholy alliance has granted you a reprieve.  You must be dancing in the streets.  My starkest image of you, however, will be of fighting in the streets.  Imagine: Jews fighting fellow Jews for the right to not fight in defense of fellow Jews.  Your ferocity against armed police only heightened the irony.  You people fight like…what’s the word…

Is that what Ben Gurion had in mind when, at the nation’s founding, he exempted a mere 400 Orthodox Holocaust survivors temporarily in a noble attempt to “preserve the remnant?”

It isn’t.  And you know it.  A community containing 80,000 draft-age “scholars” is hardly a “remnant,” more........

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