golem613

Yeshivaman 613

“The way wars are fought today, an army doesn’t have so much to do with numbers of physical troops and man power.”
Tell that to the literal Magidei Shiur and 40-something year old Avreichim in Hesder yeshivas doing their third or fourth tour of reserve duty in Gaza, Shmirah in yehuda/shomron, or Lebanon or the border of Syria. Not to mention the regular requirements of the army. People always say this and never actually have a source besides supposed anecdotal evidence. And maybe your friends weren’t allowed to enter Gaza because that just isn’t how the army works. You don’t get to say “send us here”. It’s not like saying you want to go to a certain shiur lol.

What bothers me about the learning for protection argument is that there’s no feeling of responsibility whatsoever. Obviously learning has a schar that protects, but the yeshivas only take credit when something good happens. If we really believed that learning protected then A. There would be achrayus on the learners when things went wrong as well. That is why R’Chaim Shmuelevitz would come into the beis medrish when a soldier was killed, give a klop on the bima and say “we cannot say “yadeinu lo shafchu es hadam hazeh!” Everyone spending significant time learning (myself included) should have fasted when missiles hit residential buildings, because obviously there was a chisaron in our learning.
And B. There obviously would not be a bein hazemanim right now. If we really believed that the spiritual front is equally essential in a straightforward manner, then like the soldiers, the bochurim would not be taking a break. The fact that there has not been any major call to cancel bein hazemanim for most breaks in the last two years indicates that we don’t really act on that belief.