Can Rabbis Be Idiots?

Yes. Rabbis can be wise and profound, and rabbis can be ignorant, shallow, and stupid. Rabbinic ordination has never immunized anyone against stupidity. Expertise in halakha is no guarantee of historical understanding, sound political judgment, or human sensitivity. A person can know hundreds of pages of Talmud by heart and understand nothing about the world. He may possess an encyclopedic command of the minutiae of what is permitted and forbidden, however trivial those details may be, while remaining utterly blind to causes and consequences, to responsibility and suffering, to morality and reality. The proof?

Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef. Israel’s former Chief Rabbi gave us a master class this week. Against the background of the tensions between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, he declared, “Did Trump turn against us for no reason? It is because of the decrees against Torah scholars.” At the same appearance, he called the Attorney General “Jezebel,” all because state authorities are enforcing the law against yeshiva students who failed to report for service. An embarrassment of riches. Where does one even begin? With the mangled speech? The political ignorance? The vulgarity? Or should we content ourselves with the desecration of God’s name?

Rabbi Yosef’s explanation of Trump’s conduct is not political analysis. It is tribal magic. In his world, the President of the United States has no American interests, no international struggles, no economic calculations, no power contests, no desire for an agreement with Iran, and no complicated relationship with Netanyahu. He is an agent of Providence, punishing the State of Israel because its authorities dared to demand that young Haredi men carry some portion of the burden borne by others their age.

Reality, as usual, is a little more complicated, and therefore rather difficult for His Dishonour, Rabbi Yosef, to grasp. President Trump is indeed pursuing an arrangement with Iran, demanding a reduction in the fighting in Lebanon, and publicly criticizing Netanyahu’s conduct. He has said that Netanyahu needs a “softer touch” in Lebanon and, on another occasion, that the United States must keep him “somewhat sane.” Their dispute concerns war, Iran, Lebanon, and Trump’s attempt to reshape the region according to his own interests. It is doubtful that this president, whose intellectual stature is hardly more impressive than Yosef’s, even knows that the yeshiva student exists.

Yosefs’s stupidity goes far beyond a factual error. The very notion that the entire world revolves around yeshiva students lies somewhere between grandiosity and intellectual limitation. In his telling, hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East, wars, oil, nuclear weapons, relations among great powers, the global economy, American elections, and Trump’s personal ambitions are all mere scenery for the only struggle that truly matters: whether a Haredi young man will be required to report to a recruitment office.

This is the sealed world of fundamentalism. And here is one of its senior figures, unable to understand reality because he is ignorant and limited and therefore left with only one option: to force his mythology upon it. Every success is a reward for Torah study. Every disaster is punishment for harming those who study it. Anyone who tries to test the claim is immediately branded an enemy of Torah. A perfect defense system against any assault by facts.

The phrase “Ben Torah” (A Tora child) itself deserves scrutiny. What makes a person a son of Torah? Is sitting in a yeshiva enough? Is Torah measured by the number of hours spent bent over a lectern, or by the way a person honors or humiliates other human beings? What is a man who calls a public servant “Jezebel” merely because she is doing her job? Crude, repellent, and a disgrace to the Torah he claims to represent. Is this a Torah that recognizes and honors every human being created in the divine image, or a violent system that has licensed itself to humiliate anyone who stands in its way?

The sages of the Mishnah gave us the proper model: “Hillel said: Be among the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving humanity and drawing people close to Torah.” I assume the core curriculum of this narrow minded man did not include Maimonides’ magnificent commentary on that teaching: “They said that when Aaron, peace be upon him, sensed that a person was corrupt within, or was told that he was corrupt and had committed a transgression, he would greet him warmly, befriend him, and speak with him at length... and that man would become ashamed of himself... and return to the right path.”

Mr. Yosef, loving the members of your own camp is not enough, nor are the looting of budgets you did not produce, the evasion of service, and the accumulation of political power. A disciple of Aaron is judged by his treatment of other people, especially those who are not subject to his authority. A man who loves Torah in your fashion and hates human beings as you do has understood neither Torah nor humanity.

Today’s Haredi leadership could hardly be further from the disciples of Aaron. It belongs to a government that has turned callousness into policy and cruelty into a language. It lends legitimacy to a government whose senior figures incite, humiliate, threaten, and sanctify force. It will never stand before the throne and say, enough. It sits at the government’s table, gorges itself, and leaves not a crumb for anyone else.

In doing so, it has betrayed one of the Torah’s oldest functions. The prophet was not the king’s courtier. He did not request a budget in exchange for silence. He stood before David, Ahab, and Jeroboam and reminded them that there is a law above government. Jewish tradition was not born to grant immunity to the sovereign, but to set limits upon him. Not one of today’s rabbis is capable of confronting the king as Shimon ben Shetach did, one of the founders of the Torah world they claim as their own, when he ordered the King of Israel to stand and face judgment. And our own Rishon LeZion, first in title and petty in spirit, is an idler, a coward, and a wretched inciter.

Something deeper is also happening within the public they lead. Growing parts of it are being swept into Kahanist nationalism. The alliance between political Haredism and Kahanism is no accident. The two movements share a similar psychological structure. Both divide the world into the pure and the impure, the loyal and the traitorous, the chosen and the enemy. Both despise doubt, complexity, and universal responsibility. Both regard compromise as weakness, compassion as submission, and equality as a threat. One brings the rabbinic seal, the other a metaphorical pistol and a hangman’s noose. Together they manufacture a Judaism containing almost nothing of the spirit that sustained the Jewish people for generations.

This is one of the bitter ironies of our time. People who call themselves “Torah scholars” support nearly everything opposed to its spirit. The Torah commands love for the stranger, and they seek to expel him. It warns against the tyranny of government, and they bind themselves to its atrocities. It demands one law for citizen and stranger, and they take part in a regime of discrimination. It places human life at the center, and they embrace a cult of death and killing. It declares that the king is subject to law, and they wage war against every institution that seeks to restrain their king.

Hence also the insult to those required to carry the burden. A secular or religious young person may leave home, risk his life, be wounded, or be killed, while his Haredi peer is portrayed as protecting him through study. And when the state asks even to discuss a different distribution of responsibility, it is described as a “decree.” Not a civic argument, not a dispute over policy, but a cosmic persecution of Torah itself. In this way, every possibility of conversation is blocked in advance. Whoever opposes the exemption is not merely mistaken, but wicked. A woman who enforces the law does not hold a different view, she is “garbage.”

Such language is not a slip of the tongue. It is a system of rule. First the opponent is stripped of dignity, then of legitimacy, and finally of the right to take part in shared life. This is precisely how fundamentalism turns from private belief into dangerous political power. Israel’s nationalist Haredi core is part of that war. It is not an alternative to Muslim or Christian fundamentalism, but a member of the same family. Each speaks in the name of a god alien to the moral faith it claims to represent, and all grant the little man the same dangerous exemption from thought, doubt, and responsibility.

Can rabbis be stupid? Certainly. But private stupidity is not the greatest problem. The danger begins when stupidity acquires an audience, a political party, a government budget, and religious authority. It grows worse when ignorance is presented as faith, vulgarity as zeal for Heaven, and selfishness as the defense of Torah.

The answer is not less Torah, but deeper Torah. A Torah unafraid of the world and unwilling to lie about it. A Torah that asks responsibility of a person, not immunity; partnership, not privilege; peace, not the adoration of war. A Torah whose students might truly become disciples of Aaron. Until that day comes, the simple truth should be spoken aloud: not everyone who has studied Torah has learned wisdom. Not everyone called rabbi is fit to lead. Not everyone who speaks in God’s name serves anything but himself. There are stupid rabbis in Zion. One of them even bears the title Rishon LeZion, the First of Zion’s idiots.