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COLORWORKS STUDIO OF INTERIOR DESIGN

Legal Mutiny

Some Israeli Orthodox rabbis order soliders to defy
potential army orders and are blasted
by their colleagues.

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ven in a country where a
political uproar seems part
of the daily routine, the
furor over a halachic ruling
last week by prominent Ortho-
dox rabbis exposed a raw nerve.
Former Chief Rabbi Avraham
Shapira and 14 of his associates
on the Executive of the Union of
Rabbis for Eretz Yisrael forbid
soldiers (and civilians) to take
part in the evacuation of army
bases whose sites stand to be
turned over to "goyim" (meaning
in the West Bank). In doing so,
they set off a national furor that
could be more harmful than help-
ful the Jews they sought to help.
On the face of it, the ruling —
strictly binding only on those who
requested it — was neither un-
precedented nor unexpected. Last
year, with rumors of the govern-
ment evacuating Jewish settlers
from Hebron (following the mas-
sacre perpetrated by Dr. Baruch
Goldstein), Rabbi Shapira and
like-minded colleagues — iden-
tified with the right wing of the
modern-Orthodox National Reli-
gious Party — ruled against evac-
uating any settlement in the
Land of Irael.
Last week, they simply ex-
tended that decision to include
army bases, which they defined
as "Jewish settlement[s] in every
sense." But by doing so they
elbowed in on the prerogatives of
the IDF, virtually ordering
soldiers to disobey their corn-

manders.
The response was swift, sharp
and almost universal. Prime Min-
ister and Defense Minister
Yitzhak Rabin predictably de-
nounced it, declaring: "It's un-
thinkable that a democratically
elected government will be con-
strained by rabbis through
halachic rulings that call upon
soldiers to disobey orders."
President Ezer Weizman, who
has previously called for a sus-
pension of the peace talks, angrily
refused to see a number of the
rabbis who had arrived to explain
their decision. Even Likud Chair-
man Benyamin Netanyahu,
leader of the political right, called
the ruling "a threat to democ-
racy." Right-wing Tsomet leader
(and former Chief of Staff) Rafael
Eytan growled that it was "ap-
palling."
Even many leading lights of
the broader rabbinical commu-
nity weighed in. Rabbi Ovadiah
Yosef, the spiritual mentor of the
Orthodox Shas Party, fretted that
it "will lead us to anarchy and the
destruction of the state."
Chief Rabbis Yisrael Lau and
Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron both took
issue with it. Offering his per-
sonal view that "pikuah nefesh
[saving lives] takes precedence
over territories" and that "where
there is no discipline, there is no
army and no security," Rabbi
Bakshi-Doron promised to con-
vene the country's Chief Rab-

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Rabbi Avraham Shapira addresses crowd of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem.

