Jewish Orthodoxy spreads in the Israeli military
Email 
Print
(Israeli soldiers pray at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem's Old City February 22, 2012. REUTERS/Baz Ratner )
Roni Daniel saw the writing on the wall in a toilet.
A former infantry commander who fought in three Middle East wars and now the dean of Israeli defense correspondents, Daniel recently visited military headquarters in Tel Aviv. There, a urinal that uses a motion detector to clean itself was signposted: “Forbidden on the Sabbath.” Troops, he realized, were being ordered to defer to Orthodox Jewish curbs on the use of electricity between Friday night and Saturday night.
For Daniel, and for millions of other Israeli citizens, the sign is symbolic of creeping change in an institution long cherished as a bastion of national unity. An increasing number of conscripts are Orthodox Jews – mirroring the growth of the minority in Israeli society at large. Some religious troops view military service through the prism of their own piety – either as the realization of a messianic vision that sees Jews conquering biblical lands or as an institution that should be subordinated to rabbinical writ.
For secular Israelis, already worried about the role of religion in the Jewish state, that threatens not just the military but the country itself.
“In my time, the skullcap-wearers came to the military and served alongside me. They lived their lives as they pleased, we respected them, and they also respected our lifestyle,” said Daniel, who is 64 and secular. “Today’s generation, to a degree, joins up with the object of imposing its lifestyle on others – to dictate how to behave. It’s a crawling annexation.”
Israel Defense Forces top brass say religion is not threatening the chain of command. “No rabbi will run any of my units,” chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, told Israel’s top-rated Channel Two news last month.
Read the full story here.
.
Follow all posts on Twitter @ RTRFaithWorld
Follow all posts via RSS
Follow all posts via Google+
Comments RSSPost Your Comment
-
Author Profile
-
There are a few factors here:
1. As secular people move away from God/Religion more the religious people appear to get more extreme from secular view point. So its relative
2. Religion has always been one of the places where the mentally ill hope to get help to get better (we see that in many of the Islamic so called ‘martyrs’ – many of them are just plain crazy). Crazy people do extreme things. More crazy people in one group creates an impetus for escalating the lunacy
3. As Radical Islam gets more radical as its well funded from the Saudis (Saudis occupied Bahrain on the grounds of human rights – thats hilarious!) the opposing religions most affected i.e. Judao Christian have to get more extreme to balance their radical nature,
PS I always wondered about crossing at the traffic lights on the Sabbath even if the button was not pressed.
Sorry I forgot to mention.
As a non religious person I do not think
you can judge any religion based on
crazy peoples’ actions at the margin.