New definition of dishonesty

With regard to “UTJ considers Basic Law to solve enlistment problem” (February 4), Israel’s army-serving and taxpaying citizens have long grown accustomed to being fleeced by a Haredi community that eschews both military service and (in many, if not most, cases) the payment of taxes.

That a majority of such young men do not seriously learn Torah is a fact. They do not learn simply because they cannot learn. Even in Talmudic times, when only a tiny percentage of highly capable young men entered the academy, it was known that “of a thousand who enroll, only one emerges” as a scholar of any merit. As Adina bar Yosef, the daughter of the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, said, most of the yeshiva people “spend their time wandering from window to window and from cigarette to cigarette.”

The Torah system as we now have it is primarily a crime against the wastrels who languish in its four cubits. Their lives are being wasted to serve the lust for power by Haredi rabbinic and political leaders. No wonder there are no admissions requirements, no periodic exams and no standards of competence or knowledge in order to qualify.

Now, the colossal pickpockets known as the Haredi parties are hatching a plot to “solve the enlistment problem” because the study of Torah is a “supreme value.” This creates a new definition of dishonesty. J.J. GROSS Jerusalem