A highly charged meeting took place Thursday evening in Bnei Brak, as Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch, rosh yeshiva of Slabodka, arrived at the home of Rashbi rosh yeshiva Rav Meir Tzvi Bergman.
The discussion, which lasted about 45 minutes, focused entirely on the draft-law proposal that has dominated the public arena in recent days.
The meeting came just three days after the publication of a recording in which Rav Bergman sharply criticized the proposed legislation, using unusually forceful language.
Yesterday, Rav Hirsch—together with Slabodka rosh yeshiva Rav Dovid Landau—gave the coalition official approval to begin advancing the draft bill in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. That green light followed weeks of deliberations among the leadership and was seen as a decisive turning point enabling the legislative process to move forward.
However, the release this week of recordings of Rav Bergman changed the tenor of the conversation. In the recording, the rosh yeshiva rejects the draft-law outline promoted by committee chairman MK Boaz Bismuth, denouncing it in stark terms.
In excerpts aired by Channel 13 News, Rav Bergman is heard declaring: “I don’t understand how one can even begin to think about this. What are we, owners over the Torah? Will we be afraid that there won’t be money? ‘Mine is the silver and Mine is the gold,’ says HaKadosh Baruch Hu. How can anyone even think of this? We are not going along with it at all! One cannot agree to such a thing! It is both foolishness and wickedness!”
The rosh yeshiva continues in the same vein: “They can do whatever they want, but we cannot agree to it. Not at 50 percent, not at one percent! How can anyone say that a bochur should go to the army? Whoever goes there only deteriorates further and further. It means handing falsehood to our children! We scream that this is ‘shmad’ and that one must give up one’s life, and suddenly we support it? What they want to accomplish in five years is like jumping off the roof!”
Against this dramatic backdrop, Thursday night’s meeting between Rav Hirsch and Rav Bergman was convened in an effort to clarify the direction of the Degel leadership. Details of the meeting have not yet been released.
{Matzav.com}
