A Soldier's Perspective On Drafting Yeshiva Students

Another guest post from our contributor

With the current talk about extending the draft for yeshiva students, our anonymous friend, who has already contributed several articles on different topics for us (a list here, and see especially this one) is back, sharing his informed perspective as both a Ben Torah and soldier.

Recently the idea of drafting yeshiva students has become a hot button issue in Israel. With sympathy for the IDF running so high among almost all religious Jews, there are some people, even among those who nominally belong to the Charedi camp, that are at a loss to understand the fierce opposition to this idea. This is especially true of Americans, both those in Israel and those in chu”l. Although it can be assumed that many of the politicians, newsmakers, and bloggers who have been demagoguing this issue are motivated by sinister or self-serving motives, none the less, many well meaning and sincere people are bothered by this issue, and it has the potential to cause them spiritual confusion and harm.

It is worthwhile to keep in mind that this is not something that the state can enforce even if there was the political will to do so. When Mr. Lapid calls for the immediate draft of 10,000 yeshiva students (as he recently did) he is doing so from the safety of the opposition. He is well aware of the fact that the state of Israel does not have the wherewithal to imprison 10,000 draft refusers, nor can the army afford, especially now, to absorb 10,000 recruits who reject military discipline because they don't believe they ought to be in the army. If Mr. Lapid suddenly became prime minister he would of course quickly drop this idea as being completely impractical, but insofar as he is in the opposition and therefore there is no chance of his suggestion actually becoming law, he need not worry about the consequences and can use it to try to score political points. The problem is that he and others like him are undermining national unity for the sake of their own perceived self-interest. National unity doesn't mean uniting with those who agree with you, it means accepting that there are those who don't agree with you but still believing that what unites you is more important than your differences. So in this case national unity means that even those who feel that no one should be exempt from the draft, accept that there are those who don't agree with them, and nonetheless what unites the nation is more important than these differences, however sincerely held.

While acknowledging the above, it still behooves us to provide a perspective that will grant some peace of mind to those who greatly value national unity, but are sincerely at a loss to understand why at this time it is inappropriate to draft yeshiva students. After all, does not pikuach nefesh override almost all other commandments? Is this not perhaps the equivalent of a biblical milchemet mitzvah? And if so, ought not yeshiva students be the first to rush forth for this great mitzvah? These are legitimate questions for those who are sincerely perturbed, and they deserve to be addressed seriously.

The first question that I would like to address is the issue of pikuach nefesh. It is true that when faced with a situation in which a Jew's life is in danger one is required to set aside all other mitzvot except for the three cardinal sins in order to save that life. There is no question that an immediate situation of pikuach nefesh would override the great mitzvah of Torah study. However, that is only when one is faced with such a situation, but there is no requirement to put oneself in such a situation. For instance, a physician who knows how to treat the ill is certainly required to stop learning Torah when there is an ill person in front of him requiring his attention. However, there is no obligation for a person to go to medical school in order to learn how to treat the ill, if that would come at the expense of his growth in Torah. As a matter of fact, it is well known that the Vilna gaon was prohibited by his father from studying what was then called applied pharmacology, and today would be referred to as medicine, in order that he not be obligated to interrupt his Torah studies in order to tend to the needs of the ill.

So while it may be true that an already trained reservist that is called up at a time of national emergency would be required to leave the beit medrash in order to protect Jewish lives, there is no obligation to join the army in the first place in order to be qualified to provide such protection. If one is of the tiny percentage of the Jewish people that has the will and the ability to engage in our overriding national mission of coming close to God and revealing his will through the study of Torah, there can be no doubt that that takes precedence over serving in the army. This in no way is meant to disparage the mitzvah being performed by those who are serving in the army, just as the fact that most yeshiva students shouldn't be joining Hatzalah and leaving the beit medrash several times a day to rescue the ill or injured, does not in any way belittle the mitzvah being done by those who join hatzala when it is appropriate for them.

Of course, this entire discussion is predicated upon the assumption that serving in the army is automatically the equivalent of protecting Jewish lives. Considering that the army is run in the spirit of strongly secular values, the assumption that merely by joining the army one will be performing the mitzvah of pikuach nefesh is perhaps highly questionable. But that is a different discussion for another day, for the sake of what is being discussed here right now, I will make the assumption that being a soldier equals engaging in saving Jewish lives.

There is another issue that needs to be considered, and that is that even pikuach nefesh does not allow one to violate the three cardinal sins. A legitimate argument has been made that losing one's faith is included in the prohibition of avoda zara, such that when service in the army entails a substantial risk of losing ones faith, it may be prohibited to do so even if serving in the army does equal pikuach nefesh. Obviously, this is a very individual thing, there are rare individuals whose faith is actually strengthened in the army, and there are individuals who serve with a large group of religious peers, which significantly reduces the risk of losing one's faith when serving in the army. Nonetheless when setting community policy one has to take into account that of all those who enter the army professing to be religious, 30 to 50% are not religious during their post army life. Of course, there is a difference between joining the army as an 18-year-old recruit whose Torah knowledge is limited, and whose philosophical understanding of Judaism and worldview has not yet matured, versus joining the army at a much later age when one has already acquired significant Torah knowledge and developed a mature world view.

Regarding the question of whether or not the current war can be considered analogous to a milchemet mitzvah, one must consider the following: For those who are convinced that Medina is a Jewish country and perhaps even the beginning of the flowering of our redemption, the state itself is something worth defending. This is true to some extent even among people who acknowledge that from a Jewish perspective the state is a terrible disappointment. Not only has the state failed to advance bein adam lamakom values, it has also engaged in behaviors that strongly undermine bein adam l'chavero. On the other hand those who do not see the Medina as being particularly Jewish see no reason why defending the Medina per se is a worthwhile goal. There is big difference between defending the Jewish people and defending a state as an institution. There are people currently serving in the military such as myself and my son who are willing to make great sacrifices to defend the Jewish people, but see no great value in defending the state as an institution. And the reason that people such as myself feel an obligation to defend the Jewish people is precisely because they are God's people, of which the Jewish people has no greater expression than those who are dedicated to studying God's will.

It is important to understand what the concept of a milchemet mitzvah is. Certainly, a Jewish American soldier who fought in World War II to defeat the Nazis with the intention of protecting the Jewish people, was accomplishing a very great mitzvah. But that does not render World War II a milchemet mitzvah . Any act undertaken to promote a worthy goal may be a mitzvah, but that does not render every worthwhile war into a milchemet mitzvah. By way of analogy, I would point to a pair of tefillin versus a bowl of soup. A pair of tefillin is inherently an object used for mitzvah, while a bowl of soup is not. A bowl of soup that is used to charitably feed a hungry person is certainly being used for a mitzvah, but it still remains a bowl of soup not a pair of tefillin. The same is true for a war, in order to be even be considered for the status of a milchemet mitzvah one would have to presume that the state of Israel has some sort of status as a Jewish state, not merely a state containing many Jews. Yet why would one consider the state of Israel to be a Jewish state in any halachik sense? Sure, it occupies a territory that's somewhat coincides with the holy Land, but that would be true no matter who governed that territory. Does the state of Israel express explicitly Jewish values? Is it even the policy of its government that it needs to be ruled by Jews? Are its laws and its policies an expression of the Jewish people's special mission for which God chose them? If not, in what sense is it Jewish? To consider this any more comprehensive fashion I will consider the relationship between political Zionism and Judaism.

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Political Zionism as it exists today is actually the merger of three separate ideologies, one secular, one religious, and one that is indifferent to secularism or religion.

Secular Zionism: A single human being or a single nuclear family of humans is very limited. It has limited economic potential, limited security potential, limited support in time of distress, and limited possibilities of intellectual advancement. Very early in human history, humans realized that there was great benefit (despite some drawbacks) of living in large societies. However, for large societies to succeed, people must be motivated to contribute to society at least as much as they derive from it. This is no simple matter, as human nature is such that there is a very limited number of people that we can know personally and identify with to the extent that we will care about their well-being. This is further compounded when a group is spread out over a large geographical area. Without delving into the finer points of history, sociology, anthropology, etc., the short answer is that humans solved the issue by creating the concept of the nation. The nation is a group of individuals that are united around certain factors, such as ethnicity, culture, ideology, and other similar ideas. The individual person develops a strong sense of identity with his nationality, even when he may not be able or motivated to identify with the other individuals that make up the nation, as individuals. As such, each individual in the nation becomes invested in the welfare of the nation as a whole. To further this agenda, nations have symbols around which the population can rally, such as a king, a flag, sometimes a religion, or other similar cultural affectations. Although at any given moment an individual may find that the cost of belonging to a nation is greater than its benefits, in the aggregate the benefits of being able to create huge, secure, societies far outweigh the costs. So, at its root, nationhood is a response to a human need. The symbols of nationhood are there to facilitate the success and fulfillment of that need. At its deepest roots, nationalism is just one more form of self-worship. The Jewish people explicitly rejected that model of nationalism. Monotheism properly understood, cannot abide any form of self-worship. In monotheism, any value must be an expression of God's will, and nationalism is certainly a value. In Judaism one does not inculcate a sense of national unity, create a kingdom, build a place of centralized worship, or participate in any of the other stigmata of nationalism for the benefit of society; rather the opposite is the case. One participates in society, encourages a sense of national unity, builds a kingdom and a place of centralized worship in order to further God's goal of having a relationship with the Jewish people and further God's revelation in this world. The nation does not exist to serve the needs of the individual, rather the individual exists in order to further the goals of the nation. It is true that in times of great stress, various forms of nationalism have promoted the idea that the collective, or some ideology that animates the collective, is more meaningful than the benefit of the individual, but that does not conflict with nationalism being a form of self-worship any more than child sacrifice conflicts with paganism being a form of self- worship. Sometimes self-worship can be very costly and demand great sacrifice, but in the eyes of its practitioners that is still cheaper than the ego negation that monotheism demands.

The Jewish nation, even in exile maintained a sense of unique peoplehood. It continued to see itself as God's people and exile as a temporary condition. This was despite being spread out over an increasingly wide geographical area, while being dispersed among and participating in cultures that vary greatly. And this continued for a period of well over 2000 years. Nothing remotely similar has ever taken place with any other people or nation. The reason is that since nationalism serves the needs of the collective, once a nation is conquered or dispersed and nationalism loses its benefits, the individuals that made up that collective rapidly lose any sense of identity with the collective. They go on to form a more beneficial senses of identity. This is known as assimilation. While individual Jews did assimilate over the course of the exile, a loyal core always remain part of the collective because they did not seek out what the collective did for them, but rather saw the source of meaning in their lives as what they could contribute to the goals of the collective.

Secular Zionism set out to undo all of that. It sought to re-create Jewish nationalism in the image of the nationalism that animated all other peoples. Like all other forms of nationalism this could only succeed if the Jewish nation would live in their own homeland and under their own rule. So, the secular nationalists set out to re-create the Jewish homeland and Jewish self-rule, but only after having inverted the means for the ends. To the secular nationalist, ideology would serve the Jews rather than the Jews serve their ideology. For reasons that should now be obvious, traditional Jews as represented by Charedi ideology, saw this as a modern form of paganism. The worship of an idol created in one's own image, in order to facilitate self-worship.

Secular Zionism does have a specific attachment to the land of Israel, as the homeland of the Jews, the historical source of Jewish nationhood, and the place in which Jews once had an independent kingdom. It does not connect to the land of Israel as being uniquely suited for a lifestyle of attachment to God, or a land that has its own unique mitzvot because of it representing the concept of holiness in space.

Religious Zionism: It is beyond the scope of this essay to delve into the deep theological concept of holiness. We will merely note that God did not create all things equal. Among people some are endowed with greater innate holiness than others. For instance, a Cohen is holier than a non-Cohen, and therefore there are mitzvot that apply only to a Cohen. Likewise, not all time is the same. Shabbat represents holiness in time, and therefore there are mitzvot that apply to shabbat but not to other times. The land of Israel represents holiness in space. God is everywhere and one can relate to God from anywhere, but the land of Israel allows for a unique relationship with God. Therefore, the land of Israel has unique mitzvot that don't apply to anywhere else in space.

It is for this reason that when God chose Avraham to be the founder of his chosen nation, he bid him to leave his homeland and move to the land of Israel. When God decided to rescue the Jewish people from Egyptian slavery, there was no need to take them out of Egypt. He could simply have caused the Jews to overthrow their Egyptian taskmasters and enslave them, or at least drive them out of the land and take it over for themselves. But that was not the purpose of God's rescuing the Jews, it was in order to have a relationship with them. And that relationship was facilitated by the holiness of the land of Israel.

Yona is sent by God on a prophetic mission to warn the residents of Nineveh to repent or face destruction. For reasons that I will not go into here, Yona initially rejects his mission and attempts to flee the land of Israel. What will this accomplish? Does God not supervise what goes on outside of Israel? Clearly, Yona understands that the lofty condition of his soul that allows him to experience prophesy, is only possible in the holy environment of the land of Israel. If he leaves, he will no longer be a prophet, and will thus escape the obligation that for whatever reason he does not wish to fulfill.

In the Chumash and Nevi’im, God repeatedly warns the Jewish nation that the land of Israel will not tolerate their sins, and that if they do sin, they will be ejected from the land. It is true that exile serves as a punishment for sins as well as motivation to improve, but that's not it's only purpose. God says if you are going to sin, do it somewhere else, not in the holy land of Israel.

It is because of the role that the land of Israel plays in their relationship with God, that the land always held such a central place in Jewish longing and Jewish prayer. In the prophecies of Isaiah it is predicted that the return of the Jewish people to Israel will proceed the advent of the messianic era. There were certainly messianic overtones to the return to the land by both the students of the Vilna Gaon and those of the Baal Shem Tov in the early 19th century. Organizations like Chovavie Zion emerged to facilitate increased immigration to the land of Israel from eastern Europe, while more than a few Yemenite Jews set out by foot from Yemen with the intention of settling in Zion.

This Jewish immigration was motivated by religious fervor and not an escape from difficult conditions in the exile. On the contrary, life was more difficult and uncertain in the land at that time then in the places people were coming from. Immigration that took place during the 19th century was toward the goal of settling the land, not a flight from a difficult and painful exile. While the political Zionism that arose at the end of the 19th century concerned itself with solving the problems of the Jews being a despised minority in exile, the wave of aliyah that preceded it was about returning to the holiness of the land of Israel.

The response to the rise of political Zionism of the traditional religious world tended towards polar opposites. On the one hand there arose a school of thought best represented by Rav A. Y. Kook, who saw in the secular movement to return the Jewish people to the land of Israel the heralding of the messianic era. The messianic era is closely bound up with the Jewish people's relationship with God, while the secular Zionists completely rejected the very concept of such a relationship. Nonetheless it is certainly possible for God to use people's machinations toward his own ends, even if it is contrary to their stated intentions. Moreover, it is possible for people to believe that they are acting out of one set of motivations, while the truth is that they are acting out of their essential nature which is in opposition to their stated conscious motivation. I am no expert in Rav Kook's deep philosophical and kabalistic approach, so I will attempt no more than the superficial description that I have offered above.

This approach saw in political Zionism the expression of a religious imperative. God was openly acting in history, and our relationship with God demanded that we answer that call. The physical building of the state, the effort towards political independence, these were not merely religiously tolerable but rather they were religious imperatives. When the state had been built and sovereignty affected, God would turn the people's hearts toward him and in retrospect it would be clear that all along they had been carrying out God's plan to bring his people back to him.

At the opposite end of the spectrum were the majority of the great Jewish thinkers of that era. They took political Zionism at its word, as a movement that rejected the entire concept of the Jewish people being God's unique treasure for whose benefit God manipulates history. As a movement that imagined antisemitism to be nothing more than a political phenomenon subject to a political solution. And they therefore rejected political Zionism with both hands. To the argument that God could use people's ill-intentioned actions to his own ends, they responded that on the contrary, God would not grant the merit of being agents of redemption to those that set out to separate the Jewish people from their God. Some went so far as to argue that political Zionism was hijacking the messianic era (that had begun with the movement for Jews to return to the land of Israel that proceeded political Zionism by nearly a century) and would therefore be the cause of delaying the redemption. God had begun to bring the Jewish people home in anticipation of the messianic era, but by turning that return into a rebellion against God, the Messiah would be delayed. God grants man free will, and if the Jewish nation were to reject God in favor of political machinations, God would accept their decision. He might grant them success in their political efforts, even miraculous success, but at the cost of the closeness that he had intended to bestow upon them.

Naturally Religious Zionism has an attachment to the land of Israel, not only as the natural home of the Jewish nation, but also as the land of holiness and closeness to God endowed with its own special mitzvot.

Safe haven Zionism: The enlightenment undermined Christianity as a religious force in far less time than it had taken for Christianity to arise from an obscure sect in Roman dominated Judea to a world dominant religion. But Christianity as a cultural force would survive until today. For many centuries prior to the advent of the enlightenment, European antisemitism had been based on religion. Jews were seen as the embodiment of evil, representatives of Satan in this world. Although Jews were often accused of heinous acts, their status as evil did not depend upon such allegations. Their status was seen as intrinsic and inherited, the result of their ancestor’s rejection of the Christian Christ. Yet a Jew who converted to Christianity was accepted, since by accepting their Christ he had been redeemed.

With the advent of the enlightenment and its newfound commitment to reason, such antisemitism was rejected. Antisemitism didn't disappear of course, it simply took on a new form. Jews were now seen as culturally and religiously (the two had become closely related) inferior. Many Jews internalized and accepted this view and agreed that the Jews of Europe needed to "progress". This gave rise to the Haskalah, which saw itself as a movement to imbue the Jews of Europe with European culture and thus make them the equals of their non- Jewish neighbors. The Haskalah was quickly followed by the movements to reform Judaism and thus make it equal to the cultural Christianity that surrounded the Jews. Reform Judaism was essentially a copy of protestant Christianity both in terms of its values and its ritual, without the Christian doctrine. The Reform movement from its very founding was conflicted over whether it was meant to be a short-term bridge to complete assimilation or a long-term Hebrew form of cultural Christianity. History has had its say, and it turned out to be a short- term bridge to complete assimilation. The movement only continues to exist by being taken over from the assimilated heirs of its founders by subsequent waves of Jews abandoning traditional Judaism. Because cultural Christianity was in a period of rapid flux and evolution, the reform movements had to constantly change to keep up. The Jews who accepted the antisemitic critique and responded by modernizing Judaism truly expected antisemitism to disappear. It didn't. In eastern Europe it actually got worse. This led to a generation of Jews joining a series of utopian movements in eastern Europe, particularly socialist movements that promised an end to antisemitism. This would continue until Communist antisemitism under Stalin and the Holocaust under Hitler would prove that antisemitism was far stronger than any particular ideology, and would simply mutate forms to fit into any particular zeitgeist.

At the same time, in western Europe the Dreyfus trial revealed a depth and breadth of resilient antisemitism that shocked the assimilated Jews of western Europe to the core. These historical trends did lead some assimilated Jews back to tradition. But others, such as Herzl, sought a new explanation within the bounds of reason, that could explain why antisemitism was so persistent. They decided that "race" or ethnicity was destiny. A Jew simply could not truly assimilate among non-Jews, and would always be seen as an outsider. The solution to this problem was that Jews should not live among non-Jews. It didn't really matter where they did live, as long as it was someplace that they were not among non-Jews, and had their own state. Once they were a nation with their own state, the non-Jews would no longer hate them, and would relate to them out of national interest just like they related to each other. Some went so far as to suggest that if the Jews formed a demilitarized state that threatened no one, they would then have no enemies at all. History has demonstrated how mistaken this notion was, but at that time it seemed like a rational idea to men of reason.

Of course, this type of Zionism had no particular attachment to the land of Israel per se, and could just as easily accept a homeland in Uganda or anywhere else. This form of Zionism was inherently indifferent to Judaism versus Secularism, and in fact seems to have had some appeal to many religious Jews in pre-holocaust Europe. As modern political Zionism evolved from the merger of these three distinct ideologies, the idea of founding a Jewish state anywhere outside of the land of Israel faded. Yet the concept of a Jewish state serving as an antidote to antisemitism, as well as a safe haven for Jews (these are separate, although related concepts), remains an essential tenet of the modern state of Israel. Charedi ideology found itself in conflict with political Zionism from its very inception. Of course, the fact that many of those who were active in building the infrastructure for a state and later the state itself were hostile to Judaism, as well as the project to use force to separate vulnerable traditional populations from their Jewish traditions, did nothing to endear the Zionist project to Charedi Jews. But that is not the issue that I'm trying to explain. Even if Ben-Gurion had grown a beard and peyout, and the state had done everything it could to promote Jewish practice, there still would have been an ideological objection to the political Zionist project.

As discussed above the majority of first-tier Jewish sages living at the time that Zionism began to be a successful movement, as well as those living at the time of the establishment of the state, objected to the idea that God would use those dedicated disrupting the relationship between God and his people as a tool to bring about the redemption. There is a general principle in the Torah that God brings about positive outcomes through the agency of meritorious individuals and negative outcomes through the agency of evil individuals. Therefore, these thinkers rejected the idea of the prelude to the messianic era being affected by those whose motivation was to affect the exact opposite outcome.

There is a fine point that needs to be appreciated here. It's not that God does not use the acts and intentions of evil people to his own ends, certainly that is not the case. Absent the evil intentions of Pharaoh there would not have been an exodus from Egypt, the event that serves as the basis for the Jewish people's trust in and loyalty to God. Absent Haman we would not have the events of purim, the basis for being able to maintain that trust and loyalty even in exile, even in the absence of prophecy and open miracles. In those cases, Pharaoh and Haman intended to bring about a particular end, and God manipulates events to bring about outcomes that are the very opposite of what they intended. Even in the case where God allows evil people to succeed in their intentions, such as Sancharev exiling the northern kingdom of Israel or Nevuchadnetzar sacking Yerushalayim and burning down the Beit Hamikdash, God is using these evildoers as a stick with which to punish the sins of the Jewish people. As a result, the Jewish people are encouraged to repent and their very suffering serves as a source of forgiveness, ultimately leading them to reconcile with their God, and to a deepening of their relationship with him. While eventually these events will help to lead to a positive outcome, the events themselves are certainly negative, and so it is appropriate that they should be brought about through the agency of negative people. On the other hand, the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel not only has the potential to usher in the messianic era, a positive outcome certainly, but the ingathering of the exiles is in and of itself a positive event. Therefore, the thinking goes, if it was brought about by negative actors, it cannot be the prelude to the messianic era. Once they have succeeded, what then must happen to allow for the pre-messianic ingathering of the exiles? Must the state dissolve itself? Will it be destroyed by forces either internal or external? The answer is that we cannot know. It all depends on the merit of the Jewish people. While history makes lots of sense and can be seen repeatedly following the patterns prescribed in the Torah, that is only true in retrospect. In advance we cannot know how these prescriptions will be fulfilled, and it is actually not preordained. History must take us to the destinations prescribed by the Torah, but the route to get to there depends on our free will. If we are meritorious than it will take one route, and if not, it will take another.

There was and is a minority opinion that takes the opposite view. While it rejects the corruption of Jewish nationalism that inhabits political Zionism, as well as the misconstruing of antisemitism, it nonetheless believes that the ingathering of the exiles facilitated by political Zionism can be, and perhaps even of necessity must be, the predicted prelude to the messianic era.

In short, if one is convinced that the state of Israel is in some way holy and meaningful, then it is worth sacrificing for, even if it is disappointing in it's current form. On the other hand, if one sees nothing particularly Jewish or valuable in the state per se, then the only reason to fight in the IDF is to protect Jewish people. This would be equally true if there was a war in New Jersey against terrorists that wanted to annihilate Lakewood. While participating in such a theoretical war in NJ would indeed be a mitzvah, no reasonable person would believe that it was a milchemet mitzvah.

One last point. It takes an extreme level of blindness to fail to recognize that at least one of the major lessons that God is teaching us through this war, is how helpless we are without his open intervention. Not long before this war broke out, the prime minister of Israel warned Jews not to go to a war torn Ukraine because God has not protected the Jews there in the past. Without taking any position on whether or not such travel to Ukraine is appropriate for other reasons, the declaration that we can't rely upon God, but are none the less safe in Israel because of our own security apparatus, was just the type of arrogance that can undermine the future of judaism. Some religious Jews did protest the prime minister's attitude, but he was defended by some of our favorite bloggers as being correct. A short time later, the state's vaunted security apparatus collapsed in a nearly supernatural fashion. I'm sure that there were many spiritual factors involved, some easier to ascertain than others, but to miss this point requires a pretty intense level of spiritual blindness.

So to sum up, there are those who are convinced that the state as an institution is holy, that fighting to defend it is a milchemet mitzvah, and that the need to do so takes precedence over the short term, to engaging in Clal yisroel's most meaningful activity, which is dedicated Torah study. Everyone respects the heroism and dedication that these people are demonstrating during the current war. Others, myself included, believe that their underlying premise is mistaken. The state as an institution is not holy, it's not even particularly Jewish. The number one thing that anyone can do to further the Jewish ideal, is to engage in intense and dedicated Torah study, provided that one has the opportunity and the will to do so. But for those who don't have the opportunity or will to engage in dedicated Torah learning, and instead find themselves engaged in defending the Jewish people (as opposed to the state), they too are performing a great mitzvah, provided that they can do so without harming their overall dedication to their relationship with God.

One last point. The collapse of the entire security apparatus on October 7, and the failure of the army in over 5 months to defeat their enemies even in Gaza, not to mention the north where the entire civilian population has been rendered refugees for this entire time, while we fall further and further behind in Yehuda and Shomron, should wake us up to the fact that we don't "got this". We desperately need to revitalize our relationship with God. The yeshivot are not the problem, they are at least part of the solution.