Is Torah Study Equal to Them All?
Friday, July 3, 2026 – י״ח תַּמּוּז תשפ”ו
וְכָל תּוֹרָה שֶׁאֵין עִמָּהּ מְלָאכָה, סוֹפָהּ בְּטֵלָה וְגוֹרֶרֶת עָוֹן. (אבות ב:ב)
“Torah which is not combined with a worldly occupation, in the end comes to be neglected and causes sin.” (Avot 2:2)
This week, we marked the 1000th day since the world changed on that fateful Simchat Torah, October 7, 2023. We also marked the 17th of Tammuz, the day on which, among other things, the walls of the city of Jerusalem were breached, beginning a 3-week period leading up to the destruction of the Temple on the 9th of Av, and of course the 50th anniversary of the heroic rescue mission of a hijacked plane in Entebbe, Uganda, overlapping with the 250th anniversary of the United States of America.
With all of that, this week’s focus is on the Knesset, which advanced, in a preliminary reading, a bill called “Basic Law: Torah Study” (or, in its Hebrew formulation, “Basic Law: Limmud Torah”). Fifty-six votes to forty-three. The bill would enshrine long-term Torah study as a “foundational value” of the State of Israel and recognize those who commit themselves to it as performing something the state must treat as significant service — service, in the political logic of this moment, means to sit alongside and ultimately outweigh the obligation of military conscription. Because it is a Basic Law, it is built to carry quasi-constitutional weight and is designed specifically to survive a High Court that already ruled in 2024 that blanket exemptions for Haredi yeshiva students cannot stand alongside “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty’s guarantee of equality”.[1] (See here for MK Rabbi Gilad’s Knesset speech connecting the 17th of Tammuz to the Torah Study bill)
Now, I love Torah study. The ability to engage with the deeper meaning and life lessons of our ancient wisdom and sources, and to extrapolate the messages that our ancestors, the prophets, sages, philosophers, mystics, poets, Enlightenment thinkers, and storytellers wrestled with centuries and millennia ago and apply it to our lives is one of the great privileges of being Jewish. To be a Jew is to engage with the Torah.
But Torah study cannot and should not be legislated as a Basic Law, raising it to an officially legalized equal expression for military and national service.
Torah study should be a foundational value of the State of Israel. I love how Torah is featured as a mainstay of Jewish public culture, woven into every fabric of Israeli society. Every city has biblical street names; every town and city is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible; every state school incorporates Torah study into its curricula; we use Torah verses to protest; and the Torah/TaNaKh is the underlying foundation and source of the collective narrative of the Jewish people. In short, Ahad Ha’am’s dream – to live in Jewish space and Jewish time, has come true.
Would that all Jews abide by the directive of Pirkei Avot (The Sayings of the Sages):
בֶּן בַּג בַּג אוֹמֵר, הֲפֹךְ בָּהּ וַהֲפֹךְ בָּהּ, דְּכֹלָּא בָהּ. וּבָהּ תֶּחֱזֵי, וְסִיב וּבְלֵה בָהּ, וּמִנַּהּ לֹא תָזוּעַ, שֶׁאֵין לְךָ מִדָּה טוֹבָה הֵימֶנָּה: (אבות ה:כ”ב)
“Ben Bag Bag said: Turn it over, and [again] turn it over, for all is therein. And look into it; And become gray and old therein; And do not move away from it, for you have no better portion than it.” (Avot 5:22)
Yet, Pirkei Avot teaches us something else critically important:
רַבָּן גַּמְלִיאֵל בְּנוֹ שֶׁל רַבִּי יְהוּדָה הַנָּשִׂיא אוֹמֵר, יָפֶה תַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה עִם דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ, שֶׁיְּגִיעַת שְׁנֵיהֶם מְשַׁכַּחַת עָוֹן. וְכָל תּוֹרָה שֶׁאֵין עִמָּהּ מְלָאכָה, סוֹפָהּ בְּטֵלָה וְגוֹרֶרֶת עָוֹן. (אבות ב:ב)
Rabban Gamaliel the son of Rabbi Judah Hanasi said: excellent is the study of the Torah when combined with a worldly occupation, for toil in them both keeps sin out of one’s mind; But [study of the] Torah which is not combined with a worldly occupation, in the end comes to be neglected and causes sin. (Avot 2:2)
Four coalition members voted against the bill. Religious Zionist and Likud lawmakers who by any reasonable measure love Torah as much as anyone in the chamber broke ranks. The bill will need three more readings, and legal advisers have already warned that fast-tracking constitutional legislation through the House Committee — bypassing the committee that is charged with this responsibility — creates real procedural defects. The High Court may still strike it down. But the fact that it has gotten this far, backed by the ruling coalition government, in the middle of a multi-front war, with the IDF chief of staff warning of a manpower collapse and some 80,000 draft-eligible Haredi men who are not enlisted, tells you something has shifted in what the state is willing to call Torah.
I keep thinking about a page of Talmud I was teaching this week. The Talmudic tractate Brakhot 27b–28a includes a text about this question: who gets let into the house of Torah, and on what terms, and who decides.
The Doorkeeper
The story tells us that Rabban Gamliel, as the nasi, the leader, ran the Beit Midrash (House of Study) with a gatekeeper stationed at the entrance. The policy extant at that time had severe consequences; namely, any student whose inside did not match their outside — that is, whose private character failed to match the depth of his public learning — was turned away. The house of study was to be a place of the sincere and the worthy. It sounds, on its face, like an admirable standard. Guard the sanctity of the room. Let in only the elite.
The end of the matter (Hebrew: sofo shel davar), the Talmud tells us, was that on the day Rabban Gamliel was deposed and Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya elevated in his place, the doorkeeper was removed. The house filled with many more eager to learn. Benches had to be added — the tradition disputes the number, four hundred or seven hundred — to hold everyone who now came in. Torah that had been sealed off behind a standard of who was worthy enough to receive it became, suddenly, radically available to anyone wishing to learn. And more Torah got taught that day, the text says, than had been taught in all the years before.
The Gemara does not let this resolution sit easily. It records real anxiety about what happened when the gate came down — Rabban Gamliel’s own distress, a fear that opening the house too widely would let in the spirit of disputation along with learning, and blurred distinctions that mattered. This is not a simple story about inclusion triumphing over exclusion. It is a story about an institution discovering that its gatekeeping, however sincerely intended, had been quietly deciding who counted as inside Israel’s house of Torah. The fix was not a better gatekeeper, but the removal of the gate, followed by the harder work of building a house that could actually hold everyone now sitting in it.
The House Today
“The Basic Law: Torah Study” runs this story in reverse. It does not remove a gate; it builds one, and then declares the ground on the far side of it a “foundational value” that the rest of the state must accommodate – with financial benefits, with legal status, with recognition that, in the current draft, still functions, however carefully softened, so that Torah study is equivalent to the actual defense of the country. The doorkeeper that Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya dismantled is being reinstalled, except now he stands not at the entrance to a Beit Midrash checking who is fit to learn, but at the entrance to civic obligation itself, deciding who has to serve the state in the Israel Defense Forces and who has earned, through Torah, a legislated exemption from conscription. Whose child can risk their life for the country and spend years of their late adolescence doing military service, and who simply doesn’t have to.
That is the thing worth naming plainly: this is not a bill about whether Torah study matters. Reform Judaism has never needed convincing that it does. We say each morning that “Talmud Torah k’neged kulam” The Study of Torah is equal to all [the mitzvot] is not a slogan we borrowed from anyone. This proposed Basic Law is a bill about converting the sincere, disciplined, genuinely sacred practice of Torah study into a legal instrument that lets one community opt out of a civic burden and a mortal risk, years of service, the actual defense of the state that everyone else’s children are asked to carry. Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf and MKs Meir Porush and Yisrael Eichler can call this a matter of protecting Torah scholars from persecution. But the bill’s own explanatory language gives away its actual engine. It exists to answer the High Court’s equality ruling, not to answer any theological question about the sanctity of learning. It is not a law about Torah. It is a law about who has to serve, filtered through the vocabulary of the Torah because that vocabulary is the one form of authority in Israeli public life that is still hard to argue with directly. Let’s ask them the Kantian question: Would you be OK with everyone in the country shirking the responsibility of service and defense and taking up a full-time seat on the Yeshiva bench???
That is exactly the move Rabban Gamliel’s doorkeeper made, and exactly the move the sugya (the Talmudic vignette) ultimately condemns: using an entrance standard, framed as devotion to the house, to decide in practice who belongs to the collective and who is exempted from its costs and responsibilities. The gatekeeper thought he was protecting the beit midrash. He was actually unilaterally deciding who counted as part of the community bound to its demands.
The equality problem is also a Torah problem
Reform Zionism holds two commitments in permanent, deliberate tension: that Israel exists as a Jewish state, rooted in the fullness of Jewish text, practice, history, and experience, and that it exists as a democratic nation, where the arevut — the mutual responsibility that Jews owe each other is based on a social contract — and is not selectively enforced. “Basic Law: Torah Study” exists specifically to break that tension in one direction. It is a counterweight built, by its sponsors’ own account, to “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty” — meaning that its purpose is to let a value the state now has decided is Torah learning override a value the state has already decided is based in the equality of all its citizens.
You cannot hold Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh (all of Israel is responsible for one another) as a live principle while legislating that one community’s spiritual commitment legally outweighs another family’s son or daughter serving in Gaza or Lebanon in wartime. The scale we’re talking about is not about a small elite minor group of exceptional students that is set apart, but tens of thousands of draft-eligible Ultra-Orthodox men in a country fighting on multiple fronts. Should this Basic Law be codified by the Knesset, Israel will cease to look like a room made for a minority religious calling and instead look like a state in which structural inequality wears a tallit.
The fairest version of the Haredi position deserves to be stated clearly, because it isn’t nothing: Haredi leaders argue that Israel has always had a class devoted to sustained Torah study, that the courts and “the system” have targeted a minority community’s way of life, and that a pluralistic Jewish state should have room for the Haredi population without demanding uniform conscription.
There is coherence in that claim at a small scale, and Reform Judaism, of all movements, should be wary of demanding everyone’s Judaism look and function the same way. But the honest answer is that this bill isn’t asking for room at a small scale. It’s asking the Jewish and democratic state to legislate around an equality ruling, during a live war, for a population the IDF says it urgently needs, timed to a coalition deal trading the bill’s advancement for delayed elections. Scale and cynicism are what convert a defensible claim into an indefensible law.
Reform Zionism’s argument here isn’t against Torah study. It’s against the Knesset and the current messianic government ruling coalition using Torah’s name to legislate who has to bleed for the State and who has been declared, by statute, exempt. Rabban Gamliel’s students learned the day the gate came down that the size of the house was never the danger. The danger was ever having decided, quietly, who got to walk through the door.
Shabbat Shalom.
[1] Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty is one of Israel’s foundational, quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, passed by the Knesset in 1992. It protects fundamental human rights, including life, body, dignity, property, personal liberty, privacy, and freedom of movement.