Want to know how we can tell that this draft exemption thing is a serious business? Cross Currents has thrown out its vaunted editorial standards and permitted a guest writer, Yair Hoffman, to fisk Natan Slifkin..
Now, no one with even the semblance of a life is going to have time to read the whole thing, so let me share the funniest part.
If Rabbi Slifkin is to use this argument, then he must admit that if you will chart the correlation of loss of life of IDF soldiers r”l in the wars to the amount of Yeshiva students studying in Yeshiva, you will find a clear inverse relationship: the more students in yeshiva, the less loss of life. The exception to this, where there was significantly less loss of life despite there being less Yeshiva students, was the Six Day War — there were 796 casualties then, r”l. But, there we had the additional merit of regaining the Temple Mount. [The other exception is the Suez War of 1956, which was a limited military operation where we allied with France and England to reverse Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez canal. The losses there r”l for Israel were 231.] Remember, Rabbi Slifkin brought up the argument.
Name of War Total loss of life, r”l # of Yeshiva Students in Israel 1948 6373 400 1967 796 600 1973 2656 800 1982 Lebanon War 725 12,150 2006 Lebanon War 165 51,084 2012 Operation Cast Lead 13 66,000
All together boys and girls: CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!
And to drive home this important point, our friend OrthoDiction has provided this helpful counterexample:
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