are israelis leaving israel en masse?, page-122

Talking about rabbis or other religious young Jews, some of whom will one day become rabbis...

I've been reading the other day what some higher-ups from the IDF were saying regarding a possiblity of Israel's orthodox Jews being conscripted to the IDF. As it is still now, these religious youth are exempt from a mandatory service in the army which is 32 months for men and 24 months for women.

Not only that, because they are studying the Torah, and those studies take years and years, they qualify to receive money from the government, courtesy of course of the Israeli taxpayers (some of that money probably comes from the US taxpayers), which are of course not exempt from the military service. Looks to me like they got it back to front which is nothing new.

Anyway, these higher-ups were saying that it would be very difficult for the IDF to incorporate these religious conscripts into the army because of several issues. One of them was their lack of any knowledge of mathematics except very basic arithmetic skills. I guess they meant by this simple operations of addition, substraction, division and multiplication. A brighter one could maybe calculate a percentage and that's it. And this is not enough to be in the army.

Another issue was that whatever these religious 'soldiers' were to be provided with (food, for example), would have to be kosher as well as they would have to be separated from female soldiers with whom they refuse to serve or have any contact with. Gee, what a bunch....

So, yeah, this lack of any knowledge beyond very very basic (maths, physics, chemistry, biology, humanities, etc.) gives us a good indication of how these religious Jews perceive the surrounding world. No wonder they behave the way they do and believe what they believe.