Any thoughts mate? Personally I think he's talking bollocks.
'War dead are unpious' says Israeli rabbi
By Tim Butcher
Last Updated: 5:24pm BST 27/08/2007
One of Israel’s most senior rabbis has stirred controversy by claiming Israeli soldiers who do not observe Jewish traditions can expect to be killed in battle.
Under fire: Israeli soldiers
Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the spiritual head of the Shas party, part of Israel’s coalition government, said in a sermon that a lack of religious purity would prove fatal in war.
“Is it surprising if soldiers are, God forbid, killed at war?” the Rabbi said. “When they don’t observe the Sabbath, don’t observe the Torah, don’t pray every day, don’t put on phylacteries (prayer amulets) every day?”
He cited Deuteronomy to say that those who were “fearful or fainthearted”, an apparent euphemism for those who were not fully observant, should not take to the battlefield.
His sermon compared fighters from the biblical era when, he said, the only men who fought were religiously pure, to those in the modern conscription Israeli army, which included non-observant Jews.
As a result, he said, nobody should be surprised when impure Jews are killed in combat.
Many relatives of Israeli soldiers who died in last year’s war against Hizbollah said that their loved ones followed Jewish religious traditions closely.
His comments were also criticised by another Jewish religious leader, Rabbi Gilad Kariv from the Reform Movement, because so many of the Israeli army casualties in the Lebanon war were observant Jews.
“The obedient Shas faction should rent a helicopter this year, and fly the rabbi not to revival meetings but to the homes of all the bereaved families, to ask for their forgiveness,” Rabbi Kariv said.
Manuela Dviri, mother of an Israeli soldier killed in 1998, wrote in a newspaper that Rabbi Yossef’s statement was “utter nonsense, and to prove it I propose that the honoured rabbi make a quick round of military cemeteries.”
The octagenarian rabbi is no stranger to controversy.
Seven years ago, he sparked outrage when he said that the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust did “not die for nothing”, but were the “reincarnation of Jews who had sinned” in previous generations.
______________________________________________
"Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat its mistakes..."
