The academic year started this morning. My son who's at Tel Aviv U called me earlier - he hadn't taken his Notebook this morning, and could I please use his password to find his personal section on the university's website to look up the classroom he was supposed to be in, because the information on the board in the entrance to the building was clearly wrong.
I'm reasonably technically literate as old codgers go, but the way technology has changed the way we do things can still give me pause.
So it's good to see yet another little piece of evidence that our Haredi community is finally accepting their need to have academic qualifications. They're moving incrementally, not revolutionarily, but they're moving. This is important for all of us, on many levels. It will enahnce their ability to pay for themselves; it will enrich their lives; it will enrich ours, too, if this rapidly growing minority among us figures out how to combine modernity with tradition better than they've been doing.
A lot of Israel's problems can be traced to ancient compromises that have become part of the social structure. One of these is the compromise between the ideal of universal conscription with the fact that Haredim will not do so. I don't have a particular solution, but I think it's clear that Haredi methods used to avoid conscription harm both the Haredim and Israel itself.
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