The draft
Learning and service, in the same place
This country has spent fifty years arguing about the draft as though there were only two answers, and both of them require somebody to lose. There is a third, and it is boringly practical: put the yeshiva where the soldiers are.
Why the argument never ends
A charedi family is not refusing to serve out of contempt. The fear is specific and it is honest: that a boy who goes in will come out without his learning, without a beis medrash, without a mikvah, without the structure that holds a religious life together. Meanwhile a secular family watches its own children serve and sees that fear as an insult. Both of them are describing something real. Neither of them is going to win the argument by repeating it louder.
What we would build
Yeshivas along the border bases. Not a token shiur room and not a visiting rabbi — proper batei midrash with a mikvah, a seder that holds, and a rosh yeshiva in residence, built onto the bases themselves. A young man serves and learns in the same place, at the same time, without choosing between them and without his family having to gamble on who he will be when he comes home. The state gets soldiers. The community keeps its sons. Nobody is asked to surrender.
Yeshivas Geulas Shaul
The first one is already named and already sited. It will stand on our land at Sde Trumot, in the Beit She'an valley beneath Mount Gilboa — the ground where Shaul, Israel's first king, fell on his own sword rather than be taken. We are building a yeshiva on the exact earth where a soldier died by his own hand, for the purpose of stopping soldiers from dying by their own hands. That is not a metaphor we reached for. That is the field.
The List
The Rosh Yeshiva is Shmuel Herenstein — known as Pashut. He served in the IDF and came home with post-traumatic stress. He healed with plants. He now wants to give back what was given to him, which is the entire argument of this platform, standing up and speaking.
The Village
Geulas Shaul will sit alongside the healing village, so that a soldier in treatment is never asked to choose between recovery and a beis medrash.
This is the one everybody says is impossible.
It is also the one that costs the least and ends the oldest fight in the country.