Rabbi Yuval Cherlow
Rabbi Yuval CherlowIsrael National News

The Prime Minister's comments regarding the annual pilgrimage to Uman caused great controversy in the haredi community, especially his assertion that God did not always protect the Jewish people in Europe.

Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, a senior figure in the Tzohar rabbinical organization, told Israel National News - Arutz Sheva: "The prime minister is very right and very, very, very wrong about the source from which he draws."

"As someone who does not define himself as faith-based, he ignores God's presence with us in every situation, and thus he makes a serious mistake. But from the beginning of the Bible to the last of the books of ethics, we learn that God is with us all the time, both in the biblical 'valley of the shadow of death' and the 'grassy pastures' mentioned in Psalms. He accompanies us all the time, but we don't have an insurance certificate that he will save us from the mistakes we make. All the Holy Scriptures, the entire Bible, and the words of the Sages teach that if we do bad things it is not certain that God will save us. The ways of God are not known to us."

Because of this, Rabbi Cherlow says, "It's a very strange situation because the Prime Minister says things that, at the bottom line, are very true, but deeply flawed in terms of the source from which the things are drawn."

"The Lord of the world was always with us, but was His leadership the leadership of salvation and rescue from mistakes andi idiocies that we do security-wise and in spirituality, or is it leadership that says you will have to 'eat what you cooked' as in the laws of the kings in the Bible, where it was said that if you want a king you will get a king, but in the end, you will cry out and God will not save you. This is the divine leadership as emphasized by the Chazon Ish who said that always He will be with us, but he did not promise that His being with us will bring us salvation and redemption from the abysses that we put ourselves into."

"The most correct compass is the Chazon Ish," Rabi Cherlow points out and says that this can be learned from the story of Jonathan and his armor bearer going to the Philistine camp, and just before that Jonathan tells the young man that while God can do everything and He will not be surprised by anything, but "maybe God will act for us" , that is, the choice of the word perhaps internalizes the understanding that we have no certainty in how God will decide to act, even though he is able to do everything. "Such a degree of confidence is what brings us to act to the best of our ability."

"This is an example of the fact that the politicians and those seeking the opportunity to strike and argue, but when there is an event like this, the spiritual world should not argue with a prime minister or with ministers and politicians, but engage in an in-depth investigation of the degree of security."

Rabbi Cherlow points out that there are indeed situations and there are those for whom the degree of security can lead to inaction and inaction, but the concept inherent in the word 'maybe', meaning that there is no security that God will do for us because we do not know His leadership, is what encourages action. "Even when the situation is desperate and it seems that everything is black and we are in great danger, we turn to God, we will do as much as we can and He will do what is best in His eyes."