--- title: "Military Duty Calls" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/2/12/military-duty-calls.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/2/12/military-duty-calls.html" published: "2003-02-12T13:48:00" updated: "2003-02-12T13:48:00" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "I've been called. To the military. It's a call that a small part of israeli men after the age of 21 come to expect 2-3 times a year. I'll be gone for a month or something of the sort, starting the coming sunday. does…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Military Duty Calls By Roy Osherove February 12, 2003 **Historical article** · Originally published February 12, 2003; technical details may be outdated. I've been called. To the military. It's a call that a small part of israeli men after the age of 21 come to expect 2-3 times a year. I'll be gone for a month or something of the sort, starting the coming sunday. does this mean the war is coming? maybe. If israel is gathering is miltary reserve troops to protect it's skies, it maybe just a precaution, and it may not. Why did a isay a small part of israeli men over 21? The Answer is simple. There s a mandatory military service in israel . for men it's 3 year, and for women it's a year and 8 months. it starts at 18. Why a small part? well. ignoring those that can't actually join the service, there are plenty (and i mean plenty) of those who get out of it by claming they learn the torah.In israel there is a law called "Tal's Law" which allows the military to exempt from service those that are "Torah Studiers". It's actually a law. That cuts down the number of mandatory service doers by about half. From those that DO join the mandatory service, More then half of those that finish it, don;t go back to doing reserve service. (to make it clear, it is not optional, Reserve service is required by law if you did mandatory service. ) they get out of it in different excuses, but the sad fact is that currently - about 5% of men that should be serving in reserve, do not. Those that do, need to leave their families, their jobs and thier university studies and just go to about a month a year. this totally screws up the whole system. this is what's happening now. a lot of people will get the call to serve now, they won't have much choice, they'll go. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/