Today, the Telegraph blog over at the JTA shared a story from the Hareidi (Ultra-Orthodox) world (via YnetNews): that older bachelors who were not married (and who were not yeshiva students) be punished: with banishment from the city of Jerusalem. This class of toxic older bachelors, shirking their responsibilities to be fruitful and multiply consists of those over the wizened age of 20.

The ruling was issued by Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, head of the Hazon Yaakov yeshiva and son of Shas’ spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who noted that:

[…] in the past it was customary to banish “older” single men from the capital as punishment for their refusal to marry and provide for a family.

In recent generations, Sephardi rabbis decided to annul this regulation, but according to Rabbi Yosef it should be reinstated. “Only a yeshiva student who studies Torah has an exceptional permission to postpone marriage, if he fears that marriage might distract him from his studies. But normally one must not delay marriage till after 20, and those who do had better leave Jerusalem and go study somewhere else,” he wrote.

Banishment. Somewhere, Jewish demographers and those who are obsessed with the singles crisis are saying, “Wow. We totally should have thought of that.”