2025: Next Level Charedi Resentment

From forcing men away from their families to forcing money out of their pockets

It’s 2025, and that means that there’s a significant new development in the conflict between the charedi community and the rest of Israel.

In the year and a quarter since the war began, there’s been increasing resentment from the rest of Israel towards the charedi community for not participating in the war effort and for not even caring. In numerous posts I’ve noted the increasing burden that the charedi community forces to be placed on the reservists - the endless months spent away from their jobs and families, the harm to physical and mental health and to lives (nearly a thousand killed and six thousand injured), and the resentment that this causes. But as of this month, the burden that the charedi community places on the rest of Israel gets even greater.

The war is really, really, really expensive. It’s not just the enormous military expenses - it’s also the compensation that needs to be paid for all those that have suffered in different ways, as well as the staggering costs of rebuilding the south and the north. And the government necessarily has to find ways of financing all this. As a result, 2025 launches increases in various taxes and utility prices and decreases in various government benefits. The prices of many food products are also going up. This will affect the average Israeli family to the tune of thousands of shekels monthly.

Most Israelis understand that this is the price that we need to pay in order to benefit from the privilege and importance of surviving in our homeland. But what Israelis quite reasonably cannot accept is that every taxpayer is simultaneously also forced to financially support the deliberately under-educated and under-employed charedi community.

Between yeshiva grants and welfare benefits and tax reductions, as well as forcing tens of thousands of men to be pulled out of the workforce for army duty, the charedi community costs the rest of Israel tens of billions of shekels annually. Let that figure sink in.

It’s absolutely untenable and unforgiveable. And with the rapid growth of the charedi community, it looks set to only get worse.

Of course, if the charedi community had any leadership with wisdom and responsibility, they would have seen this coming (as many of us saw years ago, including some people within the charedi world) and would have begun making changes in their communities. Or at least they would do it now, when the war makes the need for it so much starker. But they lack such leadership.

The only hope for Israel is for the charedi community to crash so hard financially that they will be forced to change their approach (as Belz and some other chassidic groups have started to do, though they still have a very long way to go). And this needs to happen as soon as possible, before they drag the rest of the country down with them into catastrophe.

In order to make this happen, the charedi parties need to be made politically toxic, and private donors to charedi causes need to redirect their giving to only those institutions which teach charedim to be economically productive. (I know of several people who are involved in reaching out to philanthropists in order to convince them of this.)

Meanwhile, as Israelis feel the effects of the charedi lifestyle not only in their army service but also in their pockets, the resentment towards the charedi community is only going to grow. Which is entirely understandable - and unfortunately even necessary, in order for change to take place.

How tragic that those who claim to represent Torah have failed to learn Chazal’s values of economic self-sufficiency aside from their failure to learn the Torah’s values of helping others, and have ended up making [their version of] Torah into something that people quite rightly despise.