One People, Two Judaisms

And the difficulty of bridging the gap

During the many years that I spent in charedi yeshivos, I once heard my Rosh Yeshivah say, “The Zionists wanted to make a new type of Jew, but we believe that the old type of Jew, the Torah Jew, was good enough!”

He was correct that there are two very different forms of Judaism. But he wasn’t correct about it being Zionist Judaism versus Torah Judaism.

Historically, there have been two very, very different forms of Torah Judaism. One was the Judaism lived by the Jewish People as they developed into a nation, fought against their enemies, attained a sovereign state, and had to make decisions for an entire people regarding running a country. That is the Judaism of Moshe Rabbeinu, of the Torah and of the Neviim, and to a significant extent through to the end of the Second Beis HaMikdash.

Then came the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, which occurred largely due to Jewish zealots who were overconfident in their strength. “Give me Yavneh and its sages,” said Rabbi Yochanan to Vespasian, and Judaism survived. But the subsequent development of Torah and Judaism occurred in very different circumstances - as a Judaism for a scattered people who were a minority in every location, who lacked any real power, and for whom governments were hostile entities with which to negotiate and manipulate for survival. Seeking to make the best of the situation and to retain pride and hope amidst persecution, they sought strength in cleverness and mysticism. Lacking physical strength and wary of what the Zealots had brought about through overconfidence in exercising it, they ideologically downplayed it. And they never had to think about large-scale issues, because they never formed a significant population.

Two thousand years later, circumstances changed again. The Jewish People were again a majority in the Land of Israel and gained political independence. There were wars to be fought, there was a nation to be built, there was a country to be operated.

With such changed circumstances, it was obvious to certain rabbinic leaders that it was time to draw upon the Judaism of Tanach (with a brief and minor adjustment of ensuring a few hundred dedicated yeshiva students to recover the Torah losses of the Holocaust). It wasn’t about making a new type of Jew - it was about realizing that the original type of Jew had to come back.

But many other rabbinic leaders, having developed from a culture of conservatism and traditionalism, were unable to rise to the occasion. They continued their diaspora form of Judaism, transferring their approach vis-a-vis the governments of Poland and Hungary to the Government of Israel. And as the threat of the outside world grew, their approach became even more isolationist.

And thus we have an intractable problem. A statement such as “Shall your brothers come to war, while you sit here?” which is uttered by none other than Moshe Rabbeinu, and resonates so strongly with dati-leumi religious Jews, is simply meaningless to charedim. The notion of Jewish combat is entirely alien to them, they are utterly detached from the idea of national responsibility, and their religious identity is dependent on being separate from the larger nation of Israel. As a chareidi rabbinic leader once said, “If the government tells us to learn Bava Kama, we’ll learn Bava Basra!”

The charedi opposition to army service is ultimately not about fear that their young men will stop being mitzvah-observant (which is a negligible risk in a charedi hesder framework). It’s about such a thing being in opposition to their very religion.

Until recently, this didn’t really make much difference to anyone else. But with the enormous birthrate of the charedi community, such that they now number well over a million people and are fully a third of the next generation, this creates a crisis that has come into sharp focus with the Gaza war and is even more concerning regarding Israel’s future. The type of Judaism which works for being a tiny minority under a foreign government simply does not work for being a major proportion of a Jewish state. There is an economy that needs to be strengthened, there is a nation that needs to be supported, and there are wars that need to be fought (and the most challenging wars still lie ahead of us).

If charedim don’t change their religion back to the original form of Judaism, the country will likely be so internally weakened that it will simply be unable to survive against its enemies. The real need of the hour is for a charedi leader to stand up and declare that it’s time for change. But the charedi community is so built up on traditionalism, fear and social pressure that it’s impossible to imagine such a revolutionary leader to even come into existence, let alone take a public stand and be respected.

Thus, the only option is to strengthen the few lower-profile charedi revolutionaries, and use a carrot-and-stick approach with everyone else. This carrot-and-stick approach needs to be done at both a governmental and private level. And it needs to be campaigned for, and not suppressed under demands for (a superficial and fake) unity. Simultaneously, I think it’s important to educate people, both inside and outside the charedi community, about how what it means to be a Torah Jew has historically changed depending on the external circumstances, and the new reality of the State of Israel - no matter whether one is “Zionist” or not - means that it has to change again.