A Generation of Tu B’Av

On Tu B’Av of this year, I began my morning with an early interview on Radio Galey Israel. I was asked to comment on a report published the previous day indicating that the number of Haredim enlisting in the IDF has risen steadily since October 7. In the year ending July 2025, approximately 2,800 Haredim enlisted; by July 2026, the annual figure had climbed to 4,000. The interviewer noted that the IDF attributes much of this increase to intensified enforcement.

I do not dismiss the importance of incentives, whether positive or negative. Like everyone else, we Haredim respond to them. Yet a narrow focus on enforcement overlooks three deeper factors driving this change.

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The first is the expansion of adapted service tracks and the shift in the army’s approach. Since October 7, the IDF has come to recognize the urgent need for Haredi soldiers. It has consequently invested greater effort in developing dedicated frameworks, expanding combat and combat-support roles, and adapting conditions of service to the Haredi way of life.

In the most recent April–May recruitment cycle, 433 Haredim enlisted in dedicated tracks, including 272 combat soldiers. The figure reflects both growing demand and increased capacity to absorb Haredi recruits.

There is still a long way to go. Anyone involved in the field knows that the gap between promises and realities on the ground has not yet been closed, and that serious challenges remain in enforcing the relevant regulations and maintaining the necessary religious accommodations. Still, the progress is undeniable. Today, at least within some of the available tracks, a young Haredi man can consider military service a genuine possibility without assuming from the outset that he will be required to surrender any part of his religious practice or Haredi identity.

The second factor is the intensive and admirable work of organizations and key figures from within Haredi society itself. The Netzah Yehuda organization has substantially expanded its operations; additional groups, such as Anashim, have entered the field; and prominent individuals—including Rabbi David Leibel and the late Yaakov Farber, founder of the Maalot Tzur program—have devoted their energy, talent, and at times their public standing to advancing the great project of Haredi partnership in the defense of Israel.

Alongside them are many others, often far from the spotlight, who accompany recruits, build trust, and work to ensure that the available frameworks are truly suitable.

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But the third factor—and the one especially worth emphasizing as we approach Tu B’Av—is time.

Since October 7, and to some extent even in the years preceding it, the conversation surrounding Haredi participation in military service has grown dramatically. This is no longer merely the old debate over “drafting yeshiva students.” It is a far broader question: How will this enormous community, rapidly approaching fifteen percent of the country’s population, participate in the defense of our shared home?

In wartime, this is not a theoretical discussion. It is laden with sights and voices that cannot be suppressed: the many young men, some of them themselves devoted and exceptional yeshiva students, who gave their lives—in the most literal sense—for the war effort; young widows and orphaned children; thousands of wounded soldiers; and tens of thousands of reservist families carrying an immense and prolonged economic, domestic, and emotional burden. –

And from across Israeli society comes a cry. Sometimes it is voiced in frustration, sometimes in pain, and sometimes in anger:

Where are you? “Shall your brothers go to war while you remain here?” We need you.

Naturally, we surround ourselves with walls of excuses and justifications: the Supreme Court, the attorney general, the hostility of the unlearned toward Torah scholars, the assault on the Torah world. Each of these arguments has its place, and some contain a measure of truth. Yet in quieter moments, when we are left alone with ourselves, I believe that we too understand that something fundamental has changed.

One era is drawing to a close, giving way to another.

The era of Haredi insularity played a crucial historical role. It enabled Haredi society to recover from the destruction of European Jewry, rebuild the Torah world, and defend itself against the threat of secularization. It was a kind of historical incubation period, protecting Haredi identity until it could grow strong and firmly established.

But an incubation period cannot continue forever. At some point, we must leave the shelter of the hothouse—not to abandon what grew within it, but to bring it into life itself. Haredi society is now called upon to move from self-defense to responsibility, from insularity to partnership, and from survival to building.

Time, as the saying goes, does its work.

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So was the case for our ancestors.

The Mishnah teaches: “There were no days as joyous for Israel as the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur.” The Rambam explains the special character of Tu B’Av by noting that, in the fortieth year in the wilderness, the deaths of the generation of the desert finally ceased. The Children of Israel waited until the middle of the month, and only then “were reassured, believed in themselves, and sensed the favor of the Creator, the turning back of His anger, and the removal of His wrath from them.”

The celebration was not, of course, over the death of the generation that had left Egypt. It marked the birth of a new era. The wilderness period had ended, and a generation had arisen that was ready to enter the Land—a generation charged with taking the great foundations it had received in the wilderness and applying them within an earthly reality that was complex, dangerous, and demanding. It would have to pass the test of faith that its fathers had failed: on the battlefield and in the building of the Land.

That transition was a complex one. The Chafetz Chaim (Shemirat Halashon, Chap. 19) writes that the initial failure of the Sin of the Spies was not just a lack of trust in Hashem; it was a lack of self-belief. “How can we, imperfect as we are, have the merit to enter the land and fulfill the promise of the forefathers?” The change of mindset took forty years.

We, too, are living through a transition. Our task is not to abandon the great foundations that we were privileged to refine and preserve. On the contrary, we must bring them into the Land and into life itself—into the economy, society, public service, and the defense of the country.

This is a complex process, and it will not be free of fears, struggles, and growing pains. But these are not signs of failure. They are the signs of a society moving from one historical stage to another.

The forty years in the wilderness were not a mistake. They prepared the Jewish people to enter the Land. The years of Haredi insularity were likewise not in vain. They built a great and powerful Torah world. We now bear the responsibility of carrying that world into the Israeli public sphere.

The time has come to trust Hashem, believe in our own strength and what we have built, and to know that we can indeed prevail.

We are a generation of Tu B’Av.