Can Power Speak in the Name of Torah?

We live at a time of unprecedented anger and frustration with the Charedi political parties. The resentment is not coming from the outside alone. Tens, even hundreds of thousands, of Charedi men and women are rubbing their eyes in dismay at the failure of Charedi politicians to deliver on their central election promises, most notably a draft law that would protect Torah students from coerced military service and ensure the continued state funding of the yeshiva world.

In a recent interview with Mishpacha Magazine, Moshe Gafni conceded his own colossal failure, noting that “I am making my own accounting, and I suggest that everyone should make their own accounting.” Clearly, the accounting he called for is not a private one, a matter of guarding one’s thoughts or avoiding lashon hara. It is a public accounting. Where have we gone wrong? What path led us here?

The following is my own small accounting. It is offered not from outside the Charedi world, but from within it; not as an argument against the Torah world, but as an argument for protecting its dignity from the distortions of political power.

 

The Costs of Power

I picked up Gafni’s gauntlet during a long flight from Israel to New York, and my answer is: power.

“Power corrupts,” goes Lord Acton’s famous dictum, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Charedi society in Israel grew, flourished, and became powerful. And like Tolkien’s Rings of Power, we have sometimes wielded our newfound strength in ways that proved deeply self-destructive, bringing us, almost inevitably, to where we stand today.

Before 1977, the challenge of political power belonged largely to others: to the Jewish People and its new State, to the Israeli Left and its socialist foundations, to religious Zionists who sought to integrate Torah and mitzvos into the political structures of Jewish sovereignty. Charedim had political representation, but little real power, and only limited leverage. In some respects, precisely because of that limitation, things were surprisingly healthy.

The yeshiva world flourished. Fueled by remarkable ideological energy, many young men dedicated their lives to Torah study, supported by loyal young women who eked out a respectable income, often as schoolteachers. At the same time, many others served in the IDF and went to work, without fear of stigma or communal reproach. Not everything was perfect, of course, and nostalgia has a way of smoothing the rough edges. But the balance, as anyone old enough will recount, was real. The Charedi world knew how to honor full-time Torah study without turning every alternative into betrayal.

Then came 1977.

Unlike the Zionist movement, which had spent decades preparing institutions, developing a political language, and thinking, however imperfectly, about sovereignty, Charedi society entered this new era with little preparation for the spiritual and moral meaning of power.

The political upheaval that brought Menachem Begin to power also brought the Charedi parties into a new and far more consequential relationship with government. The transition was dramatic. Like the State of Israel itself some thirty years earlier, Charedi society moved from relative powerlessness to power. But unlike the Zionist movement, which had spent decades preparing institutions, developing a political language, and thinking, however imperfectly, about sovereignty, Charedi society entered this new era with little preparation for the spiritual and moral meaning of power.

The result was both dramatic and traumatic, laden with potential and fraught with danger.

At first, things seemed ideal for Charedim and for the Torah world. The old quotas on yeshiva deferments were lifted, and anyone who wished to remain in yeshiva could do so. State support for yeshivos and kollelim grew. Charedi neighborhoods expanded. Later, entire Charedi cities would develop. From the perspective of Torah growth, the achievement was breathtaking.

But the success came at a price. The previous equilibrium, in which some men remained in learning while others served and worked, gradually gave way to a new and far more rigid norm. Within a decade or a little more, the prevailing assumption had shifted: a serious Charedi young man remains in yeshiva; he does not serve in the IDF; his identity is defined by separation. What had once been an honored path for the spiritually elite became the default expectation for the entire community.

I remember, as a yeshiva student in the mid-1990s, innocently referring to some of the married men with whom we shared a shul as baalei batim. The offense taken by an avrech who was present was so deep that I never made that mistake again. Later, as a young newlywed, and despite my somewhat feeble objections, a local shul I helped found was proudly named Minyan Avrechim, as though the house of prayer itself needed to declare its social hierarchy. Torah, in its most exclusive and insular form, had won. But victory came with a high price tag.

The price was paid internally as well. Political power and its benefits, public and private, shattered Charedi unity. From one political framework, Charedi society quickly splintered into competing factions: Agudah, Degel, and Shas, with no love lost between them. Later, as Charedi municipalities grew, struggles over resources, appointments, schools, control of institutions, and symbolic prestige became increasingly fierce. At times, these struggles spilled into open hostility and even violence.

When a community is small and vulnerable, unity is a necessity. When power and budgets arrive, unity becomes far more elusive. Institutions multiply. Parties compete. Rabbinic courts, school systems, newspapers, charity networks, and local authorities become centers of influence. The battle is no longer only for Torah, but for control over the machinery that speaks in the name of Torah.

And nowhere was the price higher than in the relationship with the State, or, more precisely, in the relationship with others.

With power, an attitude of caution toward the State turned into complacency. The standard political assumption became that no coalition could be formed without Charedi participation. This led to a sense of almost total confidence. Previously accepted norms, by which only genuine full-time Torah students were eligible for exemption, were thrown to the wind. The new norm became simple: if you are born into a Charedi family, you do not go to the army. Come what may.

The fact that this situation naturally sparked the ire of huge segments of Israel’s population, those who serve in the IDF and feel aggrieved by such sweeping exemptions, hardly entered the calculation. The question was not whether this arrangement could be morally explained to fellow citizens. The question was whether the political leverage existed to preserve it.

When one of the chief negotiators of the 2022 coalition agreement on behalf of Agudah was accused of stretching the boundaries too far, he responded, “Have you heard of Mansour Abbas? You can shove it.” The meaning was not subtle: You need us (just like you neede Mansour Abbas), and therefore we can demand what we want. The relationship is irrelevant. Power is enough.

When the Supreme Court struck down the draft framework, rendering tens of thousands of Charedi young men legally exposed, some within the Charedi leadership were unconcerned: “So what? Let’s see what they’ll do to us.” Again, the logic was clear. We need not persuade. We need not listen. We need not ask how our position is heard by the rest of the country. We have numbers, leverage, and the capacity to make things difficult.

In 2019, Yaakov Litzman rejected a draft law that was immeasurably better for Charedim than any of the proposals currently on the table, because of a single clause on which Avigdor Liberman refused to capitulate. The decision helped plunge Israel into repeated election cycles and political paralysis. More recently, after many months of supporting a new draft proposal (while making clear, in one way or another, that the purpose was to buy time rather than to enable meaningful Charedi enlistment), Degel HaTorah made an astonishing about-face, declaring that it had no intention of advancing the law and would instead seek to dissolve the Knesset and go to early elections.

And what then? The message has been stated almost explicitly: next time, perhaps the Charedi parties will go with a left-wing coalition. Principles, alliances, and public trust all appear increasingly secondary to the preservation of leverage.

This is not a strategy. It is the exhaustion of strategy. It is the politics of power after it has lost the discipline of relationship.

 

Power and Relationship

Power corrupts not only because it offers temptation. It corrupts because it reorganizes the moral world of the person, or community, that holds it.

The ordinary human being lives within a web of need. He must listen, explain himself, negotiate, persuade, apologize, ask forgiveness, seek cooperation, and take account of how his conduct affects others. These dependencies are not merely social inconveniences. They are moral disciplines. They keep the other person present. They remind me that my will is not the whole of reality, that my needs are not the only needs, that even when I am right I must still live with those who see matters differently.

Power loosens those disciplines. It allows me to act without listening, decide without explaining, benefit without gratitude, and injure without seeing the injured. Absolute power is absolute isolation. It is the condition in which the other no longer appears as a claim upon me, but only as an instrument, an obstacle, or an irrelevance.

That is where corruption begins.

This is why the Torah’s warning in Devarim is so profound. The danger of prosperity is not only that a person will deny Divine assistance in some theoretical sense. The danger is that he will say, “My strength and the might of my hand have made me this wealth.” He will inhabit a world of radical self-reliance. He will no longer see himself as dependent on Hashem, and once the primordial relationship is weakened, all other relationships suffer too.

The Torah’s answer is: “You shall remember Hashem your God, for it is He Who gives you strength to make wealth.” This is not a call to passivity. It does not deny human action. On the contrary, the verse speaks precisely to the person who has acted, built, achieved, and succeeded. Yet it demands that human initiative remain embedded within relationship. You acted, but not alone. You built, but not by your own isolated power. You achieved, but your achievement must not sever you from the Source of strength, or from the human beings among whom that strength must be exercised.

The same idea appears in the Torah’s laws of kingship. The king is permitted power, even great power. But the Torah surrounds that power with limits. He must not multiply horses, wives, silver, or gold. He must write a Torah scroll and read from it all the days of his life, “so that his heart shall not be lifted above his brothers.” The danger is not merely administrative abuse. It is spiritual elevation. Power makes the king feel that he is no longer one of the brothers. He governs them, speaks for them, decides for them, perhaps even saves them. Slowly, he ceases to stand among them.

For this reason, the king must keep the Torah with him. He must live before something higher than himself, and he must remember that those beneath his authority are still his brothers. Godly politics begins there: with the refusal to allow power to dissolve fraternity.

This is precisely the point at which Charedi politics has too often failed.

We have spoken endlessly of Torah, but too little of relationship. We have spoken of protecting the yeshiva world, but too little of explaining ourselves honestly to the rest of Israel. We have spoken of rights, budgets, coalition agreements, and red lines, but too little of covenant, shared fate, and mutual responsibility. We have treated political partners as instruments and political rivals as threats. We have often spoken as though our own needs, even when legitimate and even sacred, exhaust the moral picture.

Yet politics, at its best, is a form of relationship. It is not friendship, and it is certainly not the erasure of disagreement. Political life includes conflict, bargaining, pressure, and the defense of interests. But when politics loses the capacity to look the other in the eye, it becomes corrupt even before a single bribe is taken. It becomes a struggle of enclosed selves, each seeking to extract as much as possible while giving as little as necessary.

The Charedi community had, and still has, profound claims to make. The Torah world is a treasure of the Jewish People. A society that cannot make room for serious Torah study has lost something essential to its Jewish character. The demand that bnei yeshiva not be treated as mere manpower for the army is not a cynical demand. It flows from a deep and venerable understanding of Jewish life.

The Torah world is a treasure of the Jewish People. A society that cannot make room for serious Torah study has lost something essential to its Jewish character. The demand that bnei yeshiva not be treated as mere manpower for the army is not a cynical demand. It flows from a deep and venerable understanding of Jewish life.

But the manner in which a claim is advanced matters. A Torah claim advanced without humility, without accountability, without concern for the broader public, and without any willingness to distinguish between those genuinely immersed in Torah and those merely protected by communal belonging, becomes something other than Torah. It becomes power speaking in the language of Torah.

And power speaking in the language of Torah is uniquely dangerous.

For then every compromise becomes betrayal, every critic becomes an enemy of Torah, every political maneuver becomes a mitzvah, and every failure can be blamed on the wickedness of others. Once God is imagined to be attached by definition to our political machinery, the machinery itself becomes untouchable. If God is with us, we must be right. If we are right, others must be wrong. If others are wrong, almost any means can be justified in the pursuit of our ends, which are presumed to be God’s own.

This is not emunah. It is the corruption of emunah by power.

True emunah does not eliminate accountability. It deepens it. The person who lives before Hashem knows that he must answer not only to his voters, not only to his sector, and not only to the rabbis whose names appear on campaign posters. He must answer to truth. He must answer to the human beings affected by his decisions. He must answer to the widows and parents and soldiers who bear the burden of war. He must answer to the Torah students whose dignity is diminished when their protection is extended indiscriminately to those who do not study. He must answer to the Jewish People.

When power creates self-reliance, faith must restore dependence. When power creates isolation, faith must restore relationship. When power says, “I can do as I wish,” Torah says, “Your heart shall not be lifted above your brothers.”

 

Conclusion: Toward a Godly Politics

Just as we are called to lead a Godly life in the private sphere, we are called to lead a Godly life in the public sphere. We need a Godly politics: a politics that looks heavenward, and therefore also looks our political rivals, and certainly our political partners, in the eye.

Godly politics does not mean surrendering principle. It does not mean apologizing for Torah, abandoning the yeshiva world, or accepting the assumptions of secular Israeli society. It means the opposite. It means advancing Torah claims in a manner worthy of Torah. It means speaking truthfully, acting responsibly, distinguishing between genuine ideals and communal inertia, and refusing to use the language of holiness to shield failures of leadership.

Charedi politics has not taken this path. Rabbinic involvement, which ought to create humility before Torah, has too often been used to create an atmosphere of political untouchability, as though the Charedi political machinery itself stands beyond ordinary moral scrutiny. The party becomes sanctified. The deal becomes sanctified. The tactic becomes sanctified. And once the tactic is sanctified, criticism becomes impiety.

This is a terrible error. The Torah is holy. The Jewish People is holy. The yeshiva world is holy. But political machinery is not holy. It is necessary, but not hallowed. It must serve Torah, not replace it. It must be judged, corrected, humbled, and sometimes rebuked.

The present crisis should therefore not be viewed only as a tactical failure. It is not merely that our representatives miscalculated, overplayed their hand, trusted the wrong partners, or failed to secure the right clause in the right law. The failure is deeper. We allowed power to persuade us that relationship was optional. We imagined that leverage could replace trust, that coalition agreements could replace moral explanation, that communal strength could replace national responsibility.

It cannot.

Israel today desperately needs a different kind of politics. Not a politics without disagreement, for serious disagreement is unavoidable. Not a politics of sentimental unity, which asks everyone to pretend that deep conflicts do not exist. We need a politics of trust, sincerity, and responsibility; a politics in which competing visions of the common good can be argued fiercely but honestly; a politics in which communities fight for their values while remembering that the people across the table are not merely obstacles but partners in a shared fate.

The Torah world is precious. Precisely because it is precious, it must not be entrusted to a politics that cheapens it. Precisely because we believe in Torah, we must demand a public life shaped by Torah: more humility, more honesty, more accountability, more relationship.

For Charedi society, this means a painful but necessary accounting. We must ask not only how to pass a draft law, but what kind of communal life that law is meant to protect. We must ask not only how to secure funding, but what moral language accompanies our request for public support. We must ask not only whether the State understands the value of Torah, but whether we have done enough to show that Torah produces responsibility, integrity, and concern for the whole.

The Torah world is precious. Precisely because it is precious, it must not be entrusted to a politics that cheapens it. Precisely because we believe in Torah, we must demand a public life shaped by Torah: more humility, more honesty, more accountability, more relationship.

The accounting Moshe Gafni called for must begin here. Power was given to us. We used it. We benefited from it. We also became distorted by it.

The path forward is not powerlessness. Charedim are no longer a tiny remnant, and there is no return to the politics of helplessness. The path forward is responsible power. Power under Torah. Power that remembers Hashem. Power that remembers its brothers. Power that knows how to fight without contempt, to negotiate without cynicism, to lead without arrogance, and to protect Torah without turning it into a political instrument.

We deserve better. The Torah deserves better. And the Jewish People, in this hour of trial and great imagination, desperately needs better.