The Torah Is Not a Building Committee

Can a Jew see another Jew wounded, bereaved, buckling under the burden or standing under attack, and say: I will help pay the electricity bill in the stairwell, but I will not help defend the house?

In my eyes, this is the question that must stand at the center of any discussion about Haredim, the State, and Religious Zionism. Not the question of the source of the State’s authority; not the sociological discomfort of Haredi life under a secular government or secular culture; not even the ideological tension between Torah and Zionism.

The question is simpler and deeper, and it is addressed to each of us personally and communally: What does Jewish mutual responsibility demand of us? Especially when other Jews are bleeding?

Even if one accepts that Haredi distance from the State is ideological rather than selfish, ideology does not exempt a Jew from the duties of brotherhood.

Even if one accepts that Haredi distance from the State is ideological rather than selfish, ideology does not exempt a Jew from the duties of brotherhood.

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I read the article “Haredim, the State, and Religious Zionism” by Eliyahu Levy, and I could not remain indifferent.

The writer does not refrain from open and implicit criticism of what is taking place in the Haredi sector. I, too, in an article published on this platform, anticipated a painful internal explosion within Haredi society. Anyone who follows global trends knows that, in Europe too, a trend is emerging against those who live within a society but refuse to accept its civic ethos. This, too, will presumably serve as a catalyst. The repeated failures of Haredi political functionaries and rabbinic courts to pass sectoral laws tell a story that the Haredi public would do well to internalize.

And yet, on principle, I believe the article normalizes a mistaken conception. Moreover, the writer does not acknowledge a critical premise underlying the position he seeks to explain.

 

The Limits of the “House Committee” Analogy

In the name of the Chazon Ish, the article presents a conception of “partnership in the building committee.” The idea is that Haredim do not recognize the State in the full civic sense, but they are prepared to cooperate with it as neighbors cooperate in maintaining a shared building. There are contexts in which such an analogy can be useful. It may help explain payment for shared infrastructure, municipal services, or the ordinary arrangements of public life. But the analogy collapses when the building itself is under attack.

Such a conception is not moral when the shared task is not merely the division of expenses for cleaning, gardening, and roof repairs. It recalls the government “bowl” imagined by the Haredi politician Yitzhak Goldknopf, as though it somehow fills itself. But our Sages already taught that “a pit cannot fill itself from its own walls.”

Ignoring the task of defending the house itself is like parents saying that they care for their children at the level of a building committee. But the simple fact is that when a child is sick and needs medicine, it is not enough for the parents to have paid the building dues. When it comes to Jewish existence in the Land of Israel, such an outlook is a moral distortion.

What of the police who protect the house, without whom there is no house? What of government authority, of which the Sages said that without its fear, people would swallow one another alive? And what of the common property beyond the walls of the house, which nonetheless serves and sustains it?

Our Sages taught that three partners create a person: his father, his mother, and the Holy One, blessed be He. So, too, with respect to the people: the degree of partnership and mutual responsibility is not left to personal choice.

If we seek the source of the anger and the harsh expressions directed toward the Haredi sector, we find it in expectation. Specifically from those who have learned and know.

If we seek the source of the anger and the harsh expressions directed toward the Haredi sector, we find it in expectation. Specifically from those who have learned and know. Hagar may have cast the child under one of the bushes, but that is not Judaism. What is Judaism? The angel of Hashem who said to her: “For God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him by your hand.”

That is the Torah’s educational and moral statement.

To be among the disciples of Avraham Avinu means to be compassionate, modest, and devoted to acts of kindness. By contrast, of the destruction it is said: “The daughter of my people has become cruel, like ostriches in the wilderness.” In simple words: Judaism demands mutual responsibility.

 

The Need for Consistency

A building committee is not supposed to provide medical care for a neighbor. Therefore, according to the building-committee approach, the State should also not fund day care, Torah study, health insurance, housing subsidies, municipal tax discounts, income support, or national insurance. A building committee means that each person is on their own, and together they fund only basic shared expenses.

The article portrays Haredim as hostages, pressed between their opposition to the State’s authority and their desire to live in the Land, and describes them as sacrificing for that purpose. I do not accept this consciousness of victimhood. Ultimately, place of residence is a free choice. Beyond that, the claim that living in the Land of Israel is the ideal sounds very strange when it comes from those whose rabbis preached that it was forbidden to “ascend as a wall,” invoking the Three Oaths, and who then come and enjoy the fact that others did, in fact, ascend as a wall.

But even if we assume that a person does not see the State as necessary or fully obligatory, I do not believe that the mitzvah of “saving Israel from an enemy” means the State of Israel specifically. “Israel” here means our people. The anger at the Haredi sector is therefore not about the State as such. It is about leaving the collective. And at our most difficult hour.

It is worth noting that Megillat Ruth quickly eulogizes Elimelech, Machlon, and Kilyon. They descend from the stage of history and make way for someone who says unconditionally: “Your people are my people, and your God is my God.”

 

Denying the State, or Denying the Jews?

The writer seeks to reveal “inside information”: Torah study, he says, does not really override the obligation to save Israel from danger. The Haredi claim in this matter is for external consumption only. It is false. The real reason, according to him, is that Haredim do not accept the State because its authority derives from a secular source.

But this is to make one unrelated matter depend on another. If a person does not accept the State, does that permit him to abandon the obligation of saving Israel from danger? Is non-recognition of the State a greater mitzvah than Torah study, which, as noted, does not override saving Israel from danger? Is there not a distortion here that angers anyone who has learned even a little Torah?

The writer means to bless, but in my eyes, the argument only makes matters worse.

Anyone living within Haredi society cannot fail to see how the values of mutual responsibility and volunteering are being eroded. I am not speaking of yeshiva boys who are bored in the beit midrash and look for excitement in Hatzalah or ZAKA — they too should be blessed. I am speaking of something much deeper.

I cannot understand how one can see another Jew murdered, wounded, or buckling under the burden, and say: We will not visit the wounded in hospitals. We will not attend funerals. We will not comfort mourners. We will not join in saving Israel from an enemy. We will only participate in the building committee.

I cannot understand how one can see another Jew murdered, wounded, or buckling under the burden, and say: We will not visit the wounded in hospitals. We will not attend funerals. We will not comfort mourners. We will not join in saving Israel from an enemy. We will only participate in the building committee.

This is not merely a lack of mutual responsibility. It is a betrayal of the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, as the Gemara says in Sotah:

“What is the meaning of the verse, ‘After Hashem your God shall you walk’? Is it possible for a person to walk after the Divine Presence? Has it not already been said, ‘For Hashem your God is a consuming fire’? Rather, walk after His attributes. Just as He clothes the naked, as it is written, ‘And Hashem God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them,’ so you must clothe the naked. The Holy One, blessed be He, visited the sick, as it is written, ‘And Hashem appeared to him by the terebinths of Mamre,’ so you must visit the sick. The Holy One, blessed be He, comforted mourners, as it is written, ‘And it was after the death of Avraham that God blessed Yitzchak his son,’ so you must comfort mourners. The Holy One, blessed be He, buried the dead, as it is written, ‘And He buried him in the valley,’ so you must bury the dead.”

This is not abstraction, ideology, or sterile constitutional theory. A Jew visits the sick. A Jew comforts mourners. A Jew buries the dead. A Jew hears the cry of his brother and does not stand aside. This is the Torah that Moshe placed before us. It is not a building committee.

For this reason, it seems to me that the situation on the ground is much more serious than the article presents.

Member of Knesset Yaakov Asher recently said to Avri Gilad: “We only want tolerance, the way you are tolerant toward Arabs.” Whether intended or not, this statement reflects a troubling self-conception: not partnership in the Jewish majority, but minority status demanding containment. The practical result of this conception is that other Jewish sectors are treated as though they stand outside the full circle of brotherhood and covenant.

That is the heart of the matter. This is not merely a theory about the State. It is a theory about the Jewish people.

The issue is not that Haredim are unwilling to be citizens under a government whose source of authority is secular. Haredim throughout the world live under governments that are not Jewish and pay taxes to them, even though the verse “And there you shall serve other gods, which neither you nor your fathers have known, wood and stone” is interpreted by Rashi, following Onkelos, as referring to paying taxes to idol worshippers. According to the logic presented in the article, a secular source of authority should be far preferable.

The problem lies elsewhere. Too many people ignore what the Chazon Ish wrote in Hilchot Shechitah concerning tinokot shenishbu — Jews raised without Torah observance, who must be approached with love, responsibility, and brotherhood. Instead of being treated with love and brotherhood, Jews who are not Haredi are sometimes treated as though they are apostates whom there is no duty to save from danger, no need to visit when sick, no obligation to comfort when bereaved, and no reason to attend their funerals.

The deeper claim implied by the article is that the Haredi public does not sufficiently see the Israelis living alongside it, between the sea and the Jordan, as brothers. They are treated as though they do not fully fall under the category of “your brother” — and this includes Religious Zionists as well. This premise, whether stated explicitly or not, is what makes it possible to evade the obligation of saving Israel from danger.

But on Seder Night, we say that the truly wicked son is the one who withdrew from the collective and thereby denied its essence. So too, one who denies the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the covenant of mutual responsibility at Moav, denies something essential.

Beyond this, one cannot help but note a broader danger embedded in the approach the article presents. The Gemara forbids lying because “they have taught their tongue to speak falsehood,” even when the lie is told for a good purpose. And one must ask: why? After all, the Holy One, blessed be He, altered the truth for the sake of peace, and in that sugya, too, it would seem that the concern is peace between husband and wife.

The answer is that it was not a one-time alteration. It had become a method.

When a society becomes expert at exploiting verbal loopholes, clever formulations, and the sophisticated use of the language of laws and regulations, the habit does not remain merely technical. It enters the soul and seals the heart.

When people lie, or even “are forced to lie,” on a regular basis, it corrupts their character. The society becomes a lying society. The same is true of systematic evasion. When a society becomes expert at exploiting verbal loopholes, clever formulations, and the sophisticated use of the language of laws and regulations, the habit does not remain merely technical. It enters the soul and seals the heart.

The Gemara warned against “they have taught their tongue to speak falsehood” because this is the sort of thing that simply happens. Not necessarily out of evil intent. Not necessarily deliberately. Slowly, almost unnoticed, it becomes the norm. An entire society is formed whose inside is not like its outside.

This point is, of course, not the heart of the discussion, but it is connected to it. A society that grows accustomed to explaining why responsibility does not apply to it will eventually discover that responsibility itself has weakened in other places nobody intended. The question is no longer merely legal. It becomes moral and existential.

 

The Halachot of Exile

In the end, the article confuses halacha as it developed in exile — under impossible conditions in which the Jewish people survived, or in which most did not survive, some through assimilation and others through murderous antisemitism — with what the Torah and the prophets intended from the outset.

This is the core of the matter: much of Haredi political halacha is built from categories formed in exile, and those categories are inadequate for the reality of Jewish sovereignty. They were essential for Jewish survival under foreign rule, but they cannot exhaust the Torah’s vision for a Jewish people living in its Land, responsible for its own security, justice, economy, and public life.

Without question, the Gemara is indispensable to our understanding of halacha. But through the natural selection of attention to what was practically relevant, large areas of halacha as developed over the generations do not speak directly to the reality of a sovereign Jewish state. To say that the State rests on a secular source of authority simply because one did not find such a source in the Shach or the Mishnah Berurah is a foolish argument.

To say that the State rests on a secular source of authority simply because one did not find such a source in the Shach or the Mishnah Berurah is a foolish argument.

The Tur cites the laws of a military camp setting out to war three days before Shabbat, and the Beit Yosef wonders why he cites a law that did not apply in their time. Blessed is Hashem that we have merited a different reality, one that demands of us to “make the lips of the sleeping speak,” to awaken dormant areas of Torah.

It is therefore important to understand that we are in the early stages of developing a halacha that is truly a Torah of life — a halacha built on the foundations of the Written and Oral Torah, yet speaking to the reality of Jewish sovereignty. This sovereignty resembles, in certain respects, the rule of the kings at the end of the Second Temple period, who were not always the most pious of men, to put it mildly. And nevertheless, the Rambam writes in Hilchot Chanukah that these are days of praise and joy because “sovereignty returned to Israel for more than two hundred years.” Alongside this, we aspire to the days of King David: days of song, comradeship among warriors, charity, and justice.

To meet the challenges of this generation and the coming centuries, we must think with renewed tools and return to studying areas neglected under the pressures of exile. This is not foreign to Torah. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, after the destruction, established that the shofar would be blown on Shabbat wherever there was a court, and not only in the Temple. Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi compiled the Mishnah under the principle of “It is time to act for Hashem; they have violated Your Torah.” The Rosh explained that in our time, the mitzvah of writing a Sefer Torah is fulfilled not by writing a Torah scroll that remains in the ark, but by writing books of study and commentary.

The point is not that halacha bends before every historical wind. Heaven forbid. The point is that Torah leadership has always known how to identify when Jewish reality has changed, and when things must be formulated anew so that Torah can continue to be a Torah of life: to touch the essence, to relinquish the practical form through which things were expressed in an earlier period, and to shape them anew according to place and time.

Today, after an enormous and undeniable change in the conditions of Jewish life, we must continue to develop the worldview, faith, and approach relevant to the question: “What does Hashem your God ask of you?” Or in the words of Manoach’s wife: “Had Hashem desired to kill us, He would not have accepted from our hand a burnt offering and a meal offering, nor shown us all these things.”

I know this is a radical change in the Haredi approach. But in my eyes, this is precisely why Haredi thought has produced so little systematic writing, since the Chazon Ish, that speaks directly to the religious meaning of Jewish sovereignty. This is what happens when people write again and again from a perspective that no longer speaks sufficiently to reality. And precisely one who studies Torah seriously may be the one to lead the way.

 

A Closing Note of Optimism

In conclusion, I am optimistic. I believe in the younger Haredi generation.

Contrary to the conclusion of Eliyahu Levy’s article, I do not think the matter depends on Religious Zionism. It depends on a younger generation of Haredim, one more connected to reality. Reality defeats ideology. People are no longer prepared to keep throwing stones into the well from which they drink.

One can philosophize from here to the moon about the principled question of whether the authority of the State conflicts with the authority of religion, and whether this is a religious problem. In practice, everyone senses that the State is a springboard for religious Jewish existence. Therefore, the theoretical question of authority is not the existential question.

The lack of gratitude toward the Israeli taxpayer, alongside the courting of wealthy Haredi elites in America, creates a dissonance too great for the average young Haredi living here in the Land to bear for long.

The theoretical fear of expressing trust in a “secular” State is especially strange when, in practical and perhaps even covenantal terms, the State is not merely an alien secular power. It is the framework through which the Jewish people in their Land have chosen to organize their collective life. And everywhere, the Haredi public in practice plays by the rules dictated by reality. And yes, the State is becoming more traditional and more national. That is an advantage, not a flaw. The lack of gratitude toward the Israeli taxpayer, alongside the courting of wealthy Haredi elites in America, creates a dissonance too great for the average young Haredi living here in the Land to bear for long.

The question facing the younger Haredi generation is not whether to become less Haredi. The question is whether to recover for ourselves a deeper Haredi loyalty to Torah: to brotherhood, gratitude, responsibility, and the living covenant of the Jewish people. Do we wish to remain a tolerated minority, standing outside the shared burden and demanding containment? Or do we wish to become part of the Jewish majority in the Jewish state? Not by abandoning Torah, but by allowing Torah once again to speak in its full voice of mutual responsibility.

That is the choice. It can no longer be evaded.