The central claim of Eliyahu Levy’s important article on “The Haredi Problem and the Religious Zionist Test” is that Haredim distance themselves from the State of Israel because the State is secular. The State, he argues, is governed by a conception of the good that is foreign to Torah; its authority is rooted in secular values, not in the will of Hashem. Haredim, faithful to Torah, cannot accept the State’s authority in any full sense. Their political participation is therefore limited and defensive: not citizenship, but a kind of “building committee” partnership, designed to protect the Torah community from outside interference.
There is some truth in this description. Haredi internal rhetoric has long spoken this way. The State is secular; we are loyal to Torah. The State is governed by human autonomy; we are governed by Hashem. We are citizens of the Jewish People, living under a covenant with Hashem. We cannot be true citizens of the State of Israel.
Yet I think this explanation misses the deeper issue underlying the Haredi position. As it stands, Levy’s argument is not compelling. As I will endeavor to explain below, our problem is less with the secular state and more with the secular space.
Against the Secular State?
If the issue were simply participation in a secular state, Haredi life outside Israel would look very different. Haredim in the United States, Britain, Belgium, Canada, and elsewhere participate readily in states whose authority is obviously not derived from Torah, often exhibiting a healthy measure of patriotism. Many Haredim in America have no principled objection to singing the national anthem or celebrating Thanksgiving, even if, in practice, many do not. They do not experience the Stars and Stripes as a theological threat in the way the Israeli flag often is.
The deeper argument, and the one particular to Israel, is that Zionism, and later the Jewish State, legitimized a new form of Judaism: national Judaism, even when emptied of religious content. This was the argument made by Rabbi Uriel Zimmer, a sharp Haredi polemicist writing in the early years of the State, in his 1959 booklet against Zionism. The danger was not merely that Zionism was secular. It was that Zionism redefined Judaism itself. It declared that one could be a good national Jew while standing outside the covenant with Hashem. It gave Jewish standing to people whose Jewishness was expressed through language, land, army, culture, and peoplehood, but not through Torah and mitzvot.
This is not a trivial concern. Zionism could indeed be construed as emptying Judaism of its religious content and replacing it with national content alone. For Orthodox Jews, joining such a movement was understandably difficult. Zionism did not merely ask Jews to cooperate politically; it offered a new account of what it means to be a Jew. The Haredi objection to that project was serious, principled, and in many respects justified.
But Israel is no longer merely a movement. Israel is a state. This distinction matters. A movement can be rejected as an ideology. A state is a framework of collective life. A movement asks for identification with its doctrines. A state asks whether we will take responsibility for the public reality in which we live.
The militant secularism of early Zionism has by now become, in large measure, a relic of the past. True, the Supreme Court remains a bastion of liberal values, and it often stands at the forefront of the secular-liberal charge. But the Supreme Court is not the whole State. The Knesset is not militantly secular. The government is not militantly secular. The army is increasingly filled with religious soldiers, commanders, symbols, language, and motivation. Israeli public culture is more traditional, more national, and more open to religious meaning than the founders of secular Zionism could have imagined.
The Knesset is not militantly secular. The government is not militantly secular. The army is increasingly filled with religious soldiers, commanders, symbols, language, and motivation. Israeli public culture is more traditional, more national, and more open to religious meaning than the founders of secular Zionism could have imagined.
In many respects, Israel today represents, on the global stage, a struggle for the good and the just against the deep moral deconstruction underway in much of the West. It is in Israel that Jewish identity remains strongest. Israeli Jews are far more religiously connected than most Jews outside Israel. Israel has enabled the greatest Torah centers in Jewish history. Even in the Diaspora, Jews who identify with Israel are far more likely to retain Jewish identity and far less likely to disappear through assimilation, intermarriage, or total alienation from Judaism.
Does it make sense, in such a reality, to continue opposing Israel because of its secularism?
If there is a problem with the Court, then fight the Court. If there is a problem with liberal elites, then build alternatives. If there is a problem with the army, then shape the army. If there is a problem with public culture, then influence public culture. How does withdrawal help the case of the Jews?
This question becomes sharper when we recall a famous pre-State exchange of letters between Rav Yitzchak Herzog and Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky. Rav Herzog, who was associated with Religious Zionism and later became the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, advocated for a state governed by halacha. Rav Chaim Ozer, one of the greatest Haredi rabbinic authorities of the generation, argued differently. Instead of establishing a halachic state, he argued that whatever legal system was functioning well should simply be extended. Meaning, it was specifically the Haredi rabbi who resisted the demand for a new Jewish legal order.[1]
One can understand this as epistemological modesty. We had not had a Jewish state for two thousand years. We did not have a living tradition of how to run a modern sovereign state according to halacha. It was not obvious how to legislate, how to judge, how to regulate commerce, how to run an army, how to administer municipalities, how to balance individual rights and public needs, how to relate to non-Jewish citizens, and how to translate the immense world of Torah into the working mechanisms of a modern state. Perhaps, Rav Chaim Ozer suggested, we should not pretend to know more than we know.
That modesty has a striking implication. If Haredim had their way, would they in fact run the State differently? Would they legislate criminal penalties for Shabbat desecration? Would they outlaw non-kosher food? Would they transform the judiciary into a Beit Din system? Would they restructure the army, the municipalities, the civil service, the economy, the police? Would they replace the State’s legal system with Choshen Mishpat? Would they establish a full halachic monarchy?
There is no evidence that they would. Haredi parties have not sought to do so. Haredi leaders have not produced a serious blueprint for such a state. Haredi society has not educated itself toward political responsibility on that scale. To this day, the contrast remains: Religious Zionists are engaged in the Jewish State; Haredim remain largely ignorant of it, and perhaps agnostic about it.
This is why Levy’s claim that Haredi non-participation threatens Religious Zionists by exposing the contradiction between religion and Zionism seems to me exaggerated, to say the least. If Haredim are not proposing a real alternative — and they are not — then what exactly is un-Jewish about the current State of Israel? The Supreme Court is leading the liberal charge, true. But at least Religious Zionists are fighting it. The same cannot be said of Haredim.
I once took part in a television panel hosted by Yigal Guetta, together with several other Haredi figures. When the issue of judicial reform came up, one of my fellow panelists, a well-known Haredi apologist, explained the Haredi position with admirable clarity: Of course we are against the Court, and of course we support judicial reform. But we will not go out and demonstrate for it. We demonstrate only for internal Haredi issues. Let others deal with the Court.
This sentence revealed more than it intended. The issue is not that Haredim have a competing theory of the Jewish State. It is that the Jewish State is not truly their arena.
What Is Our Arena?
The central question is not: What is the source of the State’s authority? The central question is: What is our arena? Where is the arena of the Jewish people? Where should we invest our energies, our resources, our talents, our moral imagination?
The Haredi answer was formed in exile. Its source is Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s plea to Vespasian: “Give me Yavneh and its scholars.” After the destruction, when sovereignty was lost and Jewish political life collapsed, the survival of Torah depended on withdrawal into the Beit Midrash. Yavneh became the ark. The Jewish people would live not by the sword, not by statecraft, and not by sovereignty, but by the transmission of Torah. The world outside was storm and ruin; inside were the four cubits of halacha.
This exilic achievement is one of the greatest miracles in human history. No other people transformed political catastrophe into such a disciplined, creative, and enduring form of life. Haredi Judaism is one of the most impressive heirs of that miracle. It built a civilization around the Beit Midrash, around Torah study, around disciplined separation from a world that had repeatedly proved hostile and dangerous.
The long exile shifted the battlefield of Jewish life. War, kingship, political responsibility, and public sovereignty were no longer available to us. The great struggle between good and evil was therefore relocated inward: to the war of the yetzer, the battle for the soul, the struggle for holiness inside the individual and the community. The courage of the warrior became the courage of one who conquers his inclination. The battlefield became the Beit Midrash. The true front line became the disciplined soul. This was the new condition of Jewish survival.
But the very greatness of this achievement has become its difficulty. The Beit Midrash, which was meant to preserve Jewish life, has come to define the only arena in which Jewish life is considered real.
An editorial in Yated Ne’eman once put the matter with unusual force:
Bnei Torah, as well as those forced to leave the benches of the Beit Midrash but whose umbilical cord of belonging has not yet been severed, cannot belong to the outside world. For a ben Torah, there is nothing in the world but four cubits of halacha. A student of Torah cannot be the one to bring into his Beit Midrash worldview the wandering winds that blow from outside. A ben Torah takes the Beit Midrash with him even when he is outside, carrying the walls of the protective fortress with him, blocking his field of vision and preventing him from grazing in foreign fields.
This passage does not refer only to full-time yeshiva students. The illustration accompanying the piece showed an avreich leaving his kollel into the “big world” — literally walking on an entire globe — while fastening a gas mask from the Gulf War era to his face and wearing a hermetic nylon cover. In his hand was a list of “urgently necessary arrangements” — for why else would he leave?
The message was unmistakable. The arena of the Haredi person’s life, even for those whose Torah is not their full-time occupation, is the Beit Midrash alone. Outside its walls, there is no air to breathe. It is outside the pale of settlement. No life can flourish there. And if there is no life, then there is no halacha either.
The “four cubits of halacha” are thus reduced to the four cubits of life in the Beit Midrash. Of course, even in the Beit Midrash one must eat, so there must be halachot of meals, money, daily conduct, and the practical arrangements of communal life. But there is no real place in the Beit Midrash for the great questions of human society or the State of Israel. These questions belong to the world outside — outside the yeshiva’s Noah’s Ark. And there, after all, it is impossible to live.
Even if I were to become the Interior Minister and Rav Yechezkel Abramsky the Defense Minister […] we would still not be able to run the state and take responsibility.
In this context, the editorial continues by citing the position of the Brisker Rav concerning what Haredi society should do were it to become a majority. His response was:
Even if I were to become the Interior Minister and Rav Yechezkel Abramsky the Defense Minister, because these are matters of supreme import and decisions relating to going to war — and this is a matter of pikuach nefesh, danger to life, concerning which we have no instruction from the Shach and the Taz — we would still not be able to run the state and take responsibility.
According to this view, even if the outside world becomes ours by virtue of our becoming a majority, it still would not become ours. We have no right to take responsibility for matters outside the narrow halachic tradition; they are, by definition, foreign and estranged.
This is why I do not think the issue is the secular State. The issue is the secular space.
Not secular in the sense of anti-religious. Not secular in the sense of the Supreme Court, liberalism, or human dignity and liberty. Secular in a deeper, more basic sense: the space of life outside the sanctified walls of the Torah study hall. The space of politics, economy, security, literature, agriculture, administration, public morality, national culture, strategy, technology, and civil society. The space of this world.
That is the space Haredi society does not know (and does not wish to know) how to inhabit.
Citizens of Israel, or Citizens of Eretz Yisroel?
This distinction also explains a familiar linguistic pattern. Many Religious Zionists naturally speak of “Israel.” Many Haredim speak of “Eretz Yisroel.” The difference is not merely stylistic. “Israel” is a state with institutions, citizens, rights, responsibilities, symbols, a court system, a parliament, an army, a police force, and a public culture. “Eretz Yisroel” is the holy Land, the place of Torah and mitzvot, the space in which Jews live under the sovereignty of the Master of the Universe.
The Haredi Jew is often willing to be a citizen of Eretz Yisroel, but not yet a citizen of Israel. He loves the Land, but hesitates before the State. He feels a deep belonging to the holiness of place, but not to the mechanisms of sovereignty that make Jewish life there possible.
Of course, both terms are true. Israel is Eretz Yisroel, and Eretz Yisroel is not an abstract holiness detached from the Jews who live in it. But as I have noted previously, the difference in language points to a difference in consciousness. The Haredi Jew is often willing to be a citizen of Eretz Yisroel, but not yet a citizen of Israel. He loves the Land, but hesitates before the State. He feels a deep belonging to the holiness of place, but not to the mechanisms of sovereignty that make Jewish life there possible.
This is a contradiction that can perhaps be managed for a minority living on the margins. It cannot be maintained by a large and growing public that receives the benefits of citizenship, sends representatives to the Knesset, influences budgets, shapes public religion, and increasingly determines the future of the country. Citizenship is not only a package of rights. It is also a structure of duty, loyalty, gratitude, and responsibility.
Haredi society is not devoid of Jewish national feeling; far from it. It is deeply attached to Jewish peoplehood, Jewish continuity, Jewish distinctiveness, and Jewish destiny. The problem is that this feeling has not yet been translated into responsibility for the institutions of the Jewish State. It remains attached to Eretz Yisroel as a holy place, but not to Israel as the concrete framework through which Jewish life in that place is protected, governed, and sustained.
Why, then, are Haredim in the Knesset? If this is not our arena, what are we doing there? Yated Ne’eman has answered this question many times: we are not really there. We are there only to serve the Beit Midrash. As another Yated formulation put it:
Even this step of political engagement was taken solely on the orders of our great rabbis to protect the walls of Judaism, to save from the lion, the bear, and the cheetah. For this purpose, the great leaders of generations had to snatch the spear from the hand of the Egyptian and function even in this arena. But all of this was allowed only when it was carried out under the umbrella of the great rabbinic leadership, and not because we are part of the political game. Absolutely not! Only because we comply with everything they instruct us to do.
The point is clear. Political engagement is not an expression of responsibility for the public arena. It is a rescue operation on behalf of the Beit Midrash. We are not citizens. We are not partners in shaping the State. We are emissaries of the fortress, sent beyond the walls to secure supplies and repel threats.
This is a profoundly coherent worldview. It is also profoundly inadequate for the present moment.
The Corridor and the Home
Rabbi Yaakov teaches in Pirkei Avot that this world is a corridor before the World to Come. Haredi rhetoric makes this revolutionary teaching into a total way of life. This world is transient, fleeting, temporary, and therefore unworthy of deep investment. I once saw an essay in the Shabbat supplement of Yated Ne’eman about the message of the Sukkah. The lesson was not — as I understand it to be — that we must combine trust in Hashem with worldly activity, recognizing the fragility of our homes even as we build them. Rather, the lesson was that all matters of this world are devoid of value. Life is a Sukkah: temporary, unstable, and therefore not worth investing in.
This reading is appropriate for diaspora life. In exile, the world is not ours. Building a palace in the wilderness is a bad idea, and we should likewise refrain from physical and spiritual investment in the political structures of Poland, Russia, Germany, or Spain. We do what we must to survive, and we pour our true life into Torah, tefillah, mitzvot, family, and community. The rest is a corridor.
But Eretz Yisrael is not merely a corridor. A Jewish state is not merely a corridor, and neither is Jewish sovereignty, the army that protects Jewish lives, or the economy that sustains Jewish families. The courts that determine justice among Jews, the municipalities that build Jewish cities, the schools that form Jewish children, the hospitals that heal Jewish bodies, the policies that determine war and peace — all of these are not distractions from Torah. They are the arena in which Torah must speak.
The Torah was not given only to regulate kosher kitchens, eruvin, family purity, and the internal affairs of the Beit Midrash. It was given to a nation. It speaks to land, war, courts, kingship, agriculture, debt, charity, labor, property, punishment, public holiness, and the moral shape of society. In exile, much of this vast world was suspended. The four cubits of halacha preserved us when kings and princes were among the nations. But the narrowing of Torah under exile cannot become the final definition of Torah.
To treat the State as outside the arena of Torah is not piety. It is a form of Torah impoverishment. The Torah is a Torah of life. It must speak to the fullness of Jewish life. And Jewish life today includes sovereignty.
From Wilderness to Land
The best analogy for the Haredi approach is the Jewish people in the wilderness. One does not invest in a wilderness. One travels through it. One survives it. One receives manna from heaven and remains under the clouds of glory. The wilderness is real, but it is not the destination. It is not a place for agriculture, kingship, courts, public responsibility, or national life. It is a place between Egypt and the Land.
For Haredi consciousness, exile is a wilderness among the nations — as the verse in Yechezkel mentions — and because we are still, in its view, in exile, there is nothing to invest in. But something has changed. To ignore that change is to repeat the sin of the spies: the refusal to enter the earthly reality that calls us to be part of it.
The spies and the nation that sinned with them were not secularists. They were not materialists. They were a great nation that feared the demands of entering the Land. In the wilderness, life was spiritual, protected, miraculous. In the Land, one would have to plow, sow, fight, build, govern, judge, and take responsibility for the stubborn materiality of national existence. They did not deny Hashem. They denied the possibility of successfully navigating the messy reality of land, the army, the economy, and the state. In this matter, as Moshe states at the beginning of Devarim, they did not trust Hashem.
And that, precisely, is the danger we face.
It took us forty years to internalize our mission after leaving Egypt. As Moshe says at the end of those forty years: “Hashem has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see, and ears to hear, until this day.” It takes time. The frailty of our human condition dictated that we were unable to enter the Land immediately. It took forty years and the passing of an entire generation. For Haredi society, too, entering Israel is a process that takes time. Yet, it seems that our own forty years are up.
The great edifice of Haredi Judaism was built over decades of sacrifice, discipline, spiritual seriousness, and extraordinary devotion to Torah. It restored worlds destroyed in Europe. It created yeshivot, kollelim, communities, families, schools, systems of charity, and a culture of deep reverence for Torah. We must not scorn this achievement. We must not dismiss it. We must not imagine that responsibility for the State can come from abandoning it. But we must take it with us into the wider space of Jewish life.
We must step out of the ark. We must stop treating the public arena of the Jewish State as foreign territory. We must stop pretending that questions of security, sovereignty, economy, law, public culture, and national responsibility belong to someone else. There is no one else. These are Jewish questions because Jews live here. They are Torah questions because Torah is a Torah of life. They are Haredi questions because Haredim are part of the Jewish people, in the Jewish Land, under Jewish sovereignty.
For generations, we wandered in exile, and indeed, the world was a corridor. There was nowhere for us to invest. We survived by withdrawing into Yavneh and its scholars. We carried the Beit Midrash on our backs because there was no Jewish polity in which it could find public expression.
But to use Albert Londres’s expression, the wandering Jew has arrived. He should take note of this, and the sooner, the better.
[1] See Techukah le’ Yisrael, Vol. 2, p. 771 (1989); the original letter is cited in the editor’s footnote.
