Last night, I finally grasped the full emotional and moral weight of the dilemma surrounding Israel’s religious exemption from military service. It is a dilemma that sits at the intersection of covenant and contract, faith and citizenship, Torah and national responsibility. And with the war now entering its second year, and reserve soldiers on their fifth or sixth call-up, this issue is no longer theoretical. It is breaking people. It is breaking the country.
When David Ben-Gurion carved out the original exemption in the nascent years of the state, he did so not out of weakness but out of deference to what he saw as a spiritual remnant—a fragile strand of Torah learning nearly extinguished by the Shoah. The exemption was limited to a few hundred elite Torah scholars, conceived as a symbolic gesture to a generation in mourning, and a hope that Judaism’s spiritual heritage might yet be rekindled in Zion. This was never intended to be a national policy. It was a covenantal concession, a temporary allowance made in reverence to a people who had lost their world and were trying to rebuild it—one tractate at a time.
But what began as a spiritual exception has metastasized into a sociopolitical contract: a sweeping exemption for nearly all ultra-Orthodox men, now numbering in the tens of thousands. They do not serve in the army. Most do not participate in national service. Many do not work. Yet their rabbis negotiate state budgets. Their parties determine coalition governments. And their votes—exempt from the burdens of defense—carry full force in deciding the fate of a nation at war.
Israel has never fought a war for 664 consecutive days. There are soldiers who have not had a full night’s sleep in months. Wives are raising children alone. Business owners are collapsing under the weight of absent employees. There is a generation of secular and modern Orthodox Israelis who carry not just the spiritual burden of fear and grief—but the physical burden of defense, again and again and again. And yet, many yeshiva students still walk past them in the street—unburdened, untouched, and, in some cases, ungrateful. They check into their study halls. They receive stipends from the state. They do not go to funerals for fallen soldiers. They do not patrol the border towns. And their rabbis do not offer sermons of solidarity. They simply continue on, as if the war is someone else’s problem—someone else’s mitzvah.
This is not about disdain for Torah. On the contrary—it is precisely because Torah matters so deeply that this dynamic is so corrosive. Torah was never meant to be an escape from responsibility. It was never meant to be a firewall from civic duty. From Moshe Rabbenu to Rabbi Akiva, Jewish leadership meant bearing the weight of the people, not outsourcing it to others.
Perhaps the sharpest critique I heard recently—delivered with characteristic Israeli bluntness—was this: if they do not wish to serve in the army, fine. But then why should they get to vote in elections that decide whether the rest of us continue fighting this war?
This is not a trivial question. In democratic societies, voting is not just a right; it is a reciprocal responsibility. The consent of the governed is meaningful only when the governed are also bearing the burden of the state. You cannot claim the privileges of democracy while opting out of its most painful obligations.
Ultra-Orthodox politicians today hold disproportionate power in Israeli coalitions. They help determine military budgets, security policy, and whether a ceasefire is accepted or rejected. Yet their own children will never set foot in uniform. This is not just a policy imbalance. It is a spiritual and ethical distortion. It inverts the very covenant upon which the Jewish state was founded—that we would return to our land not just to be free, but to be responsible for one another.
The ultimate irony is that the very Torah being used as a justification for exemption speaks repeatedly of shared national burden. The book of Bamidbar begins with a military census. Joshua leads Israel into battle. The Maccabees, whose legacy the Haredi world celebrates every Hanukkah, took up arms to defend Jewish law and sovereignty. And in the words of the Talmud, kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—all of Israel is responsible for one another. If so, how did Torah study become a shield from responsibility, rather than its engine?
There is something profoundly tragic about watching young men immerse themselves in sacred texts while their countrymen are dying in the streets of Sderot and Kiryat Shmona. It is not their learning that is the problem—it is the abdication of solidarity. One cannot claim spiritual superiority while others are doing the dying.
To be clear, no one is arguing that every yeshiva student must become a combat soldier. The IDF and broader national service frameworks can accommodate many forms of contribution. Civil defense, education, hospitals, social services—there are many ways to serve. But the principle must be non-negotiable: every able-bodied citizen must contribute to the survival of the state that sustains them.
A just system would allow for a narrow exemption for a limited number of Torah scholars—true talmidei chachamim with national stature, chosen transparently and limited in number. Everyone else should serve in a form appropriate to their capabilities. And those who refuse should not be allowed to vote in elections that determine the fate of the people whose burden they decline to share. This is not punitive. It is principled. It reclaims the moral logic of democracy, where rights are tethered to responsibilities.
If this war has taught us anything, it is that Israel cannot afford to fracture along lines of burden and privilege. The secular soldier from Tel Aviv and the yeshiva student from Bnei Brak are not meant to be adversaries. They are meant to be brothers. But brothers do not watch each other bleed while hiding behind legal loopholes and divine mandates.
The Torah is not a refuge from responsibility—it is a blueprint for it. And the future of the Jewish people will depend not just on those who learn the words of our tradition, but on those who live them, together.