Where Is the Unity?
Ideally, Succos should be a time of unity among the Jewish People, as we see from multiple sources. On the 15th of Tishrei, the Clouds of Glory returned, after the Sin of the Golden Calf. And on that day, construction of the Mishkan, the dwelling place of the Shechinah, commenced. The building of the Mishkan presupposed unity among the Jewish People, for only when that unity exists does the Shechinah dwell among us. But when there is constant strife among the Jewish People, Hashem is disgusted with us (see Vilna Gaon to Mishlei 6:19).
In a famous essay on Succos, Rav Dessler writes that going out into the succah serves as a tikkun for the exile that followed the destruction of the Second Temple, which was caused by sinas chinam. Thus, Succos is the corrective for hatred and invective among us.
Finally, Succos is zeman simchaseinu. Simchah, in the language of Chazal, signifies overflow, going beyond boundaries. And when we do so, we can join more freely with our fellows. That was most intensely experienced, when the Beis Hamikdash still stood, during the Simchas Beis Hashoeivah.
UNFORTUNATELY, these are not happy times in Israel, certainly not a time of national unity. We are less than two months from elections, with the usual accusations being hurled back and forth by all and sundry candidates.
Responsibility for October 7 remains an issue, but the central issue of the election is what to do about the chareidim. Parties from the center-right to the left are competing to assure the public that they will finally take care of the chareidim and ensure their service in the IDF. And the dependence of the current governing coalition on chareidi votes has been the primary charge against Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The three years of war since October 7 along with the burden felt by reservists and their families has brought the issue of chareidi army service to the fore as never before. At the same time, it has aroused the anger of the national-religious population, which bears the heaviest burden of reserve duty by far, against the chareidi community.
But it gets worse. In a Tzarich Iyun article, Rabbi Shneur Rochberger describes how the rapid growth of the chareidi community has led to something approaching hatred for chareidim among large segments of the general population. According to the Jewish People Policy Institute's 2026 Israel Society Index, 55 percent of Israelis view internal polarization as the greatest threat to Israel's existence, as opposed to 23 percent with respect to the Iranian nuclear threat, and 60 percent believe that there is a danger of that polarization leading to physical violence. Secular Israelis rank their feelings of closeness to the chareidi community at 1.81 on a scale of 10. For a point of comparison, their sense of closeness to Arab Israelis is 4.28.
A steady and well-orchestrated media campaign portrays the chareidi community as an unsustainable drain on the national purse. Petitions to the High Court of Justice have already been brought or are in preparation to cut off virtually every source of communal funding. It is difficult to gainsay that their goal is the immiseration of the chareidi community in order to force chareidim to stop having so many children.
The goals are punitive. Mishpacha publisher and the founder of the Hareidi Institute for Public Policy, Eli Paley, told me recently, "I founded the Institute to work with the government on solutions to problems, but in recent years, I've found nobody is interested in solutions, only in lashing out and punishing the chareidi community."
TO SOME EXTENT, all of this could long have been foreseen, especially the political isolation. As long as the political map was more or less equally divided over the peace process between parties on the left and the right, chareidim often held the balance of power. But for two decades, that political debate has been over, with few in Israel still believing that there is a Palestinian peace partner. And that meant that the stage has been set for centrist parties to come together to form a government, even without chareidi participation.
The last three years have made the situation far worse from the point of view of the chareidi community. Until October 7, it was widely assumed by the security echelons that the IDF would no longer be involved in large-scale ground operations, and certainly not on multiple fronts and for a prolonged period of time. That turned out to be wrong, and has led to dramatically increased demands on reservists, many in their thirties or older, with jobs and families.
The dangers ahead were never fully grasped by the chareidi political echelons, or if grasped, never sufficiently acted upon. Many of the chareidi MKs are men of talent and dedication, but none have emerged as a Rabbi Shlomo Lorincz figure for our generation, capable of speaking to the larger public and commanding widespread respect. When viewed on TV, they almost always sound angry or defiant. The sole subject for them too often appears to be budgets for yeshivos, and yeshivos alone, as if nothing else is important. Rarely, if ever, are they quoted or filmed expressing concern for Israel's soldiers or pain over their deaths in combat.
Even something so basic and simple as an occasional word of thanks for a state under whose auspices and protection Torah learning has flourished to a degree unprecedented in history, at least in numbers, would go a long way with secular Israelis.
Nor has the Israeli chareidi community established any public relations operation, like that which I ran for nearly a decade for Agudath Israel of America. Such an effort would address the widespread perception of the chareidi community's "freeloading lifestyle," in the words of our harshest critics. In fact, almost every chareidi household has at least one wage-earner. Though the percentage of chareidi men employed lags far behind their secular counterparts, the percentage of chareidi women in the workforce is almost identical, and chareidi women are highly sought in many well-paying professions, such as accounting.
It is not as if chareidi households present their food bills and rent statements at the end of the month to some government office for payment, as the secular public seems to think. Even for those households receiving transfer payments from the government, those payments cover only a small percentage of their monthly expenses.
While the percentage of chareidim living below the "poverty level" may far exceed the national average, that level is always a comparative term. As studies conducted by the Haredi Institute for Public Policy demonstrate, chareidim do not perceive themselves as poor, and express higher levels of life satisfaction than their secular fellow citizens. They have, for the most part, simply chosen to live a simpler lifestyle — no trips abroad, no late-model cars, no eating out — than most Israelis choose.
Rabbi Rochberger quotes a finding that chareidim pay only 4 percent of the national tax receipts (presumably ignoring VAT), but constitute 14 percent of the population, to explain the secular perception that they constitute a drain on the economy. But the same could be said for all those below the top quintile in income earners. Are they, too, an unconscionable drain on the public? Imagine if there were a finding that black Americans paid less in taxes than their share of the population — can anyone imagine that they would be denied public benefits on that basis?
Nor, it should be noted, are chareidi men learning in kollel "welfare queens," doing drugs rather than working. And they have nothing in common with the six million American men not even seeking employment, who spend their days staring at their screens. To the contrary, the hours spent learning by the average yungerman far exceed the number of hours their secular counterparts spend working, and require a level of intellectual concentration far beyond the average job.
A proper chareidi public relations effort would also highlight the various chareidi-founded and run chesed and medical organizations serving the general public: Yad Sarah, Ezer MiZion, including its enormous blood bank and registry; Ezra LeMarpe. And it would make more generally known the work of Kesher Yehudi with the families of hostages and Nova survivors, and of Ayelet Hashachar on secular kibbutzim.
EFFORTS TO IMMISERATE the chareidi community are unlikely to achieve their goal, and will almost certainly prove counterproductive, even from the point of view of the authors of those measures, unless their goal is simply to make chareidim suffer. Let's just take one obvious example. If chareidi families in which the husband is learning full-time are denied access to subsidized child care, many chareidi women may be forced to stop working, because what is left after child care expenses is not worth the stress. In short, a loss of chareidim in the workplace.
But the misguided nature of these efforts goes deeper. They will only strengthen the hardline elements in the chareidi community, who cling to the anti-Zionism of the pre-state days.
From the time of Moshe Rabbeinu, Jews have been described as a stiff-necked people, both for good and for bad. If chareidim perceive that the government has embarked on a systematic campaign to force them to close their Gemaras, as opposed to facilitating paths for them to enter the workplace and gain the training for them to do so, they will dig in their heels more fiercely, and may even feel halachically obligated to do so in the face of governmental decrees.
The plethora of new chareidi parties, as well as chareidi caucuses within larger parties, such as the Likud, indicate that there are large numbers of chareidim who wish to feel part of Israeli society, even as they retain their chareidi way of life and identity. But if that society is perceived as anti-chareidi, all such trends will be reversed. In particular, with respect to the IDF, those who feel alienated from the general society or rejected by it are far less likely to enlist, and would, in any event, make unmotivated, inferior soldiers.
FINALLY, the manner in which the campaign is being conducted makes any chance of increased national unity impossible. Every one of the recent economic decrees against the chareidi community, and those on the horizon, has come via the High Court, not through the Knesset. Even apart from the ongoing issue of the High Court assuming policymaking powers that no other supreme court in the world takes on, the legal arena is the wrong one for the resolution of issues such as chareidi army service and economic participation.
To be successful, such efforts require two things that do not go together with judicial rulemaking: a spirit of compromise and a toleration for gradualism. And those can only come about by gathering the relevant parties around the table to solve problems, not in confrontation in the courtroom.
The High Court has played a major role in preventing change by its insistence on strict equality — even though "equality" is not a value mentioned in any Basic Law and was deliberately omitted from the 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity. The High Court has, for instance, taken a jaundiced view of all forms of gender separation, even in chareidi cities or to advance other allegedly crucial societal goals, such as bringing more chareidim into academia.
The IDF has been unable to enter into any binding agreements over the terms of IDF service, at least in part because of the ever-present danger that the High Court will strike those arrangements down. But without such binding commitments, chareidim will remain rightly leery of enlisting, because once they do so, they are under the jurisdiction of the IDF, even if the rules change.
A neighbor of mine, who has long run a chareidi high school where students take the national matriculation exams, entered into extensive discussions with the IDF about creating a chareidi hesder-style yeshivah for a portion of his graduates. But when he insisted on ironclad guarantees concerning the conditions of their service, the discussions came to an end.
Several recent stories involving hesder soldiers demonstrate why the IDF cannot be trusted to ensure soldiers' ability to adhere to halachah. A number of hesder soldiers were imprisoned after they refused to enter a closed vehicle with a female soldier. Even more worrisome, hesder soldiers were assigned tasks on Shabbos, with no immediate military necessity, but merely for training purposes, that clearly involved chillul Shabbos.
Finally, it is both unrealistic and unfair to expect the chareidi community to change dramatically overnight norms that have developed over decades. It makes no sense, for instance, to suddenly deny benefits to the family of a 30-year-old or 40-year-old avreich because he is not in the workforce. What is he supposed to do at that point? Look for some menial job at minimum wage? Enroll in a training program that might take years, and during which he will bring in no income, not even his kollel stipend?
In the give and take of politics, solutions might be found. But once the High Court enunciates a bright legal rule designed to compel that avreich to enter the workforce, all such nuance and gradualism goes by the wayside.
Clearly, the national unity for which we all yearn appears likely to elude us this Succos. And for that, there is more than enough blame to go around. But with a little more willingness to listen to one another, to try to understand where those on the other side are coming from, we can at least hope to avoid the bitter societal confrontation looming ahead.
Chag sameiach.