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\n<\/p>\nWhat does it mean to be religious when Jews are not just a community but a country \u2013 and when the word itself has become a label that divides?\n<\/p>\n
On October 7, 2023, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust tore through Israel\u2019s south. In the days that followed, something rare happened. For a brief, fragile moment, the usual walls came down. Haredi and secular, Dati Leumi and Russian immigrant, kibbutznik and settler \u2013 we were not categories. We were simply Jews: bleeding together, mourning together, sitting shiva together.\n<\/p>\n
That moment sadly has not lasted \u2013 it has dissipated.\n<\/p>\n
The fractures have returned, and in some cases sharpened. Not only the familiar arguments about budgets or exemptions, but something more corrosive: the weaponization of the word religious. Who is sacrificing enough? Whose Judaism is authentic? Who gets to speak in the name of the Jewish people?\n<\/p>\n
I did not carry these questions at the center of my life before October 7. But as a father of a soldier, and as someone whose friends have buried sons lost in war, I do now. Because in Israel, \u201creligious\u201d is not merely a personal descriptor. It is a public argument with real consequences for national cohesion \u2013 and national survival.\n<\/p>\n
Here is my claim: being religious should not be a label. There is a framework but it is about a direction of travel. And unless we recover a definition broad enough for a Jewish state, we will keep turning one of Judaism\u2019s most sacred ideas into a wedge that divides Jews from one another \u2013 and Jews from Judaism itself.\n<\/p>\n
The problem with the label<\/p>\n
Israel is a masterclass in taxonomy. Walk through any city and the categories announce themselves in clothing, neighborhoods, schools, and voting patterns: Haredi, Dati Leumi, Masorti, Hiloni \u2013 and countless hybrids. Abroad the names change, but the instinct remains: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.\n<\/p>\n
These categories are not meaningless. Communities need language. The tragedy is what we have done to the word religious. We have turned it into a static badge and a tribal boundary, when faith is anything but static. All we have to do is take an honest look at our children and we will see that it is not a static thing.\n<\/p>\n
No honest person\u2019s religious life is a straight line. It moves, stalls, deepens, fractures, repairs itself. Faith is not a destination where you arrive and judge others from a height. It is a movement \u2013 sometimes steady, sometimes faltering \u2013 toward something larger than the self.\n<\/p>\n
When \u201creligious\u201d becomes a marker of superiority rather than responsibility \u2013 and worse for special privileges \u2013 we commit something our tradition names clearly: Chilul Hashem, a desecration of G-d\u2019s name. A Jewish people publicly arguing over who is \u201cmore Jewish\u201d is not sanctifying G-d. It is doing the opposite. We are meant to be a Kiddush Hashem \u2013 a living demonstration of G-d\u2019s presence in the world. Division does not sanctify. Unity does.\n<\/p>\n
A solid foundation \u2013 and an unfinished structure<\/p>\n
Let me be clear about my starting point. I became observant as a child, and that commitment has been the spine of my life. I am not arguing for a Judaism without halacha or boundaries \u2013 Heaven Forbid. The architecture of Jewish life matters, and the Shulchan Aruch and observance of Halacha remains core to that architecture.\n<\/p>\n
But a foundation is not the whole building.\n<\/p>\n
For centuries, Jews lived without sovereignty. That reality shaped our religious instincts. We developed a heroic Judaism of survival: Shabbat without power, community without safety, law without enforcement, holiness without control. It sustained us through exile.\n<\/p>\n
Then history changed. We returned to the land, to power, to an army, to the moral complexity of governing ourselves. In Israel, Judaism is no longer only the faith of a vulnerable minority. It is also the covenantal framework of a sovereign society.\n<\/p>\n
And that raises a question we have not fully answered: what does being \u201creligious\u201d mean when Jews are not just a community, but a country?\n<\/p>\n
A three-dimensional covenant<\/p>\n
Halacha speaks across at least three relationships.\n<\/p>\n
Between \u05d0\u05d3\u05dd \u05dc\u05de\u05e7\u05d5\u05dd \u2013 human beings and G-d: prayer, Shabbat, kashrut, sacred time.\n<\/p>\n
Between \u05d0\u05d3\u05dd \u05dc\u05d7\u05d1\u05e8\u05d5 \u2013 human beings and one another: dignity, honesty, justice, ethical restraint.\n<\/p>\n
And between \u05d0\u05d3\u05dd \u05dc\u05d0\u05e8\u05e5 \u2013 human beings and the land: the responsibilities that arise when Jews must build, defend, and sustain a national home.\n<\/p>\n
In exile, the third dimension necessarily lay relatively dormant. In Israel, ignoring it is not neutral. It is destabilizing.\n<\/p>\n
When \u201creligious\u201d is defined almost exclusively by ritual observance, we end up with a spiritual caste system. Those whose contribution is visible in dress and prayer are deemed religious; those carrying other forms of covenantal burden \u2013 security, medicine, rescue, education, economy \u2013 are treated as by some as lesser.\n<\/p>\n
The Rambam\u2019s enumeration of the 613 commandments is instructive. Approximately 346 cannot be fulfilled today \u2013 they relate to the Temple, the Sanhedrin, the infrastructure of sovereign Jewish life that lay dormant for two millennia. Of the remaining mitzvot that do apply, the distribution is roughly half between us and G-d, four in ten between us and our fellow, and one in ten between us and the Land. That last category is not a footnote. It is the dimension history suppressed and sovereignty has restored. The farmer observing shemita, relinquishing his fields every seventh year in an act of faith, is fulfilling Bein Adam l\u2019Aretz. So is the municipal official who builds justly, cares for the stranger, and ensures the city reflects the covenant. This axis belongs to every Jew who lives and acts within the national life \u2013 not only to soldiers.\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
The seriousness brought to kashrut must also be brought to shared responsibility for the state and its defense. A religiosity without a theology of national obligation is not purity. It is incompleteness.\n<\/p>\n
So here is a fuller definition: being religious means aspiring \u2013 imperfectly, honestly \u2013 to responsibility across all three dimensions. The question is not which camp you belong to, but which way you are facing.\n<\/p>\n
No one owns an axis<\/p>\n
Our current discourse has seemingly to my perspective defined different parts of Torah to different tribes. Ritual becomes \u201cowned\u201d by one community. Ethics becomes the moral cudgel of another. National responsibility becomes the identity of a third.\n<\/p>\n
But Torah was never divided this way. Every Jew carries the whole covenant, even if each of us carries it unevenly. We all have strengths and we all have gaps. The task is not self-congratulation. It is humility \u2013 and movement.\n<\/p>\n
This matters because Israel is under strain. The disputes over military service and economic burden-sharing are real, raw, and growing sharper, and the election cycle is just beginning. When \u201creligious\u201d becomes shorthand for exemption or contempt, we are not protecting Judaism. We are hollowing it out, turning a living tradition into a source of alienation \u2013 especially for the young.\n<\/p>\n
A way of life that carried us through four thousand years deserves better than to become a reason for desertion. We are not talking about conscription into foreign armies which so threatened us across the previous centuries \u2013 we are talking about our army and defending our nation.\n<\/p>\n
Four voices, one direction<\/p>\n
The greatest modern Jewish thinkers (sadly all passed and Of Blessed Memory) understood that labels were insufficient.\n<\/p>\n
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch insisted that mitzvot are not ceremonies but obligations \u2013 actions that orient an entire life toward G-d\u2019s will.\n<\/p>\n
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik distinguished between the Brit Goral, the Covenant of Fate, and the Brit Yi\u2019ud, the Covenant of Destiny. October 7th was a Brit Goral moment: fate bound us together whether we chose it or not. But the Rav\u2019s point was that fate is not enough. Destiny requires an active, chosen commitment \u2013 to Halacha, to each other, to a shared Jewish future. Nobody can opt out of one axis and claim they have fulfilled the covenant.\n<\/p>\n
The Lubavitcher Rebbe refused the notion of a \u201csecular Jew.\u201d Every Jew, he taught, carries a divine spark \u2013 a pintele Yid \u2013 that cannot be extinguished, only ignored.\n<\/p>\n
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks insisted we never separate ritual from ethics, famously saying: You don\u2019t need to be holy to be good, but you need to be good to be holy.\n<\/p>\n
Together, they offer a map: the spark exists in every Jew; it demands action directed toward decency; that decency must be aimed at a shared destiny; and none of this is about identity \u2013 it is about obligation.\n<\/p>\n
There is no room here for smugness. There is no mandate for contempt.\n<\/p>\n
A shared burden, or a shared failure<\/p>\n
The soldier on the border, the scholar in the beit midrash, the nurse on a night shift, the businessperson who refuses corruption \u2013 none has a monopoly on religiosity. Each carries something essential. Each is incomplete without the others.\n<\/p>\n
The covenant is not a relay race between tribes. It is a shared weight.\n<\/p>\n
We will not resolve Israel\u2019s policy debates here. But no policy will hold without a theology that insists every Jew is responsible for more than just a part \u2013 devotion, ethics, and national destiny together.\n<\/p>\n
A life in motion<\/p>\n
I say I am religious. I believe it. But I try to hold the word with humility, not as a trophy. Because religiosity is not a place you arrive. It is a life in motion \u2013 toward G-d, toward other people, and toward the land we share.\n<\/p>\n
When Hillel was asked to summarize the Torah on one foot, he began not with ritual markers, but with moral recognition: What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. The rest is commentary.\n<\/p>\n
He was not dismissing the rest. He was teaching us where to begin.\n<\/p>\n
October 7 reminded us, at a terrible cost, that fate binds us whether we choose it or not. The question now is whether we will choose destiny: a shared, three-dimensional covenant that leaves no axis \u2013 and no Jew \u2013 behind.\n<\/p>\n
The walls between us are not ordained by heaven. They were built by human hands. And what human hands have built, human hands can take down.\n<\/p>\n
The flame is already there. It is time to stop using it to burn one another \u2013 and start using it to light the way. Religion should be more than a label, it should spark us to cleave closer to G-d and each other. Sadly it is causing the opposite effect and we need to resist this.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does it mean to be religious when Jews are not just a community but a country \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[16337,37,1421,5790,463,26831],"class_list":{"0":"post-81163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-faith","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-israel-at-war","11":"tag-israeli-society","12":"tag-religion","13":"tag-religious-secular-divide"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116458236477075250","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}