The following is a transcript of Episode 113 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi, this is Donniel Hartmann and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is For Heaven’s Sake, a Hartman Institute podcast, and our special edition Israel at War. And today is day 130. And our theme for today is the Haredi dilemma, the role of the Haredim in the Israeli army.

But before we get that there, there’s a context that I wanted to share. And it’s not a larger conceptual context. It’s actually some of the roller coaster events that have occurred on day 129 or the evening of 130. This evening we received the glorious news of the freeing of Fernando Marman and Louis Har. And the video that we were able to watch, it wasn’t just some video of the special forces. We saw the forces moving and they were, you know, thermo-colored or whatever it was. We were able to hear the tape of the soldiers, these SEAL soldiers who took hold of them, who literally, in the midst of fire, shielded them with their bodies. Literally. They literally shielded them with their bodies saying, I will die, you’re coming out alive. We finally found two of you. There’s 136 that we’ve been looking for. And we’re not going to be able to have an operation for all of them. You, we found. You were not going to mistakenly shoot. We are going to put our bodies in front of yours, you’re coming out alive. 

And the conversation between them on the helicopter, it was, here it is, you know, these are SEALS, about as rough and tough as you can get. The gentleness, with which they spoke.

Yossi: And they’ve just been through a battle.

Donniel: They just, they, right, they’re just, thank you, Yossi, it’s just, you just hear it. Are you cold? Here, come take a jacket. One of them gives them his shoes. His shoes. He says, are you OK? Are you cold? And I don’t know which hostage responds, my heart is warm. And we’re with you. We’re safe. They speak to them literally like a parent would be speaking, like I as a grandparent speak to my grandchildren in a time which might be, which might be, they might be a little nervous. Just feeling the love, that’s the Jewish people. 

This, Yossi, makes the whole thing worthwhile. I don’t want to over-romanticize. I’m not focusing on the Entebbe dimension of this.

Yossi: No, no, no, it was the tenderness. And you know, when you say it makes the whole thing worthwhile, I’m just smiling to myself and thinking, the whole thing is really a lot.

Donniel: That’s true. You know what I meant. The whole thing, I didn’t mean the war. I mean this, it’s like these emotional journeys. You know what they called them? You know what their code name was over the radio? They were called. They wanted to know. The hostages who were there, their name was Yahalom. The code name is Diamonds. Did we get the two diamonds out?

Yossi: Heist! A diamond heist!

Donniel: Ah, that could have been… See, that was one side. The other side was, these are our diamonds. These are our diamonds. And so we have many diamonds left behind. Two diamonds we were able to save with great heroism. Today it’s reported that we’re getting closer. Well, you never know. France, Egypt are saying that we’re getting closer to agreeing on some form of a, I don’t know if it’s a six-week ceasefire, and maybe more of our diamonds will come home. 

And at the same day, three soldiers, beautiful soldiers, were killed. And so there is no more appropriate context to speak about Haredim. Because this is not a theoretical conversation about should Haredim serve in the army, should they not. 

This is a context in which a legislation was put forth by the government to re-regulate military service, to bring it back up from 30 months to 36 months. It had been dropped because we didn’t need soldiers to spend as much time. Reserve duty was shortened so that you can be called periodically, but at the very most for 15 days, consecutive days, every every three years, or 15 or 20 days, every consecutive year. 

Now you could be called 40 days, every consecutive year. And they’re emptying out or taking about 1,500 soldiers, students in the middle of their pre-army gap year, stopping the year in the middle. These children have been given an exemption till the end of the spring, till the middle of the summer when they’re supposed to be drafted. They’re in the middle of an educational experience. 1,500 are being taken out, including from our gap year.

Yossi: Oh really? We’re affected as well.

Donniel: Everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone. The country needs soldiers. The country needs bodies. We’ve spoken about this before. There’s no way anybody’s gonna be able to go back north without a major amount of soldiers on the border. Just this morning it was reported that a mother and her child were seriously wounded from an anti-tank missile. 

And we’ve spoken about them, these are Coronet missiles who fly with GPS laser precision and they can go up to 10 kilometers. And Hezbollah has thousands of them and they’re firing them against houses.

Yossi: Yeah, this was on the northern border.

Donniel: In the northern border in Kiryat-Shemona. No one’s going home unless, we don’t know when, that’s another conversation, which we’ve already had, but they’re not going home. If there’s some high technological defense system. We need bodies. The Israeli army was moving towards the concept of a smaller army, high technology, and defense systems, warning systems, and now we have to go back in many ways to a 1973 concept of military service. Three years, more soldiers in the army, and right now, the country needs the Harrdim. When 15% of the country aren’t drafted, 15% of the Jewish population aren’t drafted, this is a huge, huge consequence and the weight is heavier on everyone. 

Yet in the same new draft law that was put forth by the government, it increases the weight on all of Israel and it institutes a formal exemption of Haredim from being drafted, as long as you’re studying in Yeshiva. 

This is an issue we have to talk about. I don’t want to attack the Haredim. I want to understand. I want to understand what it is that’s causing this. Post-October 7th, to even suggest such a legislation is strange. And last word, just truth be told, before October 7th, I wasn’t for Haredi draft. I don’t know if I mentioned it here. I’ve talked about it. I wasn’t for it because the army didn’t want them. The army didn’t want them. They weren’t great soldiers and the army was too big and the Army didn’t, it was just a burden, and it bothered units where men and women and secular… They just didn’t play well with people. 

After October 7th, everything has changed. But the legislation seems frozen in time. So let’s try to understand a little bit. Let’s first try, before we even critique, how do we understand why a legislation like this would still be passed? Do the Haredim still want this legislation? Who wants it? Where is it coming from? What are its sources? And why would Israeli society, or some of them, even consider it, knowing fully well that it was precisely when this legislation was passed that a huge uproar took place and it was the front cause of the anti-government demonstrations as a sign that we need new leadership? Because if after October 7th you’re still in pre-October 7th-thinking? We need new leadership.

Yossi: Well, it’s interesting, Donniel, because even within the Likud there was a major outcry, certainly against the timing of this legislation. Nothing is more certain to ignite, reignite the mass demonstrations against the government than this legislation. And the demonstrations will be led by the hundreds of thousands of reservists coming out of Gaza who are understandably outraged at the notion that they’re going to be called up again soon, many of them, while an entire segment of the population is exempt. 

But there’s something deeper here. I was thinking about this as you were talking about this extraordinary moment we’ve just experienced as a people. The tenderness, the solidarity, the love of the soldiers for the two hostages. And what an extraordinary moment we all went through. 

But who wasn’t there as part of us? Who was exempt? They’re not only exempt from participating, they’re exempt from these moments of uplift, of national solidarity. And I think that beneath the anger that so many of us feel, there’s a deep hurt. How can you, our brothers, exempt yourselves at a moment when the entire nation is mobilized. 

Bedouin are part of this war effort. Israeli Bedouin. And there’s such a feeling of togetherness. And we look at 15%,

Donniel: And Druze, 

Yossi: And we, yes, and Druze, and we look at 15 % of the population and we say to them, really? How can you exempt yourselves? How is it that you don’t want to be part of this? How can you leave us alone? 

Now, this feeling of being left alone is strange because we’re the majority. And yet, there’s something in us that feels bereft here. You know, the Haredim, presumed to be the most Jewish Jews. They’re the self-proclaimed caretakers of this country’s Jewishness. And at this most Jewish moment, and there was no more Jewish moment that we’ve experienced than the freeing of these two hostages, you of all people, you’re not going to be part of us. 

And so I think that the anger that’s being expressed is actually coming from a very beautiful place. It’s coming from this place of we want you with us. We need you with us. Not only that we need your bodies. Yes, we actually do need your bodies now. But more profoundly, we need you. We need to know you are fully with us, that we are really one people.

Donniel: I think you’re right that the call is different post-October 7th than pre-October 7th. Pre-October 7th, it had a political fight to it. It was, we are a tribal society and who’s going to win? You know, I’m fighting to protect my interests. You’re fighting to protect your interests. And there was, especially on the center-left, parties like Yesh Atid got a lot of political capital from being anti-Haredi. Or Lieberman, if you carry the anti-Haredi ticket, which by the way, they do everything in their power to earn. The Haredi do much to activate that anti-ness. But if you push that, there’s a guaranteed 15 seats who want to see the Haredim put in line.

But post-October 7th, this is not a political game. It’s, we need you. Our country needs you. And the legislation says all of us, you know, this whole standing under the stretcher analogy, we need you. We’re all under the stretcher.

Yossi: Explain the stretcher analogy.

Donniel: The stretcher analogy is when you go to in basic training, it’s one of the most shocking things that you first experience in basic training. It’s a stretcher hike. Good luck to go on a stretcher hike. And these are 10, 20 sometimes, and the more special, the infantry unit, it could be 70 kilometer infantry hikes and you learn how to carry a stretcher and run at great distances and it’s very very hard.

And the idea of a stretcher. We train at it. I never had to, but we also take out the wounded with the stretcher and bring them home and you need four people under a stretcher. You can’t carry a stretcher alone. You can’t carry it with three. You need four. And you know what else you need before, in addition to the four? You need another four regular ready to change you every two minutes. There’s like there’s these protocols. 

I remember once we went on a stretcher hike where we had nobody to replace us and we ended up on the stretcher hike for over an hour. And it was beyond intense. You know, besides the crying and the pain, also you’re never allowed to drop a stretcher. Like if you drop a stretcher in training, the punishment is as severe as losing a gun. You just dropped your brother.

Yossi: Now what’s so interesting is how that metaphor has penetrated Israeli slang. So for example, when Benny Gantz entered the government, he justified joining the Netanyahu government in that it’s, we’re in a war and I’m putting my shoulder under the stretcher.

Donniel: Under the stretcher. You have to have been in training to feel, it’s not a word, it’s something you even hear it, you feel it on your body. Like, are you there? And the thing is you can’t, there’s so many things in life that we try to be excellent, we try to maximize our skill set. You can’t do this alone! 

Yossi: And that’s the beautiful metaphor for the Haredim not being part of the all. We’re all under the stretcher. How come you’re not here? We need a fourth. We need you. We want you. We want you.

Donniel: Now here comes the ambivalence. We don’t really want you. Because when Haredim… We want you. 

Yossi: But it’s different now. We do now, we do now.

Donniel: Okay, you’re right. You’re right. You’re right. It’s like it’s this whole ambivalence. By the way, an ambivalence which we’ve never had towards Israeli Arabs who we never… Part of the whole challenge of Israeli Arabs is we’ve never really wanted them under the stretcher, the military stretcher. 

Yossi: With the exception of the Bedouin and of course the Druze.

Donniel: And the Druze. But the Haredim, we now need them. So you ask, how could they even insist at this time on a legislation like this? How could they? 

And part of what one framing that I want to offer, I wonder if this makes sense to you, Yossi, is that when the country was formed, the stretcher that the Haredim wanted to stand under was keeping the light of Torah alive and saving it from the corruption of secularism. Israel was a danger to the future of Judaism. It was a secular-motivated messianic ideology, which violated the core sense of a commitment to tradition and to Torah. And just as the Holocaust killed the bodies of Jews, for Haredim, Zionism threatened the soul of Jews. And they were going to live separate, outside of, in Israel, but outside of Israeli society and keep what they felt was a 2,000-year-old tradition alive in the way that it needed to be kept alive. 

Yossi: That was a terrific defense, by the way, of the Haredi position. It was a beautiful defense.

Donniel: This was their language. This is what they felt. And therefore not serving, not participating in the country was a religiously obligated act. But over the last 20 years, the Haredim have been going through a profound process of Zionification. They no longer see the state as their enemy, actually. They see the state as a tool to further and within which to live their Jewish lives. 

And so part of what I’m wondering, so often ideologies freeze in time. They make sense at one moment, but the Haredi community has changed. It used to be they couldn’t sit in the government. Then they could sit in the government, but they could only be deputy ministers. Then they could be deputy ministers and ministers which didn’t have ministries.

Yossi: Because they wouldn’t want to assume responsibility for secular decision-making.

Donniel: So that was the, but they didn’t even want to play. It was almost a, it’s like, it’s not my game. It’s just not my game. Now they’re ministers in the government. They’re sitting, Aryeh Deri is sitting in the war cabinet and is the most respected member of that cabinet. They’re there. To say that I’m not going to serve today is not even coherent for Haredi society. 

And I’m wondering if whether some of this push is coming from the rabbis more than the society, because the more the society wants to start taking steps, because to ask for this ruling now, Yossi, is nothing short from morally corrupt and and aesthetically obscene.

Yossi: No question, no question. You know it’s so interesting, Donniel, the rationale for Haredi exemption from the army has changed over the years.

Initially, especially in the post-Holocaust era, the unapologetic rationale was, we need to maintain our communities. We need to maintain our young people. There are so few of us after the Shoah. We’re trying to rebuild the world of Torah. What do they say to us now? They say, you need us to sit in the Yeshiva because we are protecting you. It’s not any longer that we’re protecting ourselves. We’re protecting you. We’re part of the war effort. You can’t do with it. We’re already under the stretcher.

Donniel: Explain that, because I think it’s a brilliant distinction. So, at first we study Torah as a replacement for the world. This is the world, it’s an anti-Zionist world. So now what are they saying, that the study of Torah is doing what? It’s like the tanks?

Yossi: It spiritually protects us. It brings divine protection for the Jewish people. Now, I don’t buy that for a minute. Not that I don’t buy that it’s having that impact. I don’t buy that either. But I don’t buy the fact that they really believe that and that that’s their main motive. The main motive of the rabbis and political leaders is exactly what you said it was. It’s to protect the souls of our kids. It’s to protect the spiritual integrity of our separatist communities. 

But the very fact that they need to offer a rationale, which they didn’t feel the need for in the past, shows that they already are feeling uneasy and they have some sense of… they feel accountable to us in some way, which they never did before. And that is a measure of progress.

Donniel: Yes, in this you have to see progress in millimeters. But it is true that the justification is a sign of connection. There’s no doubt. They’re just not alienated from the society. One of the challenges of the Haredi community, and I work hard to be empathetic towards it, and I was more empathetic pre-October 7, is I do know that their greatest fear right now is the loss of their children. 

Haredi ideology never ensured Jewish continuity, even though many donors think at least that’s the safe bet. The greatest assimilation in Jewish history always happened from within the Haredi community. The beginning of the 19th century with Enlightenment and the moving to America in the 20th century, where millions of people left traditional Judaism. What they left was not Reform Judaism. They left Haredi, ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and it was Conservative and Reform Judaism that reached out and gave them a place to land instead of completely leaving. Haredi ideology, which gives you an all-or-nothing choice, at some point, you’re going to choose nothing instead of everything. 

Now, Israel created for the Haredi community a ghetto, a protected ghetto. You’re small, you don’t have to work, we’re going to fund you. We basically enabled them to create their own self-defined incubator in which the outside forces are left outside. All the influences, that outside world which is enticing, it’s gone. We will give you a telephone system with your own recognizable telephone numbers, so that you can’t have a smartphone. Because this way, these numbers only take non-smartphone phones. And if you give someone your number, they’ll know directly which type of phone you have. The code is there. 

Yossi: Astonishing astonishing.

Donniel: Your dress, we’ll fund your food, we’ll fund your schools, so that you don’t have to give your kids a secular education. Secular education, let’s remind people, is not liberal arts, that’s math and English, so that you can even just get a job. When you stay in Yeshiva, we’ll give you extensive grants. 

All of this, this huge infrastructure, so that the Haredi community could diminish the impact of the outside world. But, you know, when Ben Gurion exempted the Haredim for military service, the Chazon Ish asked for 400 students. And he himself recognized that the only people who should be exempt are the full-time Torah students. 

But it’s become a way of life, studying in Yeshiva has become a way of life to protect you. Because as long as you go to Yeshiva after high school, and you get married at 18, and you get married by 19, 20, and by 22 you have two children, as the Haredim would say, you’re on the derech, you’re on the path. And when you already have a spouse and two children, you’re immune. 

And the major reason for their fear of going to the army is not because they’re frightened of not being the protectors of Torah, they’re frightened of secularization. And that fear, by the way, now, is greater than ever because the Haredi community could sustain itself up to a certain size. They’re now beyond that size. Zionism, secularism is permeating all over. They can’t close it down. So what do they do? They now have two telephones. They have their Haredi phone and their hidden phone. They all are on the internet. The world is permeating. It’s coming in. 50% of Haredi men, 70% of Haredi women, are already working in the job force. 

And so they’re panicking. They don’t know how to serve in the army and remain ultra-Orthodox. That’s their fear. Do we have to, as a society, just say, that’s your fear, get over it? I fear that my kid is going to live. You’ll have to fear that your kid is going to be exposed to something. Or is that something that you think we need to take into account?

Yossi: I think that October 7th has made the continuation of this fiction untenable. And Haredim know it. They know it. And that’s one reason why there was such a big deal that was made of the 2,000 Haredim who volunteered for the army. And of course we all know that it was a continuation of the fiction, because these were mostly men in their late 30s, early 40s. They showed up to the army, they basically served for ten days, and then they were released. 

And, you know, on the one hand, I found that a moving expression of this deep need among Haredim to be part of us. But symbolic expressions are no longer good enough. We need tangible, substantial, proof that we are really part of one society here. 

Now, I have to tell you, Donniel, that my big fear as we move into this next phase, and there’s going to be a serious confrontation between the mainstream and Haredi society over this issue, my fear is that in fighting this unavoidable struggle, many of us will lapse into language of delegitimization of Haredim, that the understandable anger will turn into contempt. And we need to remind ourselves of the heroic enterprise of the Haredim community after the Shoah to recreate this destroyed world.

You know, there were two Jewish responses to the Holocaust, communal responses among the survivors. The first and the overwhelming majority was to embrace Zionism, regardless of what you were before the Holocaust. You could have been a communist or an anti-Zionist, Bundist. The overwhelming majority of survivors embraced Zionism. 

The minority embraced the old Jewish strategy of rebuilding what had been destroyed. And this was the big divide among survivors. And the Haredim, in their way, replicated the Zionist achievement. We built a state, they built a whole destroyed world. And they did it at tremendous sacrifice. And I saw this growing up. I grew up in a Haredi neighborhood in Brooklyn, in Borough Park. I saw it emerging from, really from the void. And the sacrifice that they showed, raising enormous families in two rooms, three rooms, and assuming voluntary poverty, which nobody in the Jewish people does anymore. 

We used to, you know the kibbutzim, the settlers in the early years, they all took on a certain voluntary poverty. The Haredim are our last repository of voluntary austerity for the sake of a higher goal. And so when we confront them, as we must, we also need to tell them we understand what you’ve sacrificed. We understand that the enormous obstacles you were up against in achieving your historic reconstruction, and we will do whatever we can as a society to try to protect that. But this piece of it is unsustainable.

Donniel: Yossi, first of all, thank you. You know that very deep in my soul I yearn to expand my capacity for pluralism. My capacity to respect the validity of somebody who is very different from me. And it is a big part of what I teach and the whole mission of the Hartman Institute. 

In Israel, it’s hardest to be pluralistic to the Haredim. It really is hardest. And you helped. You helped. They’re not our enemy. They had a vision. They had a mission. You know, it was easier for me, as I said at the outset, to be quasi-pluralistic because we didn’t really need them. We really didn’t need them. 

Now, the issue is not whether we accept their argument. But I think now the issue is how we conduct the debate. We can’t allow Haredim to be exempt anymore. You have to get under the stretcher of our soldiers. You have to be in Gaza. You have to be on the border in the north. You have to be in the borders in the south.

Yes, our children’s lives are being endangered. There is a holiness to a battle. You know, Maimonides says that in a milchemet mitzvah, a war that is a mitzvah, which is at its essence a war for the survival of the Jewish people, nobody’s exempt, Maimonides says. Even a chatan and a kallah, a bride and a groom from their wedding, are taken out. Everybody’s taken out. 

And your exemption based on the fact that your Torah study is saving the Jewish people, well right now we can’t do that theological move. We need bodies. But if we think that we’re going to do so by insulting, by attacking through, you know, some of the types of demonstrations that we had over judicial reform, it’s going to cause Haredim to shut down. 

We need to embrace each other. Because at the end, when you’re under the stretcher, Yossi, if someone hates you, you all have to walk in the same direction. You even have to run at the same pace. You’re almost like, almost, left, right. You gotta be in sync. And it might take us a little longer. We might have to allow for a slower integration of Haredim into the army, as long as it begins to happen, because it has to be in sync. You don’t win cultural integration, and by the way, this is the same thing with Israeli Arab Palestinians, you don’t force it. It’s not a punishment. It has to be something that is a win-win, that Israeli society very often has great hardship with. 

And in this moment of trauma and need and a lack of tolerance for anybody who’s not under that stretcher, we have to leave some space and I think find a way for them to do so at our pace, but also at a pace that they’re comfortable with, and also know that some of the battle is not them, but some of the battle is their rabbis, for whom this is their power over the community. 

Yossi: I think that’s most of the struggle, actually.

Donniel: And so, Yossi, I so much appreciate that, yes, they were on a mission, but there’s a new war that we’re facing and they’re gonna have to show up. Last words and thoughts, Yossi?

Yossi: You touched on this just now, which is that we’ve seen since October 7th an outpouring of love for the army, for secular Israel, on the part of the Haredim. And that’s something we haven’t experienced. There’s something precious that’s happened here. And we have to honor that, we have to protect it, even as we lay down the law, so to speak and make clear that what was will not be again. But with love, with respect, and inviting them under the stretcher rather than pushing them. And that’s going to be a big challenge.

Donniel: There’s going to be a lot of stretchers that we’re going to have to carry, emotional stretchers, physical stretchers, security stretchers, economic stretchers. And we’re going to need, we’re going to have to do it together in a different way. And the Haredim are going to have to find their place.

This is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi. This is For Heaven’s Sake, day 130. Yossi, thank you.

Yossi: Thank you.