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| ISRAEL |
There is a special kind of blindness that afflicts certain Jews — a blindness not of the eyes but of the soul. It is the blindness of the Satmar demonstrators marching in Brooklyn, chanting “Judaism yes, Zionism no,” while Jewish blood soaks the soil of Israel. It is the blindness of the Haredim in Bnei Brak and Meah Shearim who throw stones and curses at Israeli soldiers, calling them Nazis as they go off to defend Jews everywhere — including their mockers. It is not holiness. It is not faith. It is ignorance masquerading as righteousness, a perverse distortion of Torah that denies the brutal reality of Jewish history.
These protests are not isolated incidents of dissent. They are moral obscenities that expose a chasm within the Jewish world — between those who understand that Jewish survival has always depended on Jewish defense, and those who retreat into fantasy, thinking that God will protect them while they spit on those who bear that divine responsibility with their lives.
There are Satmar banners that read, “Judaism opposes the Zionist State.” Their message is simple: the return to the Land of Israel before the Messiah is forbidden. They believe that the establishment of the State of Israel was a rebellion against God Himself. The late Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, articulated this view in his 1961 work Vayoel Moshe, grounding his argument in the Talmudic legend of the Three Oaths — that the Jewish people must not “ascend as a wall” to the Land, rebel against the nations, or force the end of exile.
To the devout Satmar, these oaths are divine decrees. But history has shown, in blood and smoke, that the nations themselves have long since violated their side of the covenant — “that they not oppress Israel too much.” From Pharaoh to Hitler to Hamas, the world’s response to Jewish helplessness has not been mercy but murder. To remain motionless under the banner of exile, to trust the world’s kindness rather than Jewish self-defense, is not piety; it is suicide.
The Satmar ideology was born in the ashes of Auschwitz, an attempt to make sense of catastrophe by blaming human defiance rather than human evil. The Rebbe saw in the Holocaust divine punishment for Zionist arrogance, for daring to rebuild Jewish sovereignty without awaiting Messiah. In his mind, the Shoah was not a call to arms but a divine warning: never again should Jews try to save themselves through human power.
It is a theology of paralysis. And it has left generations of Jews shackled to a fantasy of exile even while living in freedom. In the postwar decades, Satmar Hasidim flourished in Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel — shielded not by God’s hand alone but by American democracy, by police, by the U.S. military, and yes, by the deterrent power of the Israeli army, which guarantees that Jews worldwide will never again be defenseless.
When Satmar protesters in New York burn Israeli flags, they do so under the protection of a Christian-majority nation whose values are secured, in part, by the same principles of self-defense that Israel lives by. The irony would be amusing if it weren’t tragic.
Jewish tradition knows no virtue in passivity. The Rambam — that paragon of reason and halakhic clarity — wrote in Hilchot Melachim that in a milchemet mitzvah (a war of divine obligation), “everyone must go forth — even a groom from his chamber and a bride from her canopy.” The defense of Jewish life is not optional; it is sacred duty. There is no exemption for the pious, the learned, or the fearful.
The Torah itself declares: “Shall your brothers go to war while you sit here?” (Numbers 32:6). Moses rebuked the tribes of Reuven and Gad for precisely this sin — preferring comfort to courage. Today, that same rebuke echoes across the yeshivot of Bnei Brak and Jerusalem, where too many study while others bleed.
Torah study is indeed holy, but holiness divorced from responsibility is hypocrisy. A Torah that cannot protect Jewish life is a desecrated Torah. A faith that calls its defenders “Nazis” while terrorists slaughter Jews is not faith — it is blasphemy.
Jewish arms are not a modern innovation. From the Bible through the Talmud, Jewish tradition honors those who fight for the people of Israel. Abraham led 318 men into battle to rescue Lot. Joshua fought for the land itself. King David — the singer of psalms — was also commander of armies. The Maccabees were kohanim, priests of God, who took up the sword against tyranny.
Even the Talmud praises the “heroes of Israel who fell in war, who sanctified God’s Name with their blood.” To dismiss the modern Israeli soldier as “secular” or “heretical” is to forget that courage, too, is a mitzvah.
After the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbi Akiva himself believed Bar Kokhba to be the Messiah. He knew that messianic redemption might fail — but he also knew that the fight for Jewish sovereignty was itself sacred. When Bar Kokhba fell, Akiva did not curse the fighters. He wept for their loss — but he understood the holiness of their attempt. Better a failed defender of Israel than a silent bystander in exile.
Contrast that to the Satmar theology of surrender, which condemns every Jewish act of self-assertion as rebellion. Their doctrine has turned despair into faith, and faith into fear. It is a betrayal of the living spirit of our ancestors who, time and again, picked up the sword because no one else would defend them.
In Israel itself, the paradox is even starker. The Haredi population enjoys unprecedented prosperity, safety, and freedom — all safeguarded by the very army they refuse to serve. Yeshiva students in Bnei Brak debate Talmudic minutiae while secular and religious soldiers alike defend the borders that make such study possible.
Many Haredi leaders justify this exemption by claiming that Torah study “protects” the Jewish people. But protection is not theoretical. When rockets fall on Sderot, it is not pages of Gemara that intercept them; it is the Iron Dome, manned by Jewish soldiers.
Yes, the merit of Torah may bring unseen blessings. But the Torah itself commands action. It commands responsibility. Rambam’s “groom from his chamber” applies no less to the yeshiva student than to the farmer or merchant. To sit in safety while others die for your freedom is not faith — it is cowardice sanctified.
The Satmar in America and the insular Haredim in Israel share one common denominator: a refusal to look reality in the eye. They have built walled cities of ideology to keep out the harshness of history. But the world has not changed. Antisemitism is rising in America, Europe, and beyond. Israel is under existential threat. And yet they cling to the fantasy that exile is safer than sovereignty.
It is a grotesque delusion. The exile that Satmar idealizes was not a golden age but a graveyard. Every century of Jewish dispersion ended in violence — from the Crusades to the Inquisition, from the Cossack massacres to the Shoah. The difference between then and now is the existence of an army willing to fight back.
That army — the Israel Defense Forces — is not merely a military institution. It is the embodiment of Jewish continuity. It is the living proof that the curse of helplessness has been broken. To curse it, to mock it, to equate it with evil, is to spit in the face of every Jew who died defenseless before it existed.
The greatest Kiddush Hashem — sanctification of God’s Name — is not in ritual perfection or theological correctness. It is in moral courage. When a young Jewish soldier risks his life to save others, he sanctifies God’s Name more profoundly than any sermon ever could. When the Jewish people stand united, defending their homeland, they declare to the world that Jewish life will never again be cheap.
By contrast, the protests of Satmar and their ideological cousins are a chilul Hashem — a desecration of the divine. They give comfort to Israel’s enemies and mock the very idea of Jewish solidarity. They display not piety but arrogance — the arrogance of those who mistake fear for faith and confusion for conviction.
It is time for the Jewish world — especially the religious world — to grow up. The Holocaust should have shattered the illusion that Jews can survive without power. Instead, it became for some a theological crutch, an excuse to retreat from responsibility. But history has no patience for cowards cloaked in holiness.
The Jewish soldier in Gaza, the pilot over Lebanon, the medic tending to the wounded — they are not the enemies of Torah. They are its truest heirs. For without them, there would be no yeshivot, no synagogues, no future.
To those who curse them from the safety of exile or the comfort of their study halls: your ignorance is no longer innocent. It is a luxury bought with the blood of others.