An Open Letter to Haredi Leadership: Your Mouths Are Endangering Jewish Children - And now a 14-year-old Jewish child has paid the price.

 

Words Kill — Especially When Rabbis Speak

When Rav Dov Lando and his peers describe the Jewish state, its soldiers, and its institutions as enemies of Torah, you are not delivering mussar. You are issuing moral permission slips.

You know exactly how this works. Jewish history documents it in blood. When rabbis dehumanize fellow Jews, unstable people hear a heter. When leaders frame fellow Jews as traitors to God, someone always decides that “doing God’s work” requires action.

Stop Hiding Behind Children You Don’t Protect

This is no longer a debate about ideology, theology, or the boundaries of dissent. It is about responsibility. When rabbinic leaders speak in absolutist, delegitimizing language—casting fellow Jews, the Jewish state, or its defenders as enemies of Torah—they are not engaging in abstract thought. They are shaping reality. And now a 14-year-old Jewish child has paid the price.

This did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in an atmosphere deliberately cultivated by senior Haredi leadership, including Rabbi Dov Lando, where words are weaponized and consequences are outsourced. Jewish history teaches one lesson with brutal consistency: when rabbis inflame, the vulnerable suffer first. Not the powerful. Not the ideologues. Children.

Claims of innocence ring hollow. “We never told anyone to do this” is not a defense recognized by Judaism. Halacha does not judge leaders by intent alone but by foreseeable outcomes. Moshe is punished for a single misstep of speech. Eli HaKohen is condemned not for what he did, but for what he failed to stop. Leadership without accountability is not Torah leadership—it is negligence wrapped in sanctity.

When rabbis frame other Jews as spiritual enemies, unstable listeners hear permission. When leaders speak of existential war against fellow Jews, someone always decides that action is required. This is not theory. It is precedent. And pretending surprise when rhetoric metastasizes into harm is either willful blindness or moral dishonesty.

The deeper rot is structural. Much of today’s Haredi leadership has perfected an ideology that externalizes risk. Others fight wars. Others absorb terror. Others bury their dead. Meanwhile, those who speak most recklessly remain insulated—physically, socially, and politically—from the consequences of their own words. This is not mesirus nefesh. It is moral draft-dodging.

Judaism does not permit sacrificing minors on the altar of ideological purity. That is not zealotry for Heaven; it is pagan logic disguised as piety. When Torah language makes Jewish children unsafe, Torah itself is being desecrated. No amount of learning, no pile of responsa, no invocation of “Daas Torah” can launder that stain.

At a moment when Jews face rising global hostility, this rhetoric does something unforgivable: it fractures the Jewish people from within. It teaches that some Jews are holy while others are expendable. That some lives are protected while others are collateral. History does not forgive rabbis who sow internal destruction during crisis. It remembers them precisely—and harshly.

What Torah does not survive is leaders who abandon basic Jewish ethics while claiming divine authority. Recklessness is not courage. Incitement is not faith. And sanctimony is not holiness.

A line has been crossed. A child has already been thrown under the bus of ideology and murdered!.

If Haredi leadership does not immediately and publicly retract dangerous language, condemn rhetoric that endangers minors, and reaffirm that pikuach nefesh overrides all ideology, then responsibility for what comes next is clear. It will not belong to “extremists,” “misinterpretations,” or “the street.” It will belong to the men who spoke recklessly and called it Torah.

Jewish history is unsentimental. It does not forget names. And it does not confuse learning with righteousness.

 

REPUBLISHED

 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-haredi-leadership-your-mouths-are-endangering-jewish-children/