Israel’s Haredim Confront the Burdens of Jewish Self-Government
After decades devoted to survival, a new generation is asking what it owes the Jewish state.
October 7 shattered a great many Israeli preconceptions. The word konseptzia—the “conception”—has haunted Israeli public discourse since the Yom Kippur War, when deeply entrenched assumptions blinded political and military leaders to evidence before their eyes. After October 7, the term returned with a vengeance. Hamas had been deterred. Economic opportunity in Gaza would create an interest in stability. Superior intelligence, air power, sophisticated border defenses, and a small technologically advanced army could manage the threats surrounding Israel. These assumptions, and the policies built upon them, have been subjected to relentless scrutiny ever since.
But the shattered preconceptions were not only military. In the months and years before October 7, Israeli society had become consumed by struggles of extraordinary intensity—over judicial reform, religion and state, constitutional authority, and the basic character of Israel itself. Political opponents increasingly appeared not as fellow citizens with whom one disagreed but as existential threats. Perhaps we had begun to assume that a prosperous and powerful Jewish state could afford endless internal fragmentation: that each community could fortify its own identity without weakening the Jewish whole, and that questions of common responsibility could always be postponed.
October 7 and its aftermath saw these assumptions crumble one by one. The Israelis murdered at Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Ofakim, and Nova were killed as Israelis and Jews; the soldiers who raced south to save them did not first inquire how they had voted. The international reaction supplied another sobering lesson. Responsibility for Jewish existence, we were rudely reminded, cannot be outsourced.
This does not mean a new era of civic harmony is about to emerge. Quite the opposite, as the current election season has demonstrated. Fierce arguments over religion, law, territory, economics, morality, and the nature of public life will continue to rage within a Jewish state. The question is whether those arguments occur within a prior consciousness of a common fate and mission—or whether our narrower identities become so complete that there is no meaningful Jewish “we” beneath them.
Every part of Israeli society therefore must conduct its own reckoning. The same earthquake reaches different buildings differently. This essay concerns how it reaches the Haredim.
Often described as ultra-Orthodoxy in English, haredi Judaism presently exercises immense influence over Israel and the Jewish people, and given its demographic trajectories, that influence is certain to grow. Israel’s haredi population numbered approximately 1.45 million at the end of 2025, around 14.3 percent of the country’s population; close to 60 percent of Haredim are under twenty, and current projections place the community at roughly 16 percent of Israel’s population by 2030. The question of how Haredim understand their relationship with Israel is therefore no longer an internal haredi question. It is one of the great questions concerning Israel’s future.
Nor is that future distant. Haredi conscription is already among the defining questions of Israeli politics. In a September 2026 survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, a party’s position on the issue ranked third among the factors Jewish voters said would most influence their vote, behind only “foreign affairs and security” and “the economy and cost of living.” The same survey found that 68 percent of Jewish respondents regarded the events of October 7 as a central consideration in deciding how to vote. Among Haredim, however, only around one quarter said the same, while 64 percent regarded October 7 as a non-central consideration. The divergence is striking. Most of Jewish Israel is entering this election with October 7 close to the center of its political consciousness, while that is much less the case for the haredi electorate. The question is whether haredi politics can remain untouched by an event that transformed the society in which Haredim live.
Haredim must ask whether assumptions underlying their social and political order were fashioned for conditions that no longer exist: whether a rapidly growing population can continue to understand itself principally as a protected minority; whether the burdens of Jewish sovereignty can indefinitely remain somebody else’s; whether political success can continue to be measured primarily by what we preserve and receive rather than by what we contribute; and whether a society built so successfully around separation can widen its radius of responsibility without sacrificing what the separation was created to protect.
I write from inside haredi society. I live in a haredi Jerusalem neighborhood, and my children were educated and continue to be educated within Israel’s haredi educational system. Yet my primary identity isn’t haredi, but Jewish. This was not always obvious to me. There was a period in which articles in the Hebrew-language haredi daily Yated Ne’eman describing Haredim as the exclusive bearers of the Jewish torch resonated deeply. But this period of my life did not last especially long. It became obvious to me that numerous groups carry the Jewish torch, each imperfectly and each in its own way. More importantly, I have come to believe that our fundamental identity as Jews precedes the narrower communal identities into which Jewish history has divided us.
More than any other consideration, this realization led me to become involved in HaTzibbur HaCharedi, the Haredi Public, a new political party running in the present election. I should state plainly that I chair its rabbinic council, and its founder, Moti Leitner, is a friend and former student. The party seeks to preserve the integrity of haredi religious life while confronting questions that concern growing numbers of Haredim: employment, education, youth dropout, military service for those not genuinely engaged in full-time Torah study, and the broader relationship between Haredim and Israeli society.
This essay is not intended as a campaign manifesto, nor will it predict the party’s electoral fortunes. It will instead address the underlying questions: why has this party appeared now, and what are the sociological and political factors behind its emergence? Political parties sometimes reflect little more than personalities or temporary grievances. At other times they are symptoms: institutional expressions of transformations already taking place beneath the surface.
My argument is that October 7 did not create this process. It exposed it, accelerated it, and transformed a long-term haredi dilemma into an immediate Israeli one. To understand those contradictions, we need to begin with one of the towering architects of contemporary haredi society: Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach, or Rav Shach, as he is known to his followers......
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https://ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essays/haredi-politics-have-become-israeli-politics?
About the Author
Yehoshua Pfeffer, a rabbi and rabbinical judge, holds a law degree from the Hebrew University, and clerked at the Israeli Supreme Court. He has taught at a number of yeshivas and published widely on Jewish law and thought. He is the editor-in-chief of Tzarich Iyun, and chairs the rabbinic council of HaTzibur HaCharedi.