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| R' Moe, R' Larry, R' Curly SHLITA |
There are riots in the streets of, Bnei Brak, Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. Girls in olive uniforms are spat at, cursed, called names that no daughter of Israel should ever hear. Young women who chose to serve the Jewish people—whether you agree with their choice or not—are treated as if they are Amalek. And then we pretend to be shocked.
Do not be shocked.
When you spend years teaching that the Israel Defense Forces is a spiritual abomination, when you describe it as a factory of impurity, when you speak of its soldiers as if they are lost souls beyond redemption, what do you imagine will grow from that soil? Roses? Or rage?
We have raised a generation on a steady diet of contempt.
From podiums and pulpits, certain rabbinic voices have not merely argued for the primacy of Torah study. That would be legitimate. Torah is our oxygen. But they have gone further. They have painted the IDF not as a complex national institution filled with Jews—religious, secular, traditional, Ethiopian, Russian, Moroccan—but as an enemy encampment. An alien force. A spiritual Auschwitz in olive drab.
And then we act surprised when teenage boys absorb the message.
If the army is treif incarnate, if its commanders are destroyers of souls, if its culture is described as an assault on Heaven—then a female soldier walking through, Bnei Brak and Meah Shearim is not a sister. She is a symbol. A provocation. A target.
This is not modesty. It is not tzniut. It is not yiras Shamayim.
It is a failure of leadership.
Let us speak plainly: The problem is not that Haredim cherish Torah. The problem is that some leaders have defined their entire religious identity in opposition to the State and its army. Hatred has become a boundary marker. Contempt has become a badge of purity.
And when you sanctify contempt, you should not be shocked when it erupts as violence.
No one is demanding that Haredi girls enlist. No one is forcing rabbinic leaders to endorse mixed units. The halachic debates are real and serious. But there is a vast moral chasm between arguing that military service poses spiritual risks and screaming at a nineteen-year-old girl that she is a shiksa in uniform.
The Gemara teaches that the Second Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred. Sinat chinam did not begin with fists. It began with words. With narratives. With leaders who convinced their followers that other Jews were existential threats.
Have we learned nothing?
The IDF is not a monolith of wickedness. It includes religious combat units. It includes soldiers who put on tefillin between operations. It includes officers who whisper Tehillim before entering Gaza. It includes boys from Bnei Brak who quietly enlist despite the social cost. To reduce all of that to a cartoon of impurity is not piety. It is propaganda.
And propaganda has consequences.
If a rabbi repeatedly describes the army as a machine of spiritual destruction, he cannot wash his hands when his students treat its soldiers as enemies. Words create worlds. Halachic rhetoric shapes moral reflexes. When you delegitimize an institution that defends Jewish lives, you are playing with fire in a house filled with gasoline.
Yes, there are real tensions between Haredi society and the State. Yes, there are coercive policies that feel threatening. Yes, there is cultural arrogance on all sides. But riots against female soldiers are not a defense of Torah. They are a chilul Hashem of epic proportions.
What does it say to the broader Israeli public when black-hatted Jews scream at Jewish girls in uniform? What does it do to the fragile threads holding our people together after October 7? Do you think secular Israelis distinguish between “fringe extremists” and the rabbis who have spent decades depicting the army as a spiritual plague?
Leadership means responsibility not only for what you explicitly command, but for what your words unleash.
If you tell your community that the IDF is a spiritual Nazi, do not be surprised when someone decides to resist it like one.
If you tell your followers that female soldiers embody moral collapse, do not be shocked when those followers treat them as walking affronts to Heaven.
Torah without derech eretz becomes cruelty dressed in black. Piety without responsibility becomes mob rule with a hechsher.
The tragedy is that it did not have to be this way. A rabbinic leadership secure in its faith could say: “We do not send our daughters to serve. We believe Torah study protects the nation. But those who serve are Jews. They are our brothers and sisters. You will not touch them. You will not curse them. You will treat them with dignity.”
Imagine the power of that message.
Instead, too often, we have heard a different tone—one of suspicion, delegitimization, and apocalyptic language. And now the streets reflect the sermons. You cannot cultivate hatred for decades and then feign innocence when it blooms.
If we truly fear Heaven, then we must fear the consequences of our own rhetoric. The Jewish people cannot survive endless internal wars. Not theological wars turned physical. Not in Jerusalem. Not now.
If there are riots against female soldiers, the question is not only what the boys in the streets have done. The question is what the men at the lecterns have been saying. And whether they have the courage to take responsibility.
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| REPUBLISHED |
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-have-raised-a-generation-of-haredim-on-a-steady-diet-of-contempt/