For two thousand years, the great tragedy of Jewish history was not only hatred, but helplessness.
Jewish blood was cheap because Jewish power was absent. From the massacres of the First Crusade, to the butcheries of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, to the pogroms of Czarist Russia and the furnaces of the Holocaust, the lesson was repeated with merciless cruelty: defenseless Jews were dead Jews. That is why there is something profoundly disturbing—morally and intellectually—about leaders among the Charedim who seem incapable of grasping that without the Israel Defense Forces there would likely be no Israel at all. This is not a secondary political question. It is the central fact of modern Jewish existence.
The psychology of such leadership deserves scrutiny. There is a kind of moral ignorance that grows in sheltered worlds, where dependence on others is mistaken for spiritual superiority. Protected by soldiers, some speak as though soldiers are unnecessary. Living beneath the shield of sacrifice, they convince themselves the shield is incidental. Gratitude gives way to entitlement; realism dissolves into theological fantasy. This is not piety. It is historical amnesia elevated into doctrine.
No serious Jew acquainted with history can indulge the illusion that Torah study alone guards Jewish life. Did prayer stop Crusaders at the gates of Mainz? Did holiness prevent Cossack massacres? Did piety halt the trains to Auschwitz? The martyrs of Jewish history were often righteous beyond measure. They were also unarmed. Their tragedy was not lack of faith, but lack of power. The rebirth of Jewish sovereignty was meant to end precisely that condition.
The Israel Defense Forces is not merely another institution of the modern state. It is the negation of exile. It is the answer to Kishinev and Treblinka. It is the declaration that Jews will no longer entrust their survival to the mercy of others. When the founders of Israel built a state, they were not rebelling against Torah; they were rebelling against helplessness. They understood what some insulated religious leaders seem determined to forget: in a violent world, Jewish continuity requires Jewish force.
History itself has already judged the matter. In the Six-Day War, Israel survived because Jews fought. In the Yom Kippur War, Israel survived because Jews fought. When enemies mass on the borders, when rockets fall, when terrorists infiltrate communities, no one survives by abstraction. They survive because young Israelis stand watch, bleed, and sometimes die. To enjoy that protection while diminishing its necessity is not merely hypocrisy; it is a kind of moral blindness.
There is also an intellectual provincialism at work, a refusal to understand that sovereignty changes religious responsibility. Categories forged in exile cannot govern a Jewish state under siege. A Jew in the ghetto could dream of survival without power. A Jew in Jerusalem cannot afford such illusions. To speak casually about a society defended by others, while treating military service as spiritually inferior, reveals not elevated wisdom but a catastrophic failure to understand the age we live in.
Even Jewish tradition itself refutes this false dichotomy. Moses had Joshua. King David had warriors. The Maccabean Revolt was not won through study halls alone. The guardians of Jewish continuity were often scholars with swords when history demanded it. Torah and defense were never enemies. Only in the distortions of modern ideological rigidity have they been made to appear so.
What is most painful is that this blindness insults the memory of defenseless Jews throughout history. Every victim of a pogrom, every mother who watched her children dragged away in Europe, every martyr abandoned by a powerless people, stands as a warning against precisely this complacency. “Never Again” was never meant to be a slogan. It was meant to mean armed Jewish responsibility.
One may debate burdens of service, civic arrangements, or the role of religious communities. But one cannot honestly deny this foundational truth: without the Israel Defense Forces, there may be no Jewish state in which Torah can flourish. To refuse to appreciate that fact is not merely an error in judgment. It is a failure of moral imagination.
For the first time since the destruction of the Siege of Jerusalem, Jews possess both Torah and power. To disdain one in the name of the other is civilizational folly. Without Torah, Israel loses its soul. Without those who defend it, Israel may lose its life. A leadership unable to recognize both truths is not preserving Judaism. It is misunderstanding the very miracle it inhabits.
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