Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is a rabbi, writer and lecturer in Jerusalem who spent decades at the Simon Wiesenthal Center advocating for Jews and Israel, and formerly held the Sydney M. Irmas Adjunct Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics at Loyola Law School. He edits the online journal Cross-Currents and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
The Torah makes a remarkable promise. When the nations see us living by its laws, they will say, "What a wise and discerning people is this great nation!" (Devarim 4:6). It is worth asking how many Israelis, watching haredi politics over three years of war, would reach that verdict. I suspect very few.
Something new is happening in Israeli society. For the first time, many Israelis are discovering haredim who work for a living, haredim who serve in Tzahal, and haredim determined to break the cycle of poverty for their children.
Most important, they are hearing from haredim willing to say out loud: "We want to join our brothers and sisters in defending and contributing to our state! Give us ways to do so that respect our principles, and we will be there, with you and for you."
These haredim have been here all along. What has changed is their determination to be heard, and the growing sense that the mainstream haredi parties no longer speak for them.
That sense is well founded as one can see from this telling measure: after decades of extraordinary haredi population growth, the established haredi parties have not added any new seats. Defections continue to mount. A movement that cannot hold on to its own children has a problem far bigger than electoral arithmetic.
The deeper failures are easy to list. The mainstream parties have done little to counter the internal contempt aimed at haredim who earn a living, or at parents who want their children to acquire English, mathematics and the basic tools for future employment. They have left serious problems of abuse, and the appalling treatment of women in haredi workplaces, largely unaddressed.
Then there is the concern they claim as their highest priority: protecting genuine Torah learners so they can keep learning without interference from the Attorney General. Here the parties have shouted, protested and thrown tantrums. Bochrim are still being arrested. Noise is plentiful. A strategy that will actually change the situation is nowhere to be found.
Worst of all, the established parties have helped create an image of Torah life that has provoked widespread contempt among our fellow Jews. When, in recent memory, has Torah been so despised by so many?
I often wonder what these politicians have in mind when they recite Birkat Hamazon and ask Hashem to sustain us through His own generous hand, rather than through the gifts of flesh and blood. I wonder, too, how they read the Rambam, who reserves harsh words for those who take untenable positions in the name of Heaven and bring shame upon the Torah in the process. They do not win adulation as a “great wise and discerning people." Rather, people look upon them with disdain, saying, “What a foolish and contemptible people is this small nation."
Anyone who loves Torah should lose sleep over that.
Political posturing has a price, and right now the Torah itself is paying it.
There is another way, and it is hardly a new invention. It recalls the Gedolim of just a few decades ago, when a wider range of haredi life was tolerated, refinement of speech was prized, and the character development championed by the Mussar movement was understood to be essential to a life of Torah. There was a time when emet, truthfulness and ehrlickhiet, integrity, was an unquestioned virtue in our world, and nobody dismissed it as a weakness imported from America. Many of us still live by the maxim Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, zt"l, loved to repeat: "Mahn darf zein normahl!" A person has to be normal.
When Israelis encounter this kind of haredi life, something striking happens. Apart from the predictable hostility of those who despise everything religious, the reaction has been warm, often surprisingly so. Some of the most enthusiastic responses have come from people as distant from haredi life as Tucker Carlson is from winning the Israel Prize. They hear language they can respect and values they recognize, even where they disagree. I believe that reflects the enduring beauty of the Jewish neshamah, which can sense its connection to Hashem's word sometimes long before it can explain why.
That reaction carries a lesson for the whole haredi world. A growing number of us believe that Torah commitment and responsible citizenship belong together. A person can earn a livelihood and grow in spiritual stature at the same time. One can serve fellow Jews and remain true to one's principles. And the dignity of Torah ought to show in the way its adherents speak, work and treat others.
Elections come and go. Seats will be counted, coalitions negotiated, and politicians will declare victory or defeat. What remains afterward is the impression we leave on our fellow Jews, and that impression is built daily, through the lives we lead and the example we set.
Kiddush Hashem is available to every one of us, every day, long after the ballots are counted. It may be the one achievement in public life that no outcome can take away.