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Asked and Answered, Rabbi Dunner

• 18 min read
Asked and Answered, Rabbi Dunner

Rabbi Pini Dunner has published a lengthy response to his critics — among them, this publication. He writes that his letter to the Prime Minister sparked a firestorm, that his challengers keep missing the point, and that almost no one has engaged what he calls the central question of the entire debate. We thank him for reading us, we welcome the genuine clarifications in his essay — and we accept the invitation. Here is the central question, engaged directly. And answered.

Link to Rabbi Dunner's original post on x.com here: https://x.com/pinidunner/status/2073749032288067718
Our original response to that post here: https://www.charedim.com/with-friends-like-these-a-response-to-rabbi-pini-dunners-letter-to-prime-minister-netanyahu/
You're invited to first read his response to our response and others here: https://rabbidunner.com/the-courage-to-face-reality/

I. Credit, Again, Where It Is Due

Let us begin the way an honest disagreement should. Rabbi Dunner read the response published here and by others, took it seriously enough to answer at length, and in doing so conceded a great deal that deserves acknowledgment. He repeats, forcefully, that the arrests of bochurim are morally wrong and strategically disastrous. He concedes — in plain words — that the IDF has often failed its religious soldiers, has not always enforced its own rules, and has treated halachic accommodation as a favor rather than an obligation. He affirms that Torah protects Klal Yisrael, that elite lomdei Torah must be supported, protected, and honored, and that the mockery and dehumanization of Charedim as parasites is itself a failure of yashrus. He even clarifies that chinuch, mesorah, and emunas chachamim are sacred, and that he never meant to describe emunah as sociological conditioning.

These are not small concessions, and we do not treat them as debating points. They are common ground, and we stand on it with him and we sincerely apologize if we misunderstood him.

Now to his answers — and to the question he says nobody will touch.

II. "I Never Called to Go After the Gedolim" — Then Who Wrote the Policy?

Rabbi Dunner protests that his letter was misread: he never called to target the Gedolim, chas v'shalom, only the politicians, the askanim, the functionaries, the public-relations men — who, he correctly notes, are not Gedolim. He adds that great rabbinic leaders have always depended on those around them for information about public affairs, sometimes well served and sometimes not, and that it is not the Gedolim themselves who sit across from the generals.

We welcome the clarification sincerely. But it does not rescue the argument, because it rests on a premise that everyone in Eretz Yisrael knows to be false: that the policy of resistance to conscription is some askan's invention, maintained around the Gedolim rather than by them.

It is not. The refusal to hand bnei yeshiva to the army is the public, repeated, in-their-own-voice ruling of the Gedolim themselves — not whispered through intermediaries but delivered in their own addresses, over their own signatures, at gatherings they themselves convened. It was Rav Dov Landau who stood before the assembled Roshei Yeshivos and set out the community's course. It was the Gedolim who called the atzeres tefillah of hundreds of thousands. It is the Moetzos Gedolei HaTorah — not their spokesmen — whose written statements define the position, and it is a matter of open record that the Charedi parties take their instructions from the Gedolim, not the reverse. The suggestion that the Gedolim are captives of poor advisers, sincerely unaware of what is said in their name, is simply the original argument in softer clothing: it dismisses the ruling by attributing it to the machinery around the ruler. One cannot demand that the authors of this policy be held publicly and politically accountable and then, when shown who the authors are, insist no such demand was made. There is no strand of this policy that does not run directly back to the Gedolim — on camera, in writing, in their own words.

III. The Central Question — Answered in Full

And now to the heart of it. Rabbi Dunner's central question: can a policy created for a tiny Torah community rebuilding itself from the ashes — Ben-Gurion's exemption of four hundred students — really be treated as an eternal Torah principle in the radically different reality of today? The Torah didn't change, he says, but the metzius certainly did, and poskim have always applied eternal principles to changed circumstances.

He is right about the method. He is wrong about the history, and he has overlooked the one fact that dissolves his entire question. Three layers:

First: the principle was not created in 1948, and it was never a "policy." The exemption of those who bear the Torah from the community's burdens of defense is not a post-Holocaust administrative improvisation. It is Chazal, and it is halacha. The Gemara rules that Torah scholars do not contribute to the building of the city's protective wall — rabbanan lo tzrichi netiruta — because their Torah is itself their guard (Bava Basra 7b–8a), a ruling codified down through the Shulchan Aruch. And the Rambam, in words every ben Torah carries in his heart, extends the crown beyond birth: not the tribe of Levi alone, but any person whose spirit moves him to set himself apart, to stand before Hashem and serve Him, is sanctified kodesh kodashim, and Hashem becomes his portion forever — as He was for the Kohanim and Levi'im who bore no arms and received no land (Hilchos Shemittah v'Yovel 13:13). What Ben-Gurion signed in 1948 was the young state's administrative recognition of a principle three thousand years its senior. The four hundred was the state's cap — a ceiling the Torah world experienced as a constraint and ultimately saw lifted — not the Gedolim's principle. And Rabbi Dunner's proportional arithmetic, by which the exemption "should" today number a few thousand, treats the Torah world as a quota frozen at its lowest historical ebb. By that logic, the number of shuls, yeshivos, and Jewish children should also have been pegged to 1948. The growth of the Torah world from four hundred to tens of thousands is not a loophole stretched beyond its design. It is the rebuilding itself — the very resurrection the exemption existed to make possible, and the greatest vindication those broken survivors could have dreamed of.

Second — and this is the decisive point — we do not need to speculate about what the Gedolim would say today, because we have Gedolim today, and they have said it. Rabbi Dunner asks whether the giants of the postwar years would have ruled differently confronting today's numbers, and answers: "I do not know. Neither does anyone else." But this humility, however gracefully expressed, gives the game away — because Daas Torah is not an archive to be interpreted. It is a living chain. The same unbroken succession that produced the Chazon Ish and the Brisker Rav produced Rav Elyashiv, Rav Shteinman, Rav Chaim Kanievsky, and Rav Gershon Edelstein — and produces, today, Rav Dov Landau and Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch. Every one of them confronted not the metzius of 1948 but the metzius Rabbi Dunner describes: the hundreds of thousands, the demography, the wars, the manpower claims, the arrests. And every one of them ruled — repeatedly, publicly, in the present tense. The question "how would the poskim apply eternal principles to today's changed circumstances?" is not hanging unanswered in the air. It is the one question that has been answered most loudly and most often, by exactly the people whose job it is to answer it. Rabbi Dunner's argument works only if the Gedolim of today somehow do not count as Gedolim — which is precisely the move he spends three paragraphs insisting he would never make. With respect: he does not lack an answer to his central question. He lacks an answer he likes.

Third: the metzius changed in the other direction too. Rabbi Dunner catalogs what has changed since 1948 — the numbers, the demography, the politics. But a posek weighs all of the metzius, and here is what else has changed: the army's spiritual environment has grown dramatically worse, not better. The very month of his letters, the Chief of Staff told the Religious Zionist rabbinate that women's integration into combat would proceed "without compromise"; the rosh yeshiva of Eli testified that the army drafted its own religious-accommodation ordinance and then deliberately spent twenty years not implementing it; a photograph from Lebanon showed what "accommodation" looks like in the field; and a rabbi who objected was removed from the room. If changed circumstances demand fresh application of eternal principles, then the fresh application must reckon with this circumstance above all — and it is exactly the circumstance today's Gedolim are reckoning with when they say no.

IV. Rav Shteinman zt'l — The Documented Record

Rabbi Dunner leans heavily on Rav Shteinman, and pre-emptively announces that anyone who denies his account is peddling a distortion. Very well: let us confine ourselves strictly to the documented record, and let the reader judge who is distorting.

It is documented that when reports spread that Rav Shteinman supported the idea of Nachal Charedi, he denied them vehemently — himself, in writing. When Rav Don Segal inquired about the rumor in a letter, Rav Shteinman responded by directly addressing the "widespread and continued report" that he supported the idea that bochurim weak in learning or yiras Shamayim would benefit from being there — a report he wrote to reject. That denial is not Charedi spin manufactured after the fact. It is the Rav's own correspondence. It is likewise documented — in Israel's mainstream secular press, no friend of our position — that Rav Shteinman long rejected the claims of support attributed to him, that he spoke out forcefully against army service throughout his life, and that he encouraged full-time Torah study without interruption. And it is documented that the man himself, at draft age in Poland, starved his own body and then fled across a continent rather than be conscripted — mesirus nefesh against a draft that he carried in his bones for the rest of his hundred and four years.

What is true — and we say it plainly, because the truth serves us fine — is that Rav Shteinman was the moderate pole of his generation's leadership, and that he was viciously harassed by zealots for that moderation, which we condemn without reservation. But look carefully at where his moderation actually ended, because his own letter marks the boundary. The rumor he wrote to deny was precisely the claim that bochurim weak in Torah study or in yiras Shamayim would benefit from being in the army. Read that again: the position Rav Shteinman put his pen to paper to reject is the very position Rabbi Dunner now attributes to him — that the boy who is "not learning full-time, or can't," the struggling learner, the weak learner, has a place in a military framework. For Rav Shteinman, a bochur limping along in his learning belongs in the beis medrash, being strengthened — not in a uniform. Whatever quiet, case-by-case allowance credible accounts attribute to him concerned only those who had completely severed themselves from the beis medrash and were already on the street — and even that was a private bedieved for individuals, never a public doctrine, never an ideal, and never, under any circumstances, a channel for anyone still inside a yeshiva's walls. He favored tactical engagement with government committees — meeting the world as it is — precisely in order to preserve the yeshiva exemptions, against those who refused all contact. And when the draft decrees came, it was Rav Shteinman who stood at the head of the opposition, under whose authority the great atzeres of 2014 filled Yerushalayim.

Now watch what happens when we take even the maximal version of Rabbi Dunner's account — a voluntary, hermetically separate track reserved for young men who had left not only the beis medrash but observance itself, with every learner (including the struggling one) untouched and the yeshiva world's exemptions defended to the last. Even that position is no rebuke of today's Charedi world — because none of today's war is being fought over it. What becomes of the rare young man who has abandoned Yiddishkeit altogether has always been a question the gedolim weigh quietly, soul by soul, with rescue as the goal; it has never been the battlefield. The war is over something else entirely: quotas imposed on bnei Torah, criminal sanctions, funding stripped from every yeshiva in the land, and bochurim in good standing dragged to military prison — a campaign whose architecture Rav Shteinman fought with everything he had. If Rabbi Dunner's proposal were truly Rav Shteinman's position, most of this argument would evaporate overnight. It is not. And invoking Rav Shteinman against the community he led, in defense of a campaign he opposed, is precisely the distortion Rabbi Dunner accuses others of.

V. The Satmar Argument, and What Citizenship Does and Does Not Oblige

Rabbi Dunner next praises Satmar for consistency — they reject the state, so they built their world outside it — and charges the Israeli Charedi mainstream with incoherence: you live under Jewish sovereignty, vote, negotiate coalitions, receive public funds, and shelter beneath the army's protection, yet deny the state's legitimacy and its claim on your sons.

The argument is elegant. It is also built on a false picture of what our participation is, and always was.

The mainstream Charedi position was never Satmar's, and it needs no lessons in consistency. The derech of the Chazon Ish — the derech of Jewish communities in every land and every century — is that Jews live under whatever government rules the place where they live, deal with it pragmatically, petition it, and obey its legitimate laws, without thereby endorsing its ideology or conceding its every demand. Jews voted in Polish elections. Jews lobbied the Czar's ministers. Jews paid taxes to every crown in Europe and sent shtadlanim to every court — and no one in a thousand years understood any of that as a contract obligating Jewish sons to violate the Torah when the government asked. Participation in civic life under a sovereign is what exile taught us to do everywhere; it has never been a signature on a blank check. Moreover, the Torah community of Eretz Yisrael did not immigrate into the state's arrangement — the state established itself around and on top of an Old Yishuv that predates political Zionism by generations. Citizenship was conferred upon us; it was not contracted by us.

As for the ledger of benefits: Charedim pay the same taxes as every Israeli — income tax, the value-added tax on every purchase, municipal rates — and the public funds Rabbi Dunner cites are those citizens' own share routed to their own children's schools, a share that on a per-capita basis remains famously smaller than anyone else's. And hakaras hatov? It is real, and we express it constantly — we have written about it, we daven for the soldiers' safety, and we mean every word. But gratitude has never been a halachic mechanism that obligates transgression. A man may owe his physician his life and still refuse to follow him into what his Torah forbids. What fairness demands, what gratitude demands, what Torah demands — Rabbi Dunner's own list — none of these has ever demanded that a Jew surrender his sons to an environment his poskim rule destructive to their neshamos. And if we are auditing consistency, let the audit run both ways: a state that says "you benefit, therefore you owe your sons," while turning away four thousand Charedi volunteers, declining to call up its Charedi reserve veterans, shrinking its own combat forces by design, and pouring its treasure into an army of drones — that state's obligations-of-citizenship argument is applied to exactly one community and waived for every other pool of non-service in the land. That is not a principle. It is a target.

VI. Yissachar, Zevulun, and the Question of Who Sorts the Learners

Rabbi Dunner argues that no Torah society was ever all Yissachar, that Zevulun is part of Torah itself, and that a blanket exemption covering thousands who are not seriously learning is a fiction that everyone privately knows.

On the first point: full agreement — and the Charedi world is the proof, not the counterexample. Zevulun flourishes inside Charedi society: a large and growing Charedi workforce, businesses, professionals, chessed empires, and the armies of supporters who carry the yeshivos on their shoulders. But note what Zevulun is in the Torah's partnership: a voluntary supporter who chooses his role and shares the reward — not a conscript delivered by quota. The Yissachar–Zevulun model argues for exactly what exists: voluntary economic participation alongside protected learning. It does not, and cannot, argue for a draft.

On the second point — "not every young man is a serious learner" — we concede the obvious: not every bochur is the next Gadol Hador, and nobody claims otherwise. But two questions expose what this argument would actually require. First: who does the sorting? Shall a state draft board grade shteiging? Shall a government clerk determine which Jew's learning is "genuine" enough to continue? The Gedolim have always refused to hand anyone that ledger — because the mechanism built to sort the beis medrash is a mechanism built to shrink it, and because the beis medrash keeps its doors open to every Jew who sits in it, knowing that Rabbi Akiva was an am ha'aretz until forty. Second, and more simply: the current campaign is not aimed at "those not seriously learning." It strips funding from every yeshiva, sets enlistment quotas on bnei Torah as such, and arrests bochurim in good yeshiva standing. And as for the young man who has genuinely left — not the weaker learner, not the part-timer, but the boy who has abandoned observance itself — his case belongs where it has always belonged: before the gedolim, weighed soul by soul with rescue as the goal, not before a draft board. We do not presume to announce rulings in their name, in either direction. What we can say with certainty is that this question — a small number of individuals no longer shomer Torah u'mitzvos — is not what any of this campaign is about, and Rabbi Dunner, who opposes the arrests, knows it.

VII. "Victims," Take Two

Rabbi Dunner clarifies that he never meant the bochurim's emunah is conditioning — chinuch is sacred, mesorah is sacred, emunas chachamim is sacred. We welcome that warmly. But read his restatement: the young man raised so that every other option became unthinkable is sincere, perhaps courageous — yet his sincerity "does not erase the responsibility of those who created the environment."

With respect, this lands in exactly the same place as the original. Every mesorah community in history is precisely an environment-creating enterprise — that is what chinuch is. The Torah's first description of Avraham Avinu's greatness is that he would command his children and household after him to keep the way of Hashem (Bereishis 18:19); v'shinantam l'vanecha is a commandment to shape a child's world so thoroughly that Torah becomes his native air. By Rabbi Dunner's standard, every strong tradition indicts its own teachers the moment its children grow up believing what they were taught. The honest test of a conviction's authenticity was never whether it was instilled from childhood — every conviction on earth is. The test is whether the adult holds it freely, and at cost. These young men hold it at the cost of prison. That is not an environment speaking. That is a Jew.

VIII. The Frameworks Prescription — Already Written, Already Broken

On the army itself, Rabbi Dunner is at his most reasonable: the concern is serious, he grants, but a serious problem is not an eternal impossibility — demand better frameworks, stronger guarantees, enforceable standards, rabbinic oversight with real authority, consequences for violations.

Here is the difficulty. That prescription has already been filled — not by us, but by the community best positioned in the entire country to secure it. The Religious Zionist world, with its generals, its hesder yeshivos, its decades of blood invested in the army, demanded and received exactly Rabbi Dunner's list. The "enforceable standards"? That is the Joint Service Ordinance — which, the rosh yeshiva of Eli testified from twenty years on the inside, the army drafted and then systematically declined to implement. The "rabbinic oversight with real authority"? The leading rabbinic voice on the question was removed from the dialogue meeting by the Chief of Staff's office. The "consequences when commitments are violated"? The consequences fell on the objectors, while integration proceeds "without compromise." Rabbi Dunner is correct that a serious problem is not a logical eternal impossibility. But the Gedolim are not ruling on eternity; they are ruling on this army, now, with a quarter-century record laid out in front of them — and the burden of proof sits on the institution that broke every guarantee, not on the community declining to gamble its children on the next one. Indeed, this is the very sensitivity to metzius Rabbi Dunner demands. Let the army keep faith with its own religious soldiers, visibly and durably — and then let it come and talk about frameworks. Until then, "demand better guarantees" is advice the facts have already answered.

IX. To the Mother, and to the Bereaved Father

Rabbi Dunner's most piercing paragraphs ask what we say to the mother whose son has been in Gaza for months, to the reservist whose business and childhood-years are gone, to the bereaved father who asks why his son's blood bought safety for those who will not serve. He is right that "they don't understand Torah" is no answer. So here, with a whole heart, is ours.

To that mother: your son's sacrifice is real, and it is holy to us. We daven for him — for all of them — morning and night, by name when we know it. We have never for one moment held your grief cheap, and any Charedi Jew who has spoken of your family with anything but reverence has sinned against our own Torah. What we ask of you is not agreement but room: our sons also serve, on the front the mesorah has assigned them for three thousand years — and we believe, with everything we are, that their Torah is part of what brings your son home. You need not share that belief. We ask only what we extend to you: that each of us be permitted to hold our post as our deepest convictions command. And one thing more, because grief deserves truth rather than a scapegoat: the arithmetic that returned your son to Gaza for a fourth tour was not written in Bnei Brak. It was written by the planners who shrank the army by design, by the system that turned away four thousand Charedi volunteers, by the apparatus that leaves tens of thousands of reservists uncalled while your family carries tour after tour. Your exhaustion is real. Its address is not the beis medrash.

X. Yashrus — Accepted, in Both Directions

Rabbi Dunner closes with the Netziv on Sefer HaYashar — that the churban generation was full of Torah and mitzvos and fell because it lacked yashrus, judging everyone outside its camp as incapable of acting l'shem Shamayim. He could not have chosen a source closer to our own heart; we have taught the very same Netziv in these pages. So we accept the standard without reservation, and we accept that it binds us: we take Rabbi Dunner's love of Torah at his word, we impute to him no motive but the ones he states, and we have written both rounds of this exchange without a syllable of "kefirah" — an accusation he complains of but will not find here.

We ask only that the standard run in both directions. A community's position cannot be described as "political evasions" resting on "a fiction everyone privately knows is not entirely true" — a description that assumes the bad faith of hundreds of thousands of Jews and their Gedolim — by the same pen that invokes the Netziv against assuming bad faith. Yashrus is not a stick for one side of a machlokes. It is the floor both sides stand on, or neither does.

XI. Two Things at Once — Our List

Rabbi Dunner says our discourse must be able to hold two truths together, and offers his pairs. We agree with the method, and offer ours.

We can say the arrests are wrong — and that the conscription of bnei Torah is wrong, rather than quietly installing "mass exemption is wrong" as the pole everyone supposedly shares. We can say the Torah world must be protected — and that the rare soul who abandons observance altogether is a question for the gedolim to weigh with compassion, case by case, not a pretext for conscripting a generation. We can say the army must change — and that until it demonstrably has, over years and not press conferences, no Gadol will stake a generation of neshamos on its assurances. We can say that honesty is demanded of the Charedi world — and that it is demanded, in equal measure, of a state whose manpower story collapses on contact with its own enforcement record. If our discourse can hold those truths together, it is not broken. It is finally beginning.

XII. In Closing

We thank Rabbi Dunner for a serious exchange, conducted — on both sides, we hope — l'shem Shamayim. He asked his central question in the confidence that no one would answer it. It has now been answered: the principle he calls a postwar policy is as old as the Gemara; the Gedolim he says cannot be consulted have ruled on precisely today's reality, in this generation, with their own mouths; and the changed metzius he invokes includes, above all, an army that has shown its own most devoted religious soldiers what its guarantees are worth. The door here remains open to him, as it does to every Jew who loves the Torah.

May the Ribbono Shel Olam guard every soldier of Israel and every ben Torah, comfort every grieving family among His people, and speedily bring the day when the question itself dissolves — when His kingship is revealed, and every Jew stands at the post for which his neshamah was sent — bimheirah b'yameinu, amen.

Sources

The essay under discussion

  • Rabbi Pini Dunner's published response to the critics of his open letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu (July 2026), summarized and answered above

The Torah foundations of the exemption

  • Bava Basra 7b–8a — rabbanan lo tzrichi netiruta, that Torah scholars are exempt from the costs of the city's defenses because the Torah is their guard, as codified in Shulchan Aruch Yoreh De'ah 243; Rambam, Hilchos Shemittah v'Yovel 13:13 — that any person whose spirit moves him to set himself apart to stand before Hashem is sanctified as the tribe of Levi; Bereishis 18:19 and Devarim 6:7 — the mitzvah of shaping one's children and household in the way of Hashem; Sotah 21a — Torah magna umatzla

The documented record on Rav Shteinman

  • Rav Shteinman's own written response to Rav Don Segal, vehemently denying the reports that he supported "the idea of Nachal Charedi" — a letter that specifically rejected the notion that bochurim weak in Torah study or in yiras Shamayim would benefit from being there; the documentation in Israel's mainstream press that he long rejected such claims and spoke out forcefully against army service while encouraging full-time Torah study; his tactical engagement with government committees for the purpose of preserving the yeshiva exemptions; his leadership of the mass atzeres against the draft legislation (2014); reports that the Netzach Yehuda battalion became overwhelmingly Chardal, with only a small fraction actually Charedi; and his own flight from the Polish draft in 1937

The present metzius

  • Chief of Staff Zamir's "without compromise" on women's combat integration; Rabbi Ohad Tirosh's testimony that the Joint Service Ordinance was drafted and deliberately never implemented; the removal of Rabbi Yigal Levinstein from the dialogue meeting; the 4,000+ Charedi volunteers turned away after October 7 and the uncalled Charedi reservists; the pre-crisis reduction of the IDF's own combat forces and the "Super Sparta" technology program

The structural relationship to other articles in this series