Take Off the Blindfold - A Letter to Our Brothers in the Dati Leumi Community

There is no community in Eretz Yisrael today that we admire more — and no community we are more worried about — than yours.

Your sons have given everything. They have left chuppah dates to return to their tank. They have served three hundred days in milluim, four hundred, more. Their wives have run households alone for two years, raised babies their husbands have barely held, and stood at gravesides we cannot even count anymore. Forty percent of IDF infantry officer cadets now come from your community — a community that is twelve to fourteen percent of Israeli Jewry. Your blood has soaked into the soil of Gaza, Lebanon, Yehuda, and Shomron at a rate that dwarfs every other sector of this society.

And we are writing this article — with deep respect, and with sharper words than we want to use — because the State you have served with such mesirus nefesh is, right now, in real time, telling you exactly what it thinks of you. And you are still not hearing it.

We want you to hear it. We want you to look up from the next milluim notice, look past the Yom Ha'atzmaut speeches, look beyond the chief of staff who has not found time in two and a half years of war to meet with your Rabbanim — and see what is happening to you.

Take off the blindfold, dear brothers. Before it is too late.

What Just Happened in the Druckman Home

This week, dozens of Roshei Yeshivos and Rabbanim from across your spectrum gathered at the home of Rav Chaim Druckman A"H. Liberal wing and Chardal wing. Hesder yeshivos and pre-military mechinot. They sat for over four hours and reached, in the end, complete unanimity.

The trigger was the High Court's April 13, 2026 ruling ordering the IDF to begin a pilot program of women in the Armored Corps by November — an order issued over the IDF's own previous determination that the program was impractical. The court overrode the army. The army will override your sons.

Listen to what your own Rabbanim said that night, because it is sharper than anything we are about to write:

Rav Zalman Melamed, Rosh Yeshiva of Beit El: A frum soldier cannot serve in a mixed unit. The hesder yeshivos have decided their talmidim will not serve in tank units as long as the question of mixing remains open.

Rav Shmuel Haber, Rosh Yeshiva of Karnei Shomron: From a halachic standpoint, mixed service is like eating treif. It is simply forbidden. Pashut.

Rav Yaakov Medan, Rosh Yeshiva of Har Etzion — a man who himself served in armor in the Yom Kippur War: We will not serve in field units where there is mixing. When women were introduced into all artillery battalions, we regrettably stopped serving in artillery. I hope we will not be forced to do the same in armor.

Rav Meir Nehorai: For two and a half years our sector has been on the front lines, and the IDF Chief of Staff has not found time to meet with us. That is unacceptable. He needs to understand he has a problem.

Rav Yigal Levinstein: In real time, in war, everything becomes mixed. If a tank crew is hit, you reassign whoever enters the tank — including women. What can soldiers do?

The unanimous conclusion of the conference was that a religious soldier who is makpid on halacha cannot serve in a mixed combat unit. Period.

Now ask yourself the only question that matters: Why is this happening?

You Are Being Pushed Out

The High Court did not order women into tanks because the IDF needed it. The IDF said it did not need it. The court ordered it anyway. The army has been planning gender-segregated tank crews for modesty reasons — bathrooms inside the tank, the impossibility of separation in a four-person crew. None of that mattered to the court. The ruling came down regardless.

Why?

Because the unstated logic of every recent ruling is the same: the secular establishment that has held cultural power in this state since 1948 has watched, with mounting alarm, as religious Israelis became forty percent of the officer corps. They have watched as Religious Zionist Roshei Yeshivos became players the chief of staff has to negotiate with. They have watched as the soul of the IDF began, slowly, to drift away from the Tel Aviv elite that founded it.

And so a strategy emerged. If we cannot prevent religious soldiers from rising, we will create conditions in which religious soldiers cannot serve at all. Mix the artillery — and the religious left. Mix the tanks — and the religious leave. Mix everything they can mix. The Rabbanim will rule that mixed service is forbidden. The young men will obey their Rabbanim. And the army will quietly become exactly what the founders wanted it to be: a secular institution, with religious Jews invited to die in it but not to lead it.

This is not a theory. This is what is happening in real time, in front of you, this month. Rav Chaim Wolfson said it plainly at the conference: The High Court's ruling is tearing the army apart and is effectively aimed at excluding religious soldiers from tank units.

You have been useful. You have been promoted to the rank of brigadier general while the Aluf positions remained reserved for the right people. You have been allowed to die in Khan Younis while the architects of the disengagement received Israel Prize nominations. You have been asked to serve a flag that, for thirty-five years, has progressively narrowed the range of units in which a Torah-observant Jew can fulfill basic halacha.

Now ask yourselves: how is this different, in its essential structure, from what is being done to the Chareidim?

The Charedi Issue Was Yours Too

We have to say this with love and we have to say it without flinching: when the High Court came for the Chareidim, much of your community cheered.

You watched as the court invented a "legal fiction" — Senior Attorney David Peter's exact phrase — that demanded a special law for one Jewish minority that no other minority needed. You watched as the court struck down every law the Knesset passed. You watched as the court ordered the conscription officer to issue 79,836 draft orders, knowing that only about two-and-a-half thousand bnei yeshiva would actually enlist, knowing the rest would be turned overnight into "deserters" through legal manufacture. You watched, just last week, as the same court ordered the cancellation of daycare subsidies, after-school subsidies, municipal tax discounts, public transportation discounts, and discounted housing programs — punishments aimed at three-year-olds and their working mothers.

And much of your community said: Good. They should serve like our boys serve.

We will not pretend to know what your community has carried in this war. The graves are too many, the losses too close, the weight too heavy for an outsider to fully measure. But every soldier you have lost is our soldier too. We daven for your sons every day — for those still in the tanks, in the tunnels, on the northern border, on the southern border, and for the neshamos of every kadosh who has fallen al kiddush Hashem in this war. Your pain is our pain. Your loss is our loss. We feel it, and we carry it with you.

But the principle you allowed the court to establish in order to punish the Chareidim is now being turned against you. The same court that fabricated legal authority to draft Chareidim is now fabricating legal authority to push you out of the units your sons have died in. The same doctrine of "equality" that demanded yeshiva students go to the army is now demanding women go into your son's tank.

The robe does not stay in its lane. It never does.

When the State has finished using the court to break the Chareidim, the State will turn — is turning, has turned — that same court on you. The Religious Zionist who applauded the rulings on Chareidi conscription is now staring at a ruling that will put a young woman in a tank with his son for six months at a stretch. And he is asking: How did we get here?

You got here, dear brothers, because you helped build the doctrine that put you here.

The Lesson You Refused to Learn

The lesson was sitting in front of you twenty-one years ago.

Gush Katif. Twenty-one Jewish communities. Eight thousand of your finest. Greenhouses, shuls, gardens, generations. Built with the sweat of Religious Zionists who had been told for forty years that the State was a reishit tzemichat geulateinu — that to serve the State was to serve Hashem, that the army was holy, that every act of national construction was redemptive Torah.

And then, on a Tuesday morning in August 2005, the State sent IDF soldiers, many of them your own children — the very Religious Zionist soldiers raised in this ideology — to drag your other children out of their homes, while bulldozers waited for their homes and left the Shuls intact knowing they would be destroyed.

The community survived. Barely. The theology of "the State is the beginning of redemption" took a wound it has not healed from. Some of you absorbed the lesson. Many of you did not. Most of you simply doubled down — we will join the officer corps, we will become so essential they can never do this to us again.

You became forty percent of the infantry officers. You became indispensable. You became, in the language of one religious Zionist analyst, "leadership capital" inside the security epistemic community.

And when the State decided, this April, to do to your sons in the tanks what it did to your families in Gush Katif — to break the partnership you thought you had earned with your blood — the chief of staff did not call you. For two and a half years of war, he did not call you. The court issued the order. The army shrugged. The dance moved on.

You learned in 2005 that the ideology of the State could not protect you. You learned it again at every Joint Service Ordinance amendment, at every promotion you did not get, at every secular general's smirk in a briefing room. You are learning it again right now.

How many lessons does Hashem need to give before the message is heard?

The Daily Erosion

You know what we are talking about because you live it. We are not telling you anything new — we are simply asking you to name what you already know.

You know about the milluimnik who was forced to share a guard post with a female soldier whose uniform did not meet basic tznius. You know about the religious soldier who was told his unit had to attend a formal ceremony where men and women would be seated together for a hikenes honoring a fallen friend, and that no exemption would be granted on religious grounds because all soldiers must participate in formal military ceremonies including those that have women singing.

You know about the wives of reservists who organized "Wives of Soldiers for the Sanctity of the Camp" under the Hotem organization. Their founder Efrat Lupo said it on the record in March: Men and women should not be placed together in guard posts, living quarters, armored vehicles, searches, or shared facilities. Enough with harming soldiers who observe religious traditions in the name of progress. These are the wives of your milluimnikim, your reservists. They are not Chareidi. They are your community. And they are telling you what their husbands cannot say while wearing the uniform.

You know about the soldier whose hesder regiment was filled, gradually, with mixed companies, until in his last assignment the entire regiment was billeted together for a week in one school complex and the mixing was awful, in his words. He requested a transfer. He was refused. He became a religious soldier with a halachic crisis no commander cared to solve.

You know about Shabbos. The "operational necessity" exceptions that grew, slowly, into routine kelalim. The chillul Shabbos that became normal, the heter that became minhag, the boundary that kept moving until your sons could no longer find it. You know the rabbanim in the field write back, do what you can, my son, the situation is impossible.

You know about the bigger compromises too. The "Pride Land" festival announced for the Dead Sea on Yom Ha'atzmaut. The public buses now running on Shabbos in cities where your political party — the party that was supposed to represent Torah values in the Knesset — voted with the secular center to allow it. Naftali Bennett, who built his entire career inside your community, openly campaigning in 2026 on a platform of Shabbos public transportation, treating the desecration of Shabbos kodesh as a winning center-lane policy position.

And here is the question we have to ask, with no anger but with full seriousness: Where were you when the Chareidim were protesting against chillul Shabbos for the last seventy-five years?

When the streets of Yerushalayim filled with bnei Torah every Friday night, demanding that the holy city not be turned into Tel Aviv on Shabbos — where were you? When the Chareidi MKs fought, conference after conference, year after year, for basic kavod Shabbos in a Jewish state — where were you? When the gedolim warned for decades that a State that did not protect Shabbos was a State that would, eventually, come for everything else — where were you?

You were, many of you, on the other side of those debates. You were telling the Chareidim they were galus-minded, that they did not understand the mamlachti spirit, that the State's secular character was a temporary phase to be redeemed by your love rather than challenged by their protest. And while you were defending the State's right to chillul Shabbos in the name of national unity, the State was quietly building the legal and cultural machinery that is now being used to shove your sons out of the tanks and your daughters out of basic tznius.

And there is a deeper question, one that cuts even closer to the bone. What were you doing all these years when the secular court system was being built into the unaccountable monarchy it has become?

The High Court of Israel is not a Jewish institution. It never was. It is a body of unelected justices applying a body of law that the founders of this State explicitly designed to be not Torah. Every ruling it has ever issued rests on a single foundational premise: that man-made law, written by secular jurists in the name of secular values, outranks the Torah of Hashem. This is not a side issue. This is the central chillul Hashem of the modern State of Israel — the public, institutional declaration that the Torah Hakedosha is one legal tradition among many, and not even the highest one. Lo b'shamayim hi, the secularists love to quote — while pretending they have the authority to write what is in shamayim.

Every Jew is obligated, m'd'oraisa, to live by the laws that Hashem gave at Sinai. Lo tasur min hadavar asher yagidu lecha yamin u'smol. The chain of authority runs through the Sanhedrin, through the gedolei haposkim, through the mesorah — not through the Hebrew University law faculty. And yet for decades, your community lent its prestige, its authority, its sons in kippot serugot, to a court system that systematically substituted its own values for halachas haTorah. You filed petitions in it. You argued cases before it. You celebrated its rulings when those rulings happened to align with positions your community held. You treated its justices with the reverence due to talmidei chachamim and its decisions with the weight due to psak halacha.

You supported this Godless institution. You defended its legitimacy. You taught your children that the rule of secular law was a Jewish value, that judicial independence was sacred, that to question the court was to undermine democracy and therefore — somehow — to undermine the Medina you treated as kodesh.

And now the same court — the same unelected justices, applying the same secular doctrines you helped legitimize — has turned. It is fabricating drafts orders for Chareidim. It is canceling daycare for three-year-olds whose fathers learn Torah. It is ordering women into your sons' tanks over the army's own objection. It is doing all of this with the same authority you spent seventy years insisting it possessed.

The court did not betray you. The court is doing exactly what an institution built on rejection of Torah must, eventually, always do: rule against Torah. The only surprise is that it took this long.

The Israeli flag now waves over institutions whose values are not Torah values, and whose direction is not the direction of od mehbeni-vnesi-noaa-Yisrael b'tarbusa. You know this. You have always known this. The only question is when you will stop pretending otherwise.

You know all of this. And you have made peace with all of it because the State, as an idea, demanded the peace.

The Idea Itself Was the Problem

Here is the part we have to say plainly, with the same warmth and the same sharpness:

Zionism is not Torah. It was never Torah. It was a nineteenth-century European ideological movement, born from the same secular nationalist soil as German Romanticism and Italian unification, dressed up in Hebrew vocabulary and biblical place-names. The founders of secular Zionism — Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky — explicitly rejected Torah as the basis for the Jewish people's continuity. They imagined a "new Jew" who would be liberated from galus and from Torah, in the same breath. The State they built was, in its DNA, a state designed not to be a halachic state.

The Torah is perfect. Toras Hashem temima. Nothing was missing. Nothing needed to be added by Theodor Herzl. Nothing needed to be added by David Ben-Gurion. Nothing needed to be supplemented by a flag designed by people who did not keep Shabbos and an anthem that promises a "free people in our land" without once mentioning Hashem.

The love of Eretz Yisrael — that is Torah. The Torah is full of it. Ki tavo el ha'aretz. Every yom tov, every halacha of agriculture, every line of Tanach throbs with it. Three times a day for two thousand years, every Jew has davened for the return to Tzion. The land is ours. The land was ours before there was a Zionist Congress and the land will be ours after the last Zionist conference is forgotten.

But love of the State — love of the secular ideology that built the state — that was a graft. That was an addition. That was a chiddush that was never asked for and never authorized and never needed.

You confused the two. We say this with love: you confused the two for a hundred years, and the cost has been enormous. You confused the land, which is holy, with the ideology, which is not. You confused the people, who are kedoshim, with the State, which is a secular bureaucracy that has, at every critical juncture, chosen its secular character over the spiritual interests of the very Jews who built it.

And so you served. You served and you served and you served. You served past Gush Katif. You served past every Joint Service Ordinance. You served past every promotion blocked, every Rabbi insulted, every halacha quietly trampled. You served because the ideology demanded that you serve, because to do otherwise would have been to admit that the ideology itself was wrong.

It is wrong. It has always been wrong. The Chareidim, whom you have spent decades looking down on as galus-minded refusniks, were right about this from the beginning.

What This Is Not

We are not telling you to stop loving the land. The land is yours. The land is ours. The land is the Avos' and Imahos'. We are not telling you to leave Eretz Yisrael — chas v'shalom — or to take down the chinuch institutions you have built or to stop davening with the kavanah of someone who knows he is standing in Yerushalayim.

We are not telling you to abandon achdus with Klal Yisrael. We are not telling you to look down on the secular Jew or the chiloni who is, in the language of every honest Torah source, a tinok shenishba — a captured child, raised without truth, whom we love and want back.

We are not telling you that mesirus nefesh for Am Yisrael is wrong. It is the holiest thing a Jew can do.

We are telling you something narrower and harder: Zionism, as an ideology, must be left behind. The State, as an object of religious devotion, must be left behind. The flag, as a symbol of redemption, must be left behind.

The Torah is enough and it does not lack.

What Coming Home Looks Like

Look at the Chareidim. We do not say this to score a point — we say it because the model is right in front of you.

The Chareidi community loves the land. They live in it, they raise children in it, they daven in it, they would not leave it for any inducement. They give their avodas Hashem — Torah, tefilla, chesed, building Jewish homes in numbers no other community in the world is producing — and they trust that this is, in fact, a contribution to Am Yisrael of immeasurable value.

And the chesed that flows out of this community is one of the wonders of the modern Jewish world. The gemachim — for wedding gowns, for medical equipment, for baby clothes, for interest-free loans, for every conceivable human need — number in the thousands, run quietly out of apartments in Bnei Brak and Beitar and Kiryat Sefer, serving anyone who walks in the door regardless of their level of observance. Yad Sarah lends medical equipment to every Israeli citizen, free of charge. Hatzalah volunteers run toward the wounded — Jew, Arab, religious, secular, soldier, civilian — and have saved countless lives since October 7th, often arriving on the scene before any state ambulance. Zaka recovers the bodies of the fallen with a kedusha and a tenderness no government agency can match; they have been on every battlefield, in every bombing site, sifting through every horror, asking nothing in return. Ezer Mizion. Chai Lifeline. Lev Echad. Kupat Ha'ir. The list has no end.

This community feeds soldiers. It cooks Shabbos meals for milluimnikim's wives. It collects clothing and toys for evacuee families from the north and the south. It opens its homes, its mosdos, its pocketbooks, to any Jew in need — and not because the State asks it to, but because the Torah demands it. This is what avodas Hashem looks like when it is taken seriously. It does not need a flag. It does not need a slogan. It needs only the conviction that kol Yisrael areivim zeh la'zeh and the willingness to act on it, every day, without expectation of reward.

They do not pledge allegiance to the State as an ideology. They do not tear kriah over flags. They do not allow the secular establishment to define their dignity. They do not give the High Court permission to ride into their world and remake it. When the State punishes them — and the State is punishing them now, in ways that should make every honest Jew's blood boil — they do not capitulate, and they do not break.

They are not perfect. No community is. But on the foundational question — is the State of Israel a religious authority, or is it a flawed instrument that we engage with only as far as Torah permits — they have always answered correctly.

You can answer correctly too. You can keep every yeshiva you have built, every settlement you live in, every Torah institution that flowers in this Land. You can keep the ahavas haaretz that is the inheritance of your Rabbeim, from Rav Kook to Rav Druckman to Rav Tau. You can even, where the halacha allows it and the gedolim of your community guide it, keep serving in roles that do not compromise basic Yiddishkeit.

What you have to give up is the theology that made the State sacred. You have to give up the idea that ideological Zionism is part of Torah. You have to give up the loyalty to a flag that has, in front of your eyes, become the standard of an institution that is no longer willing to make space for your sons' Yiddishkeit.

You have to make peace with the truth that only one mesorah is real. There is one Torah. There is one chain of transmission. There is one emes. It does not run through Herzl and it does not run through Ben-Gurion and it does not run through any chief of staff who cannot find time to meet with your Rabbanim while your sons die for his army.

It runs through Sinai. It runs through the shalsheles hakabbala. It runs through the same gedolei Torah the Chareidi world has been quietly listening to for two centuries while you were busy being told the State knew better.

It does not.

Before It Is Too Late

The High Court is not finished with your community. They are barely starting. The same logic that ordered women into tanks will, before the decade is out, order chillul Shabbos in operational contexts that today are still off-limits. It will order your hesder framework dismantled because it "violates equality." It will order your pre-military mechinot defunded because their content is insufficiently pluralistic. It will, eventually, come for your yeshivos the way it has now come for ours, because the doctrine the court has built admits no resting point until every Jewish institution that does not bow to the secular liberal vision of the State has been broken.

You have a choice. You can keep absorbing each blow, keep telling yourselves that next time will be different, keep sending your sons into a system that is using them and discarding them, keep writing letters to a chief of staff who will not return your calls — until one day you wake up and the army has no place for an observant Jew at all and the question becomes academic.

Or you can do what every Jewish community in Jewish history has done when the surrounding power turned hostile: withdraw the spiritual loyalty. Keep the love. Keep the land. Keep the Torah. Keep the people. But take back the piece of your soul you have been giving to a State that does not deserve it and never did.

The geulah is not coming through the State of Israel's Supreme Court. It is not coming through the IDF's manpower directorate. It is not coming through any government office or any flag-raising ceremony. It is coming — it has always been coming, it is coming right now — through Torah, through teshuva, through ahavas chessed, through the achdus of a people that finally remembers Whose it is.

Our loyalty cannot be shared. Our faith cannot be divided. A Jew who gives half of his heart to Hashem and half to a secular state has not given Hashem the kol levavcha the Torah asks for. Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad — One Hashem. One Torah. One direction in which to turn. Everything else is, at best, an instrument.

Your community has been one of the most loving, devoted, sacrificial pieces of Am Yisrael in this generation. We say this with the deepest respect. Yishar kochachem. The reservists. The wives. The mothers at the gravesides. We see you. The Ribbono Shel Olam sees you.

But we are begging you, before another generation of your sons is consumed by this contradiction:

Take off the blindfold.

Leave the ideology behind.

Come home all the way.

The Torah is waiting. The gedolim are waiting. Your brothers are waiting.

There is one mesorah. There is one emes. There is no second one to keep at the same time.

Hashem yishmor tzeischa u'voecha mei'atah v'ad olam.

Sources

The April 13, 2026 ruling and the Druckman conference

• Times of Israel, "High Court orders IDF to allow women in Armored Corps tanks by November 2026" (April 13, 2026)
• Israel National News, "Religious Zionist Rabbis: 'A religious soldier cannot serve in a mixed unit'" (April 2026)
• Yeshiva World News, "Dati Leumi Rabbanim At Emergency Conference: 'Our Talmidim Will Not Serve In Mixed-Gender Tank Units'"
• Ynetnews, "Religious Zionist rabbis warn female tank fighters could push recruits out of armor"

February 2026 letter to Netanyahu

• Times of Israel, "Top religious Zionist rabbis urge Netanyahu to keep women out of IDF tanks" (February 18, 2026), including signatories Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, Rabbi Aryeh Stern, and Rabbi Dov Lior

Hotem and "Wives of Soldiers for Sanctity of the Camp"

• Israel National News, "Yeshiva students protest serving alongside female paramedic" (March 2026), citing Hotem's "Wives of Soldiers for the Sanctity of the Camp" statement
• Israel National News, "Hesder combat soldiers assigned to units with female soldiers" (September 2025), citing founder Efrat Lupo
• VINnews, "'Wives Of Soldiers For Sanctity Of The Camp' Support Rabbi Yosef's Call Not To Serve In IDF" (December 2024)

Religious Zionist participation in IDF and officer corps

• The Guardian / Forward, "A nationalist religious group has swelled the ranks of Israel's military" (October 2024) — religious males rose from 2.5% of infantry officer cadets in 1990 to ~35% in 2018, ~40% by recent estimates
• Tablet Magazine, "Israel's New Theology of Power" (February 2026) on the post-Disengagement strategic shift in Religious Zionist military participation
• Times of Israel, "Lacking Haredi manpower, IDF turns to womanpower: 1 in 5 fighters are now female" (May 2025)

Joint Service Ordinance history

• Lawfare, "Female Service in the IDF: The Challenge of an 'Integrated' Army" (January 2023)
• Miami International and Comparative Law Review, "Blood, Sweat, and Breakthroughs: Women in the IDF" (February 2025)

Background: Chareidi conscription rulings cited

• Times of Israel, "High Court orders government to impose financial sanctions on Haredi draft evaders" (April 26, 2026) — 79,836 draft orders, 2,178 enlistments, five welfare benefits canceled
• David Peter legal analysis, Yeshiva World News (April 2026)

Gush Katif / Disengagement

• Israel Democracy Institute, "Religious Zionism" archive on Disengagement aftermath

Torah sources

• Toras Hashem temima (Tehillim 19:8)
• Tinok shenishba (Talmudic concept, Shabbos 68b)