To Our Dati Leumi Brothers, With Love: If the Torah Truly Matters, This Is the Moment to Stand With Us

Last updated 11 Jun 2026 • 15 min read

To our brothers in the Dati Leumi — the Religious Zionist — world: we write this not as opponents but as family, and not in triumph but in pain.

For decades, a real and painful disagreement has run between our communities over the army and the State. We have made our case in this series with honesty, and we have tried, throughout, to direct our sharpness at ideas and our love at people. Today we write because something is happening to you that breaks our hearts — and that, we believe, proves the very thing we have been saying for seventy years. We do not say this to wound you. We say it because we love you, because your sons are our sons, and because we believe the moment has come to say plainly what brotherhood requires us to say.

I. First, the Honor That Is Due to You

Let nothing in this article be misread as a word against your devotion. We say this clearly and without reservation, because it is true and because you have earned it a thousand times over.

You have given the State of Israel your finest. While debates raged, your sons filled the combat units — the infantry, the armor, the elite formations — far beyond your share of the population. In brigades like Golani, religious soldiers make up some thirty percent of the ranks, twice their proportion in the country. Your yeshivos send virtually all their talmidim into combat, and your graduates rise to become officers, commanders, the backbone of the fighting army. You have bled for Klal Yisrael. You have buried your children. Since Simchas Torah, you have stood in the gap and absorbed losses that have torn your communities apart, and you have done it with emunah and with a song on your lips.

No one — least of all us — questions your courage, your mesirus nefesh, or the sincerity of your love for Am Yisrael and Eretz Yisrael. Whatever we are about to say, understand that it rests on a foundation of the deepest respect. The argument we make is not that you have given too little. It is that you have given everything — and look at how it is being repaid.

II. What Is Being Done to Your Soldiers Right Now

Consider, with clear eyes, what the army you have served so faithfully is now doing to the soldiers most devoted to it.

At a Golani ceremony marking two years of war, the organizers brought female singers to perform before the assembled troops — knowing that a third of those soldiers are shomrei Torah u'mitzvos for whom watching a woman sing before an audience is a halachic prohibition. Dozens of religious soldiers had to rise and walk out in protest of their own army's event. As one of your own leading rabbanim observed, no one would dream of bringing female singers before the soldiers of the Charedi Chashmonaim Brigade — they would all simply leave — but the national-religious soldier, who has spent years shrinking himself to live as a brother within a secular framework, is treated as someone who can be made to swallow it.

It does not stop at ceremonies. Dozens of hesder soldiers have found themselves placed into mixed-gender battalions, with female combat soldiers joining their companies one after another; when they asked — repeatedly, from the start — to be transferred, they were refused, because they had been slotted into a "gender company" designed to promote integration. One soldier described an entire battalion housed together in a single school complex for nearly a week, the spiritual obstacles "out of control," until he reached a breaking point and could not continue. Soldiers of Battalion 77 of the Armored Corps were promised that a battalion vacation would be gender-separated and respectful of their way of life — and discovered, in their words, that "these were false promises," held near a pool with no separate swimming hours and no regard for the standards they had been guaranteed. "This was a severe blow," they wrote, "that severely damaged our faith, our values, and our way of life… we left with a feeling of hurt and betrayal."

And now the deepest blow of all: following a High Court ruling ordering the army to open equal combat opportunity to women, the IDF has moved to push a pilot integrating women into the tank crews — the Armored Corps that has been a mainstay of hesder service for decades. In response, first twelve and then thirteen more of your own roshei yeshiva — twenty-five in a single week — were forced to declare that they can no longer send their talmidim to the Armored Corps, because, after careful deliberation, they concluded that service under such conditions is forbidden by halacha. They had already been forced to do the same with the Artillery Corps, which now suffers a shortage of reservists as a result. These are not fringe voices. These are the mainstream roshei yeshiva of the Religious Zionist world — the very rabbanim who built the hesder ideal of combining Torah and combat service — and they are being driven, against everything they have stood for, to pull their boys out.

III. This Was Never About Your Courage — It Is About a Structural Truth

Here is the heart of what we want to say to you, and we say it as a hard-won lesson rather than a rebuke.

The crisis you are living through has nothing to do with any failure of yours. It is not that your soldiers were not brave enough, not committed enough, not willing enough to sacrifice. They were and are all of those things. The crisis flows from a structural truth that we encountered long ago and that you are now encountering in real time: you cannot keep the Torah pure inside an institution that does not share its values, because in any collision between the two, the institution will win.

This is not cynicism; it is simply how institutions work. An army is built to serve its own priorities — operational, political, ideological — and when those priorities collide with the demands of halacha, the army will, in the end, follow its own priorities and expect the religious soldier to bend. The kedushah of the camp is not the army's value; it is yours. And a value that belongs to you but not to the institution that controls the conditions of your service is a value that the institution can erode at will — slowly, promise by broken promise, pilot by pilot, until one day you look up and find female singers at your ceremony, women in your battalion, and a directive to put them in your tank.

The Torah itself sets the standard the army cannot meet. "Ki Hashem Elokecha mis'halech b'kerev machanecha… v'haya machanecha kadosh" — "For Hashem your God walks in the midst of your camp… therefore your camp shall be holy" (Devarim 23:15). The Torah commands that a Jewish military camp be a place of kedushah, precisely because the Divine Presence accompanies it and is the true source of its victory. Your own roshei yeshiva said exactly this: that the kedushah of the camp is the foundation of the army's spirit and of its success against the enemy. But an institution that does not believe this — that regards the kedushah of the camp as an obstacle to "gender equality" rather than as the source of Heavenly help — cannot be entrusted to preserve it. You are being asked to maintain a holiness the institution does not value, in conditions the institution controls. That is a battle you cannot win from within, and the last two years have proven it.

IV. This Is the Lesson We Learned Long Ago

We say this with no pleasure, only with the ache of having watched it coming: what you are discovering now is precisely what the Charedi gedolim concluded generations ago.

When the Charedi world declined to send its sons into the army's frameworks — even the "religious" ones — it was not, as the caricature claims, out of cowardice or ingratitude or a refusal to share the burden. It was out of exactly the recognition you are now reaching: that a framework built and controlled by those who do not share Torah values cannot be trusted to protect those values, and that the neshamah of a young man is too precious to entrust to an institution that will, sooner or later, place its own priorities above his. We have written elsewhere in this series about why the Charedi world frowns on even the "Charedi" IDF programs, and about the documented record of the army's broken promises to Charedi soldiers — a founder of the Charedi Nachal unit declaring publicly, "It's worse than you can possibly imagine. They do not keep their word." We did not want to be proven right. We take no satisfaction in watching the same betrayal now visited upon you.

The difference between us was never about love of Eretz Yisrael, or willingness to sacrifice, or devotion to Klal Yisrael. The difference was a single question: can you maintain your Yiddishkeit, uncompromised, inside that institution? You believed, in good faith and with the noblest intentions, that you could — that you could go in, serve with valor, and hold your standards intact, and perhaps even sanctify the army from within. We believed you could not — not because of any flaw in you, but because of the nature of the institution. And now the institution itself is answering the question, in the clearest terms imaginable, against you.

V. The Argument That Should Stop Every Charedi Heart — and Yours

And here is the point that should make every Jew, Charedi and Dati Leumi alike, stop and think.

You are the soldiers the army most wants. You are its most willing, most dedicated, most accomplished religious servants — the ones who fill its combat units, produce its officers, and ask for so little in return. The IDF itself acknowledges how much it depends on you; a senior officer, contemplating the loss of your tank soldiers, lamented that the High Court had placed the army in "an impossible position," weighing "a few female soldiers each year against giving up dozens of soldiers in each draft." You are, by the army's own admission, enormously valuable to it. And even you — even its most devoted religious heroes — it will not accommodate. Even for you, it breaks its promises. Even for you, it changes the rules. Even for you, it will sacrifice your kedushah on the altar of an ideology you mostly do not share, rather than give up a pilot program for a handful of soldiers.

Now ask the question that follows inescapably from this: if this is how they treat you — their beloved, their bravest, their most willing — how on earth do they expect us to believe they will treat the Charedim any better?

This is the vindication of the Charedi position, written in the army's own conduct. The State demands that the Charedi world send its sons into the same institution, with the same promises of religious accommodation — "Charedi tracks," protected frameworks, guarantees of kedushah. But we have just watched those exact promises shattered against the soldiers most committed to the army. If the army will not keep faith with the hesder world that has given it everything, what is the value of any promise it makes to us? None. The promises are worth nothing, because the institution that makes them does not share the value it is promising to protect, and will discard it the moment its own priorities require. Your betrayal is our proof. We are not refusing out of stubbornness; we are refusing because we have now seen, in your experience, exactly what awaits anyone who trusts these assurances. They cannot be trusted — not because they are uniquely wicked, but because an institution will always serve its own values, and its values are not ours.

VI. They Will Promise, and They Will Not Keep It

Notice the pattern, because it is the same every time, and it is the pattern that makes trust impossible.

The army issues a reassurance: "There is no scenario in which men and women will serve together within the same framework." It sounds firm. But read closely, and the same reports note that men and women would still likely serve together at the battalion and brigade levels — that the pilot has not even reached the chief of staff's desk, that its future is "unclear." The reassurance is precisely calibrated to quiet the protest without actually guaranteeing anything — exactly as your soldiers were "promised" separate swimming hours that never materialized, exactly as they were "promised" gender-separated frameworks and then slotted into "gender companies" with no transfer. The promise is a tactic, not a commitment. It buys time, defuses the immediate objection, and is quietly abandoned when the pressure passes and the institution's real priorities reassert themselves.

This is why the rules can change under your feet at any moment. An accommodation that depends on the goodwill of an institution that does not value it is not a right; it is a temporary indulgence, revocable the instant it becomes inconvenient. You secured the Artillery Corps as a place your sons could serve — and then the rules changed, and you had to pull them out. You served in the Armored Corps for decades — and now the rules are changing, and you must pull them out. What you thought were stable arrangements were only pauses between erosions. And there is no reason — none — to believe the next promise will hold any better than the last. A body governed by a High Court and a "gender affairs" apparatus committed to integration as a matter of ideology will keep moving in that direction, and every guarantee to the contrary is written in disappearing ink.

VII. Come Stand With Us

So we come, at last, to what we most want to say — and we say it with open arms.

Come stand with us. Not, we hasten to say, by abandoning your love of Eretz Yisrael, which is precious; not by ceasing to care for the security of Klal Yisrael, which we share; not by surrendering one ounce of the courage and devotion that have always defined you. To "join the Charedim" does not mean to change your clothing or your community or your fierce love for this Land. It means something simpler and deeper: to put the Torah first — before integration, before acceptance, before the longing to be full partners in an institution that has shown it will not honor your faith — and to refuse, finally, to entrust your sons' neshamos to a framework that cannot be trusted to guard them.

It means recognizing what your own roshei yeshiva are now recognizing as they pull their talmidim from the tanks: that there are lines kedushah does not permit you to cross, and that when an institution forces you to those lines, fidelity to Torah requires you to step back rather than step over. It means building, as we have built, frameworks of your own where Torah is the master and not the servant — where the kedushah of your sons is not subject to the next ruling of a secular court or the next initiative of a gender-integration unit, but is held safe in your own hands, under the authority of Torah alone.

We know how hard this is. We know that for generations you have defined yourselves by the dream of serving as full partners, of sanctifying the State and its army from within, of proving that one can be both fully religious and fully part of the national project. We honor the nobility of that dream. But the events of these very weeks are the dream's own answer: the partnership you sought is not, in the end, being offered to you on terms that let you keep your Torah whole. You have given them everything, and they will not give you back the one thing you asked — to serve without being forced to violate your faith.

So we ask you, as brothers who love you: if the Torah truly matters most — more than acceptance, more than the dream, more than the longing to belong — then let the Torah decide this. Stand with us not in defeat but in clarity. Put the kedushah of your sons above the approval of an institution that has proven it will not protect it. We are not your rivals in this. We are your brothers, and we have kept a place for you at the table all along. The disagreement that divided us is being dissolved, painfully, by the conduct of the very institution that stood between us — and on the far side of that pain is the possibility, at last, of standing together.

VIII. The Closing Word — In Love

We did not write this to say "we told you so." We wrote it because we cannot watch what is being done to you in silence, and because we believe the Torah is calling you, through these very events, to a conclusion we reached long ago and have ached to share with you.

You are not less than us; in courage and sacrifice you have often put us to shame, and we say so without hesitation. This was never a contest of who loves Klal Yisrael more. It was a disagreement about whether the Torah could be kept whole inside an institution that does not cherish it — and that disagreement is now being settled, not by our arguments, but by the army's own broken promises and shifting rules, written across the experience of your most devoted sons.

If this is how they treat their heroes, they cannot be trusted with ours — or with yours. The promises will not be kept. The rules will keep changing. The kedushah of the camp will keep being traded away, because it was never the institution's value to begin with. The only ground that will not be pulled out from under your feet is the ground of the Torah itself — and on that ground, there is room for all of us, together.

Come home to that ground. Stand with us. Put the Torah first. And may the day come soon when this entire painful exile of compromise gives way to the true camp of Israel — holy, whole, and united — with the Shechinah dwelling openly in our midst, and Klal Yisrael serving Hashem together, with no one forced to choose between his people and his God.

Sources

The honor due to the Dati Leumi world

The disproportionate Religious Zionist presence in IDF combat units (e.g., approximately 30% of Golani, twice their share of the population, per Rabbi Eli Sadan) and in the officer corps; the hesder model sending virtually all talmidim into combat service; the devastating losses borne by the Religious Zionist community since Simchas Torah 5784

What is being done now — the documented current crisis (2025–2026)

The Golani ceremony featuring female singers before troops a third of whom are shomrei Torah u'mitzvos, and the religious soldiers who walked out in protest (Rabbi Eli Sadan's public letter, including the halachic point that watching a woman sing before an audience is forbidden according to all opinions, and the observation that female singers would never be brought before the Charedi Chashmonaim Brigade)
Dozens of hesder soldiers placed in mixed-gender battalions and refused transfer because assigned to "gender companies"; the soldier who reached a breaking point after a battalion housed together for a week (Arutz Sheva)
Battalion 77 (Armored Corps) soldiers promised a gender-separated, religiously respectful vacation and discovering "false promises" — a pool with no separate hours — and writing of a "severe blow… that severely damaged our faith, our values, and our way of life" and a "feeling of hurt and betrayal" (Arutz Sheva)
The High Court ruling (April 2026) requiring the IDF to advance equal combat opportunity for women, including a pilot integrating women into the Armored Corps by the November 2026 draft; and the resulting declarations by 25 Hesder roshei yeshiva (12, then 13 more in a single week) forbidding their talmidim from serving in the Armored Corps, having previously done the same for the Artillery Corps (now suffering a reservist shortage) — reported across Yeshiva World, Times of Israel, Israel National News, Ynet, and Jerusalem Post
The IDF's response ("the IDF needs every male and female combat soldier"; "no scenario in which men and women will serve together within the same framework") alongside reporting that men and women would still likely serve together at battalion and brigade levels, and that the pilot had not yet reached the chief of staff's desk
The Yahalam unit (the Chief of Staff's adviser on gender affairs, tasked with promoting gender integration); the senior IDF officer's lament that the High Court placed the army in "an impossible position," weighing "a few female soldiers each year against giving up dozens of soldiers in each draft"

The Torah of the holy camp

Devarim 23:15 — "Ki Hashem Elokecha mis'halech b'kerev machanecha… v'haya machanecha kadosh" — "For Hashem your God walks in the midst of your camp… therefore your camp shall be holy" — the Torah's requirement of kedushas hamachaneh, the kedushah of the military camp, as the condition of the Divine Presence and the true source of victory; invoked by the Hesder roshei yeshiva themselves as the foundation of the army's spirit
Talmud Bavli, Berachos 24a — "kol b'isha erva" — the halachic basis of the prohibition concerning a woman's singing voice; the ruling (as Rabbi Sadan notes) that watching a woman sing before an audience is forbidden according to all recognized poskim

The structural argument and the vindication

The structural principle that Torah values cannot be preserved within an institution that does not share them, because the institution will follow its own priorities in any collision — the lesson underlying the long-standing Charedi position
The documented record of the army's broken promises to Charedi soldiers (developed in "Why Does the Charedi World Frown on 'Charedi' IDF Programs?"), including the founder of the Charedi Nachal unit, Rabbi Yoel Schwartz: "It's worse than you can possibly imagine. They do not keep their word"

The structural relationship to other articles in this series

"Why Does the Charedi World Frown on 'Charedi' IDF Programs?" — the parallel record of broken promises to Charedi soldiers and the pikuach nefesh and kedushah concerns
"What Is the Charedi View on Full-Time Torah Learning?" and "Why Is Torah Learning the Top Priority?" — the alternative the Charedi world offers: Torah as the first priority and the truest protection
"Sinas Chinam and Ahavas Yisrael" and "How Does the Charedi World View Secular Jewish Leaders?" — the framework of love for every Jew, including the warm address to the Religious Zionist community throughout this series