We Were Just Following Orders

Outside Prison 10 this week, before thousands of Sanzer chassidim gathered in tefillah, the Rebbe shared something the askanim had heard from the police officers themselves: most of them were embarrassed, and openly apologized. They were ashamed of who was being put in prison and whom they were guarding. They respect lomdei Torah, they said. They are only carrying out orders. Stop on that last sentence. In those six words lies the entire anatomy of this hour — a machine grinding against the Torah world in which every hand insists the responsibility belongs to a hand above it. Let us follow the orders up the chain, and see where they lead.

I. The Scene at Prison 10

First, understand why thousands of chassidim stood outside a military prison at all. Two Sanzer chassidim are imprisoned there — young men who were arrested when they arrived at the military recruitment office to regularize their status. Read that again. They came to comply with the system's own procedures, and the system arrested them at the door. For that, an atzeres tefillah; and to the thousands assembled, the Sanzer Rebbe offered a chizuk that reframes the entire moment.

We sometimes feel small, the Rebbe said — what are our tefillos and our learning worth beside the previous generations, who served Hashem with simplicity through far harder times? But look, he said, at the war now being waged against us by the forces of tumah: it is itself the testimony. If our Torah and mitzvos made no impression in Shamayim, no one would trouble to fight them. Every good deed is still precious Above — and the fury of the campaign against us is the proof. And he named the campaign's true object without euphemism: the war is not over limud Torah. The war is over our Yiddishkeit — they wish to uproot our way of life and make us "like all the nations," chalilah. Our readers will recognize that phrase: it is the ancient ambition the navi already recorded, and already answered — what you are imagining shall not come to be (Yechezkel 20:32).

II. "Only Carrying Out Orders"

Now to the officers at the gate — and let us first say, with complete clarity, what we are not saying. We are not comparing Jewish policemen to the murderers of our grandparents, chas v'shalom, and we never will. These officers are our brothers. Their embarrassment is to their credit; their apology is the stirring of a Jewish heart; and the Rebbe himself spoke of them without a drop of venom. If anything, their shame is the most hopeful detail in this entire story.

But precisely because we are Jews, the sentence they reached for cannot pass without comment — because our people has paid more tuition than any nation on earth to learn what that sentence is worth. "We were only following orders" is the oldest hiding place conscience has ever found. Its lesson was never about who the enforcers were; it is about what the words do: they relocate responsibility to somewhere that can never be found, so that wrong is done by everyone and answered for by no one. And here is the truth the officers' own shame reveals: when the enforcers of a policy must apologize while enforcing it — when the men guarding the prison are ashamed of whom they guard — the policy itself stands condemned out of the mouths of its own instruments. An order that decent men are embarrassed to carry out is an order that should never have been given. The shame does not absolve the system. It indicts it. And responsibility does not dissolve in the chain of command; it climbs.

III. So Follow the Orders Up the Chain

Climb with it. The officers at Prison 10 are following the orders of the enforcement apparatus. The clerks of the Israel Tax Authority, this same month, began stripping Section 46 tax-deductible status from dozens of yeshivos and Torah institutions — and on whose authority? The reports say it plainly: acting on the order of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. The Attorney General, in turn, points to the High Court's ruling. The Court points to the principle of equality. Every hand in the chain is only carrying out orders; at no link does anyone stand up and own the thing being done.

And note the exquisite cruelty of the trap the orders have built. The Section 46 revocations target yeshivos whose students "have not regularized their status with the military." The two chassidim in Prison 10 were arrested when they came to regularize their status. Regularize, and be handcuffed at the counter; fail to regularize, and your yeshiva loses its standing. The orders have been arranged so that there is no door a ben Torah can walk through without a penalty waiting behind it. That is not law enforcement. That is a snare.

IV. The Orders That Somehow Never Travel in the Other Direction

But the deepest exposure came from the Kikar HaShabbat investigation published alongside all this — because it turns out the orders only ever travel in one direction.

While the Tax Authority moves against the yeshivos, it has taken no such steps against organizations that publicly declared solidarity with Al-Haq — an organization designated by Israel's own Defense Minister in 2021 as a terrorist organization over its ties to the PFLP, a designation still in force, and later sanctioned by the United States. Physicians for Human Rights answered those sanctions by proclaiming "full solidarity" with its partners; the Association for Civil Rights in Israel called the sanctions a disgraceful delegitimization campaign and declared itself in solidarity with "the Palestinian organizations, our partners." Both hold Section 46 status today. PHR published a report in the middle of the war — in English, for foreign consumption — accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. ACRI has petitioned on behalf of the detention conditions of Nukhba terrorists and called for the criminal prosecution of the head of Central Command. And the Yaffo Theater — whose productions by Einat Weizman were determined by the Finance Ministry's own legal adviser to convey messages constituting support for terrorism — not only keeps its Section 46 status but is slated to receive more than half a million shekels from the Culture Ministry in 2026, the Nakba Law notwithstanding.

Finance Committee chairman MK Chanoch Dov Milwidsky said it with the weariness of a man who knows his own system: he looks forward to the day the legal establishment examines terror-supporting organizations the way it examines and acts against the institutions of the Torah world — and he has no illusions it will come soon. There it is, in one sentence, from the chairman of the Knesset's Finance Committee. The orders are relentless in one direction and unenforceable in the other. We documented this pattern in full in "One Law for the Yeshiva, Another for Everyone Else"; this week the pattern signed its own confession.

V. And at the Top of the Chain — A Tweet

So climb to the very top. At the summit of this entire apparatus sits the Prime Minister of Israel. And what occupied him this week? A leaked video of HaGaon HaRav Dov Landau, the gadol hador, speaking privately with the Rosh Yeshiva and Mashgiach of Mir.

What did Rav Landau actually say? He directed a sharp critique — not at soldiers, whom he did not so much as mention with disrespect — at an ideology held within parts of the Religious Zionist world: the doctrine that a Jew must go even to wars waged "for the honor of the state," beyond the needs of survival, at the cost of life itself. Against that doctrine he leveled the Torah's own charge: to send Jews to die for national honor rather than survival is, in halacha's eyes, the spilling of blood. Agree or disagree — it is a rigorous Torah claim about pikuach nefesh, the kind poskim have weighed for centuries.

Netanyahu's response? An official statement announcing that he "firmly rejects the shocking remarks against IDF fighters" — remarks that were never made. Rav Landau did not attack the fighters; he attacked a doctrine that spends their lives too cheaply — a critique offered, if anything, in defense of the soldiers' blood. The Prime Minister of the government whose Attorney General orders the revocations, whose military police fill Prison 10, whose entire machinery grinds against the Torah world while terror-solidarity organizations keep their tax benefits — that Prime Minister found time this week for exactly one intervention: a tweet dueling the gadol hador over words he did not say. Degel HaTorah's answer was brief and sufficient: the words of the Gedolei Yisrael are the Kodesh HaKedoshim of Am Yisrael; those who do not live within the world of Torah would do well not to rush to interpret them, and certainly not to attack them — and beware of their burning coals. Our readers know the source: hizaher b'gachaltan shelo tikaveh — be careful with the coals of the chachamim, lest you be burned (Avos 2:10).

VI. The Rebbe's Deeper Answer — The People Are Not the Enemy

And yet the most important thing said all week was said by the Sanzer Rebbe, and it was not an indictment. It was a defense — of the Jewish people.

We must know and repeat this, the Rebbe insisted, so as not, chalilah, to speak negatively about fellow Jews: most of the people living in this land appreciate religion, the Torah, and Charedi Jews — even those who are themselves, to our sorrow, like children raised in captivity. They want their grandchildren to remain Jews. They sense that Am Yisrael has no existence without Torah. The war, he said, is waged by a small group of leaders and haters of religion who impose their agenda on the public and incite it against us, dressing up their obsession as the will of "the majority."

And who proved the Rebbe right within the hour? The police officers at the gate of Prison 10 — the "majority" in uniform, apologizing, ashamed, telling Sanzer askanim to their faces that they respect lomdei Torah. The machine's own operators do not believe in the machine. That is the Rebbe's point made flesh: the Jewish people is not our enemy, and we are forbidden to speak of it as if it were. A small cadre gives the orders. Everyone else is being dragged — some in handcuffs, and some in uniforms they are ashamed of.

As for what guards this land through two years of open miracles, the Rebbe said it with the bluntness of total conviction: who but a fool could say it is not solely the zechus of the Torah and mitzvos that protect us?

VII. The Order Does Not Absolve

So here is our closing word to every hand in the chain.

To the officers at the gate: we bear you no hatred — the opposite; your shame moved us, and we recognize in it the Jewish heart your orders could not extinguish. But carry your own history with you: "I was only following orders" has never once, in the long memory of our people, turned a wrong into a right. Refuse what you can refuse. Delay what you can delay. And know that the tzibbur outside the gate davens for you, too.

To the clerks, the Authority, the legal advisers: the paper trail that says "acting on the order of" will not be the last word on what you did with your signature. Each of us answers for his own hands.

To the order-givers — the small cadre the Rebbe named: history does not remember the followers of orders half so well as it remembers those who gave them. You are building a record. It is being kept, Above and below.

And to our readers: the Rebbe has given us our own orders, and they are the only ones in this story worth following without question. No bitterness toward the Jewish people, who are with us more than the inciters dare admit. No despair about the worth of our avodah — the very fury of the war against it is Heaven's own testimony to its power. More Torah, more tefillah, more ahavas Yisrael. The two chassidim in Prison 10 will come home. The orders will run out. The Torah will remain — as it has remained past every chain of command that ever formed against it.

May Hashem free every ben Torah from confinement, turn the hearts of the order-givers or turn their counsel to naught, guard the Jewish hearts still beating beneath every uniform, and speedily bring the day when the only commands in Yisrael are His — bimheirah b'yameinu, amen.

Sources

The atzeres and the Rebbe's words

• The atzeres tefillah of thousands of Sanzer chassidim outside Prison 10 following the imprisonment of two chassidim arrested upon arriving at the recruitment office to regularize their status; the Sanzer Rebbe's address — that the war against the Torah world testifies to the enduring worth of Torah and mitzvos, that the war is over Yiddishkeit itself and the desire to make us "like all the nations," that most of Israel's citizens appreciate the Torah and the Charedi community while a small cadre incites against us, and the officers' own expressions of shame and apology — as reported by Yeshiva World News; Yechezkel 20:32

The selective enforcement

• The Kikar HaShabbat investigation: the Tax Authority's revocation proceedings, on the order of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, against dozens of yeshivos — while Physicians for Human Rights and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel retain Section 46 status despite public solidarity with Al-Haq (designated a terrorist organization in 2021 over PFLP ties, and sanctioned by the United States), PHR's wartime "Genocide in Gaza" report, and ACRI's petitions concerning Nukhba detainees and its call to prosecute the head of Central Command; the Yaffo Theater's retained status and Culture Ministry funding despite the Finance Ministry legal adviser's determination regarding its productions; and the statement of Finance Committee chairman MK Chanoch Dov Milwidsky

The exchange at the top

• The leaked video of HaGaon HaRav Dov Landau with the Rosh Yeshiva and Mashgiach of Mir, and his critique of the doctrine of waging war "for the honor of the state" beyond the needs of survival; Prime Minister Netanyahu's statement rejecting "shocking remarks against IDF fighters" that were not made; the Degel HaTorah response — that the words of the Gedolei Yisrael are the Kodesh HaKedoshim of Am Yisrael; Avos 2:10 — hizaher b'gachaltan shelo tikaveh

The structural relationship to other articles in this series

• "One Law for the Yeshiva, Another for Everyone Else" — the full audit of the double standard this week confirmed
• "Afraid of a Pair of Tefillin" — what the orders look like inside the prison walls
• "How We Win" — the Rebbe's prescription, and the gedolim's: Torah, tefillah, and no hatred for the Klal
• "The Secular Establishment Wants to Assimilate the Charedim Through the Draft" — the aim the Rebbe named: to make us "like all the nations"