Don't exempt us from the Israeli army – include us - opinion

Picture a Tel Aviv restaurateur who opens a steakhouse on Rabbi Akiva Street in Bnei Brak. The kitchen also serves cheeseburgers, and the doors open every Shabbat afternoon. The tables stay empty. So he writes a column: “The people of Bnei Brak hate good food! Ingrates! Cut off their water!”

No one would take him seriously. Serve kosher le’mehadrin food and close the restaurant on Shabbat, and he would pack the place.

Yet a version of his argument dominated Israel’s 2026 election. Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) do not serve in the IDF, so haredim do not care whether the Jewish state lives, so cut off their housing aid, daycare, and yeshivas. The courts have already begun tying benefits to draft compliance.

The premise is wrong. A haredi Jew does not refuse to eat; he refuses to eat treif. He does not refuse to travel; he refuses to drive on Shabbat. And he does not refuse to defend his people. He refuses to do it in an army that, for 78 years, has made the surrender of his Torah the price of admission.

Let us say what the secular press rarely reports. Every day, in every synagogue, we pray for the soldiers of Israel: that God guard them, grant them success against our enemies, and bring them home whole.

We grieve at every funeral. The handful who chant Namut ve’lo nitgayes (we will die rather than enlist) are a tiny radical fringe that speaks for no one but itself, the Peleg Yerushalmi whose founder died years ago. The haredi mainstream is not asking for less of an Israeli army. We are asking for more of one, an army the God of Israel would march with openly, and we want in.

Consider the army the Torah describes. When Moses went to war against Midian, he drafted elef la-mateh, elef la-mateh, a thousand from each tribe (Bamidbar 31:4–5). The midrash reads the doubled phrase as two armies: a thousand per tribe to fight, and a thousand per tribe to pray for those fighting (Bamidbar Rabbah 22:3).

The men who prayed were not shirkers. They were counted in the same muster. And that army came home with lo nifkad mimenu ish – not one man missing (31:49), which the Gemara reads as: not one had gone missing into sin (Shabbos 64a). Face to face with the temptation that had cost 24,000 lives at Ba’al Peor, not one soldier fell, in body or in soul.

Sefer Devarim (Deuteronomy) then gives the army its constitution, and the verse that belongs over the gate of every induction base: ki Hashem Elokecha mis’halech b’kerev machanecha, God walks in the midst of your camp to save you; therefore your camp shall be holy, so that He sees nothing unseemly and turns away (23:15).

The army’s strength is the Divine presence. The presence depends on the camp’s holiness. An army careless about holiness is not merely less pious. By the Torah’s own reckoning, it is less protected.

Navi (the Prophets in Tanach) is a thousand-year experiment with one result: Achan at Ai, Gideon’s three hundred, David before Goliath, Hezekiah’s sword at the door of the beis midrash, and the Hasmoneans, whom we still thank God for in Al HaNisim as oskei Toratecha – those who toil in your Torah. It is no small thing that the IDF named its first haredi brigade after them.

The Rambam turns this into law. A war to rescue Israel from an attacking enemy is a milchemet mitzvah, and in such a war everyone goes out, even the groom from his chamber (Melachim 7:4).

When the Torah summons every Jew, it must be to a camp where every Jew can keep the Torah. And on Shabbat the Rambam does not tell the pious to stay home. Life-saving work is to be done by gedolei Yisrael v’chachmeihem, the great and learned of Israel (Shabbat 2:3), because they know exactly where the line is.

Serving without compromising on religion

What a haredi soldier objects to is not guard duty on Shabbat. It is the ceremony, the drill, and the routine convoy scheduled on Shabbat because no one in command thought it mattered.

Why does the door look closed? David Ben-Gurion designed the IDF as a kur hituch, a melting pot to forge a new and explicitly secular Israeli. Since then, promises to Netzach Yehuda have been broken, separate frameworks have shrunk, senior officers have branded rabbinic objections to mixed units “calls for refusal,” and Shabbat and kosher still depend on whoever commands the base this week.

Haredi parents are not asking whether their sons will be brave. They are asking whether their sons will come home Jews.

So here are the five conditions (and this would solve the draft issue). First, haredi command, from platoon to general staff.

Second, a council of gedolei Torah formally consulted wherever Halacha is at stake; David consulted the Sanhedrin before his generals (Berachot 3b).

Third, haredi units in every branch: intelligence, Air Force, cyber. A yeshiva man who has spent 10 years on a sugya in the Ketzos is among the finest analytical minds the country produces.

Fourth, guarantees in statute, not in a commander’s goodwill: no mixed service, mehadrin kashrut, Shabbat broken only for pikuach nefesh, protected time to daven and learn.

Fifth, recognition of the beit midrash. The thousands who prayed against Midian were counted in Moses’ army, a tradition continued by David and the Kings of Judah.

Why did haredi parties fight for exemptions instead? Because exemption was the only thing ever on the table. Offered an army that would make our sons less religious, or a yeshiva, we chose the yeshiva, and we would again. Change the offer all the way, and ask us again.

Go back to the restaurant. The owner can keep insisting his neighbors hate food, or he can make the kitchen kosher, close on Shabbat, and discover they were hungry the whole time.

Israel’s leaders face the same choice. Build the army the Torah describes, and see who comes. The haredi soldier will arrive with his tefillin and his Gemara, daven before battle like Judah Maccabee, and fight with the whole heart the Rambam describes.

No soldier will be more patriotic, because none will believe more deeply that the battle belongs to God.

We are not refusing to fight. We are demanding to, in an army that God will fight for, ki Hashem Elokecha mis’halech b’kerev machanecha.

The writer is an attorney in Jerusalem and principal of David Page Law, a full-service law firm with an emphasis on real estate, wills, trusts, and estates. He has taught law at the Hebrew University at the Faculty of Law and made aliyah after a judicial clerkship and a year in Washington DC’s largest law firm. He is also a member of R’ Daniel Belsky’s Kollel and the author of Rav Gustman, on the Rosh Yeshiva who was the last Dayan of Vilna, and the creator of the podcast The Kings of Israel.