Living Apart in a Shared State
Why Sovereignty Intensifies the Ultra-Orthodox–Secular Tension
For much of Jewish history, the preservation of religious life depended upon institutions that existed within societies Jews did not govern. Religious communities established schools, courts, charitable networks, and patterns of communal authority that allowed them to maintain a distinctive identity under political powers whose laws and values were frequently not their own.
These arrangements varied considerably across centuries and countries. Jewish communities sometimes possessed substantial internal autonomy; at other times they endured restrictions, discrimination, forced conversion, expulsion, or persecution. But the central political condition remained: the wider state generally belonged to someone else.
The establishment of modern Israel in 1948 transformed that relationship. Jews were no longer simply negotiating communal existence under foreign sovereignty. They were participating in the governance of a state established as the national home of the Jewish people.
For Haredi communities, this achievement presented a complicated religious and political challenge. The state was Jewish in national identity, but its political institutions did not necessarily reflect their understanding of Torah authority. They could participate in a Jewish state’s government without accepting the proposition that political sovereignty should determine the meaning of religious obligation.
The distinction created a problem that remains unresolved: how can communities committed to maintaining substantial cultural and religious separation exercise the rights of citizenship while sharing the obligations of a common state?
The State Was Jewish, but Not in Only One Sense
It is misleading to describe the dispute simply as a conflict between a secular state and religious Jews. Zionism contained secular and religious movements from its early development, while traditional Jewish attitudes toward political sovereignty varied substantially.
The State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence expressed Jewish historical and national aspirations while promising equality of social and political rights and freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.
It did not resolve every disagreement concerning the meaning of Jewish identity or the relationship between religious law and political authority.
Haredi communities themselves differed in response. Some regarded Zionism’s pursuit of Jewish sovereignty before the messianic redemption as religiously problematic. Others adopted pragmatic relationships with state institutions, and some eventually developed more affirmative attitudes toward the state. Participation in elections or government coalitions did not necessarily indicate acceptance of secular Zionist ideology.
These differences help explain a feature of Israeli politics that can otherwise appear contradictory. A community may seek distance from certain institutions of the state while using the democratic process to influence public policy, preserve religious education, and secure resources for its institutions.
Separation from the surrounding culture and participation in political power are not mutually exclusive.
How an Accommodation Became a National Question
One early arrangement illustrates how the political context has changed.
In 1948, David Ben-Gurion approved exemptions from military service for approximately 400 yeshiva students. The arrangement developed in circumstances shaped by Israel’s War of Independence and the devastation of European centers of Jewish religious learning during the Holocaust.
There were religious and cultural reasons to safeguard a small population of scholars who could contribute to rebuilding institutions of Torah study.
The arrangement did not remain small.
Over subsequent decades, Haredi society grew substantially, and the relationship between extended religious study and military obligations became an increasingly consequential public issue. A policy established under one set of demographic and historical conditions generated a very different problem as the number of those affected expanded.
This history matters because it changes how we understand the present dispute. An accommodation may be reasonable when it applies to a small number of people under exceptional circumstances, yet become difficult to justify when it creates a large and enduring difference in public obligations.
Acknowledging the origins of the arrangement does not determine what the policy should be today. It does, however, prevent us from pretending that the conflict emerged from nowhere.
The Meaning of Obligation
Modern states make substantial claims on their citizens. They collect taxes, establish educational requirements, regulate public institutions, and, in some circumstances, require military service.
Those obligations are justified through ideas of security, equality, public welfare, and participation in a shared political community.
Haredi communities understand obligation through another framework as well. Torah study and observance are not merely matters of individual preference. They are sacred responsibilities understood by many believers to contribute to the survival and spiritual welfare of the Jewish people.
The disagreement therefore concerns more than competing interests. It involves competing understandings of what constitutes a contribution to collective life.
For a soldier repeatedly called away from family and employment, unequal military obligations may appear morally indefensible. For a family whose son has devoted years to Torah study, compulsory enlistment may appear to threaten a calling that is itself regarded as essential to Jewish continuity.
Understanding both perceptions is important, but it does not make their legal and political implications equivalent. A democratic state must ultimately establish obligations capable of being justified to people who do not share the same religious premises.
The challenge is to do so without unnecessarily destroying the religious practices it is obligated to protect.
Participation and Political Responsibility
The issue becomes more complicated when Haredi political parties participate in governing coalitions.
Religious parties can legitimately represent the interests of their constituents, just as other parties represent economic, regional, ideological, or cultural constituencies. Democratic government makes room for organized political difference.
But political influence carries responsibilities beyond the preservation of one’s own institutions.
Decisions concerning public expenditure, defense, education, transportation, and civil rights affect citizens who may never enter a Haredi synagogue or school. Likewise, decisions concerning military service affect families across Israel’s religious and ethnic communities.
A system in which each group pursues protection for its own members without considering the consequences for others risks turning democratic government into an endless competition for exemptions and privileges.
The problem is not particular to religious parties. It is a recurring temptation of coalition politics. Yet the tension becomes especially acute when the requested accommodation concerns fundamental public obligations.
A community that exercises political authority over shared institutions cannot reasonably regard itself as having no responsibility for their consequences.
A Society Larger Than Two Camps
The familiar division between secular and Haredi Israelis obscures much of the actual country.
Religious Zionist Jews often maintain substantial commitments to Jewish law while regarding military service and participation in state institutions as religiously meaningful. Traditional Jews occupy a wide range of positions between more observant and more secular communities. Haredi groups differ internally, while Israel’s Arab citizens possess their own legitimate claims to civic equality, religious freedom, and public representation.
Pew Research Center’s study of Israeli religious identity documented substantial differences among Haredi, Dati, Masorti, and Hiloni Jews. Those distinctions involve differing understandings of Jewish identity, public life, and the appropriate relationship between religious law and democratic institutions.
The practical task of government is therefore not to reconcile two monolithic communities. It is to sustain a political order in which multiple communities hold different views about what makes the state Jewish and what democratic citizenship requires.
This diversity complicates the problem, but it also offers possibilities. Religious commitments need not lead every community toward identical institutional arrangements, and engagement with the state need not require abandoning religious identity.
Sovereignty Changes the Moral Question
A religious minority living under foreign government may regard separation primarily as a defense against outside power. A religious community participating in the government of its own national state faces an additional obligation to consider how its decisions affect the wider society.
That distinction does not eliminate religious liberty. Nor does it justify demanding that Haredim adopt the cultural priorities of secular Israelis.
It means that preserving religious life and maintaining shared institutions can no longer be treated as entirely separate enterprises.
Israel’s Haredi communities have demonstrated extraordinary capacities for sustaining religious education, communal solidarity, and the transmission of tradition. Those achievements deserve serious recognition. Yet the success of a community’s institutions cannot be the only measure of its relationship with the state in which it participates.
The condition of Jewish sovereignty creates obligations that did not arise in the same form under foreign rule. Those obligations must be negotiated in ways that acknowledge religious commitments while giving appropriate weight to the security, rights, and welfare of fellow citizens.
Israel’s challenge is not to eliminate the difference between sacred and civic obligations, but to establish a political relationship in which neither becomes an excuse for disregarding the other.
The question is what moral framework could sustain such a relationship when agreement about first principles remains impossible.
Jewish tradition offers a potential starting point in its understanding of covenant.
Notes and References
- State of Israel, Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948.
- Israel Democracy Institute, Development of the Haredi Exemption Law, 2024, documenting the 1948 arrangement and subsequent legislative history.
- Israel Democracy Institute, The “People’s Army”?, on the historical development of military-service exemptions.
- Pew Research Center, Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, 2016.
- Malach and Cahaner, Annual Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel 2025, 2026.