My son is in Lebanon; yours is in yeshiva

I know how to hold two things at once. I am an Israeli. I am a journalist. I am a mother with a son in uniform. Holding contradictions is not a skill I learned. It is a condition of my existence.

But there are days when the contradictions become too heavy to carry gracefully. When a soldier dies in southern Lebanon — when a boy of 19 or 22 or 25 is brought home in a body bag, or comes home without a hand, or comes home and does not come home at all, not really, not the person who left — on those days, the two things I am supposed to hold at once do not fit in my hands anymore. One of them wants to swallow the other.

So let me try to do something honest. Let me try to say both things out loud, at the same time, and see if they can coexist.

The first thing:

I believe in the Haredi world. I live among them. I know their families, their shuls, their stores, their children. I know the beauty of a life organized entirely around Torah, around the rhythm of the Jewish calendar, around the conviction that learning is not a retreat from the world but the most serious possible engagement with it. I know that the yeshiva world produced something extraordinary, a transmission of Torah knowledge across centuries of catastrophe that is, by any measure, a miracle of Jewish civilization.

I know that the men who learn in those yeshivot are not cowards. Cowardice is easy to identify, and what I see in Bnei Brak is not cowardice. It is a worldview. A theology. A genuine belief that the learning of Torah protects the Jewish people in ways that are invisible to those of us who do not share the framework.

I do not want to hate them. I do not hate them. And I am aware, acutely, painfully aware, that rage, if I let it run without a leash, becomes indistinguishable from hate. That the distance between “you should be doing more” and “you are the enemy” is shorter than we think, and that crossing it would be a sin I do not want on my conscience.

The second thing:

My son is in uniform.

And when I read the notification, the name, the age, the unit, the circumstances, I do not read it as a journalist first. I read it as a mother first. My hands go cold before my brain catches up. I check, and then I breathe, and then I feel the relief, and then I feel the guilt of the relief, because the relief means it is someone else’s son, and someone else is not breathing, not today, maybe not ever again in the same way.

And I think: who is sharing this? Who is distributing this weight?

Not equally. That is the answer. Not equally.

The boys dying in southern Lebanon come from the Dati Leumi communities, from the kibbutzim, from the development towns, from the Druze villages, from the Bedouin communities. They come from every corner of Israeli society, except one. And that corner is large. And that corner is growing. And that corner has a political arrangement that protects it from the knock on the door that the rest of us live with.

That is not a theological claim. That is arithmetic.

So how do you hold it?

I have been asking myself that question for two years. And I want to be honest: I do not always hold it well. There are moments when the arithmetic feels like an accusation, when I walk into a beit midrash and hear learning and feel something ugly rise in me that I am not proud of. Not hatred — I don’t think it is hatred. But something close to it. A furious, grief-drenched question: Do you know what it costs? Do you know what is being paid, right now, for the life you are living?

And maybe that is the thing I need to say directly, to my Haredi neighbors, to the people I buy from, and nod to on Shabbat, and whose children play alongside my children.

I need you to know what it costs.

Not abstractly. Not as a political argument. As a human fact.

It costs boys their hands. It costs families their fathers. It costs mothers the ability to breathe normally when a notification comes through. It costs wives who will grow old alone. It costs children who will visit a grave instead of a living room.

That is what is being paid. Every day. Right now. While the learning continues.

The rabbinical tradition has a concept I keep returning to: kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. All of Israel is responsible for one another. Every Jew is a guarantor for every other Jew. It is not a metaphor. It is a legal and moral principle that runs through the entire tradition.

I believe the Haredi community believes this too. I believe they take it seriously. I believe that when they say the Torah protects, they mean it as an expression of that mutual responsibility, not a flight from it.

But I also believe — I have to believe, or the arithmetic becomes unbearable — that the principle of mutual responsibility cannot mean only one direction of guarantee. It cannot mean that some bodies absorb the cost and other bodies produce the spiritual merit, and that this arrangement is permanent and non-negotiable and sealed by rabbinic decree.

That is not areivut. That is a transaction. And the people paying are not asking for much. They are asking to not pay alone.

Here is where I have landed, on my better days.

Rage is not the enemy of love. Rage can be a form of love, when it is aimed at something real, when it refuses to look away, when it says: this matters too much to pretend it is fine.

What I feel toward the Haredi world on the days when soldiers die is not hate. It is a demand. The demand of someone who shares a covenant with them, who believes in the same God and the same Torah and the same impossible project of Jewish existence in this land, and who needs them, urgently, desperately, to feel the weight of what is happening and ask themselves what their share of it looks like.

Not because I want to destroy their world. Because I cannot afford for their world to be sealed off from mine.

We are not two peoples. We are one people. The body bags come back to one country. The mothers sit shiva in one land. The names are read aloud in one language.

If that is true — and I believe it is true — then none of us gets to say “that’s sad” and move on.

Not them. And not me either.