October 7 and the Test of Shared Fate

What National Trauma Reveals About Unresolved Fractures

In the days following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israelis confronted a catastrophe whose effects reached far beyond the communities directly attacked. Families searched for missing relatives, hospitals received the wounded, reservists were called away from ordinary life, and volunteers organized efforts to provide food, transportation, medical assistance, and support to displaced communities.

The scale of the tragedy and the war that followed transformed questions that had previously occupied political debates into matters of immediate personal experience.

Among them was a longstanding disagreement concerning the relationship between Haredi religious life and the obligations of Israeli citizenship.

For decades, Israelis had debated whether full-time Torah study should justify extensive exemptions from military service. After October 7, the issue acquired new urgency as families faced death, injury, prolonged reserve deployments, and disruption of employment and family life.

Yet something else happened as well. Haredi volunteers participated in relief operations, organized assistance, and sought opportunities to contribute to national emergency efforts. Their actions revealed a capacity for solidarity that the usual political arguments did not adequately describe.

The contradiction between those expressions of responsibility and continuing opposition to widespread military enlistment exposed one of the deepest unresolved questions in Israeli society: what does it mean to share a national fate when communities understand their obligations so differently?

The Mobilization Beyond the Military

In late October 2023, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that thousands of Haredi men had expressed interest in military service and that many others were participating in volunteer operations supporting soldiers and affected communities.

Religious organizations and individuals mobilized resources, supplied meals, supported emergency work, and assisted people facing the consequences of the attacks.

Members of ZAKA, the emergency response organization whose volunteers include many Orthodox and Haredi Jews, undertook the painful work of recovering human remains and helping ensure that the dead received dignified treatment according to Jewish religious requirements.

Such work involves a form of service that cannot be adequately described through stereotypes about religious withdrawal.

The impulse toward communal assistance has substantial roots in Haredi life. Religious obligations involving charity, care for the sick, burial of the dead, and support for families have produced extensive networks of mutual aid. In a national emergency, those practices can extend beyond their ordinary communal boundaries.

These forms of participation matter, even though they do not resolve the separate question of compulsory military service.

They show that a community seeking protection from certain aspects of secular culture need not lack a sense of responsibility toward the broader Jewish people.

The Limits of Wartime Solidarity

It would be tempting to interpret the early mobilization as evidence that October 7 permanently transformed relations between Haredi society and the state.

The subsequent record suggests a more complicated conclusion.

In February 2025, reporting on the Israel Democracy Institute’s research indicated that the initial increase in Haredi volunteering and expressions of interest in military participation had not produced a corresponding large-scale or permanent change in enlistment among younger men.

This distinction is important. Emergency solidarity can be genuine without changing the institutional commitments that shape ordinary life.

An individual may respond generously to national disaster while continuing to oppose military conscription. A community may provide substantial charitable assistance while retaining religious assumptions that separate Torah study from the obligations assigned to other citizens.

Neither observation makes the initial service insincere.

The problem arises when temporary solidarity is mistaken for a durable settlement of the underlying questions. National emergencies can reveal previously underestimated capacities for cooperation, but those capacities do not automatically become new policies, institutions, or accepted obligations.

Without deliberate reform, societies often return to familiar arrangements after the immediate crisis has passed.

Competing Religious Responses to Danger

Some Haredi leaders regarded the attacks and ensuing war as reasons to intensify Torah study and prayer. Within their theological framework, those activities are not simply expressions of sympathy. They are understood as ways of responding spiritually to collective danger.

Other religious figures emphasized a more direct obligation to participate in the national emergency.

Rabbi David Leibel, whose arguments were examined in a November 2023 analysis by the Israel Democracy Institute, urged Haredim to assist the broader population through volunteering and national service. His reasoning emerged from Jewish religious obligations rather than from the claim that modern citizenship should replace Torah.

For Leibel, war raised questions about how established religious principles concerning collective danger should be applied to contemporary circumstances.

This was not a simple choice between faith and practical action. It was an argument about what faith requires when the Jewish people face an immediate threat.

Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer would later examine related questions in his essay on Haredi theology and the military draft, arguing that dependence upon divine protection should not diminish the religious significance of human responsibility.

These arguments demonstrate that the wartime disagreement cannot adequately be understood as a confrontation between secular Israelis who value action and religious Israelis who value prayer.

The relationship between divine providence and human action is itself a subject of serious Jewish theological debate.

The Burden Carried by Families

Any discussion of shared responsibility must acknowledge the particular costs borne by military families.

The death or injury of a soldier, the prolonged absence of a parent, the strain of repeated reserve deployments, and the disruption of employment are not abstractions that can be balanced through rhetorical expressions of mutual respect.

For families experiencing those burdens, the distinction between those required to serve and those excused from service may be among the most consequential differences in Israeli citizenship.

The moral force of that concern deserves recognition.

Yet it would also be a mistake to portray Haredi families as untouched by October 7 or the war. Haredim were among the victims, and communities in southern Israel experienced fear, loss, and disruption. Some Haredi families included soldiers, emergency volunteers, or people otherwise directly involved in relief and defense.

The relevant distinctions are therefore not between communities that suffered and communities that did not. They concern how different institutions distribute continuing obligations and what forms of contribution they recognize.

Grief itself should not become a competition. But neither should recognition of shared grief obscure unequal distributions of civic burden.

Why Trauma Can Deepen Division

National trauma can produce extraordinary solidarity. It can also intensify suspicion, create new political grievances, and make previously tolerated inequalities seem unbearable.

The urgency of collective danger often reduces patience for gradual reform. People whose lives have been disrupted may understandably demand immediate changes from institutions that appear insulated from their sacrifices.

Religious communities may respond by strengthening their boundaries, particularly when they believe that an atmosphere of fear is being used to justify measures that would threaten their institutions.

The result can be an escalating cycle. One community regards resistance to new obligations as indifference to national suffering. Another regards demands for rapid institutional change as an effort to exploit tragedy for cultural or political purposes.

The arguments become increasingly difficult to separate from judgments about loyalty.

Yet a democratic society cannot determine legal obligations solely by measuring the intensity of public anger. Nor can religious institutions rely indefinitely upon arrangements that appear increasingly disconnected from the needs of the country.

The proper response requires recognizing both the urgency created by war and the need for policies that are lawful, workable, proportionate, and sustainable.

Repair Requires More Than Returning to Normal

Following collective trauma, societies often speak of restoration as though the objective were to recover the conditions that existed before the catastrophe.

In Israel, however, many of the conditions preceding October 7 included unresolved disagreements concerning national service, political legitimacy, religious authority, and the distribution of public responsibilities.

Returning to those arrangements without reconsideration would not necessarily constitute repair.

The experience of Haredi volunteers suggests one possible avenue for change. Their participation demonstrates that religious distinctiveness and public service are not always incompatible.

The persistence of opposition to compulsory enlistment demonstrates the limits of assuming that voluntary service alone will resolve the controversy.

Both observations deserve attention.

The task is to develop arrangements that recognize authentic religious commitments while establishing obligations capable of enduring beyond exceptional moments of public solidarity.

Those arrangements will require more than government declarations. They will depend upon changes in institutions, opportunities, leadership, and the way communities understand their obligations to the larger society.

The Work That Remains

October 7 revealed the strength of Israeli solidarity in some circumstances and the fragility of that solidarity in others. It brought forward extraordinary acts of public service while exposing disagreements that the country’s political institutions had repeatedly failed to settle.

For Haredi society, the experience raised difficult questions concerning the relationship between preserving religious life and participating in national defense. For other Israelis, it raised questions about whether respect for religious commitments can coexist with a fair distribution of collective burdens.

Neither community can answer those questions solely by invoking the sacrifices or contributions it already makes.

The future will depend partly upon whether the experience of common danger can produce a more durable sense of mutual responsibility, grounded in institutions rather than confined to the emotions of an emergency.

That transformation cannot be imposed through rhetoric alone.

It will require engaging the disagreements already taking place within Haredi Judaism itself, where rabbis, educators, families, and younger generations are reconsidering the relationship between Torah, public life, and the responsibilities of Jewish sovereignty.

Those internal arguments may prove as consequential as the demands of the wider Israeli public.

Notes and References

1. Eliyahu Freedman, “Israel’s War Has Spurred Thousands of Haredi Israelis to Volunteer, Cook—and Serve in the Army,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 27, 2023.
2. Eliyahu Berkovits, “Haredi Enlistment in the IDF—A New Normal?”, Israel Democracy Institute, October 26, 2023.
3. Israel Democracy Institute, Haredi Enlistment for the Current War with Hamas Is a Sign of a New Model of Rabbinic Leadership, November 2023.
4. The Times of Israel, “October 7 Changed Israel Forever. But the Ultra-Orthodox? Not So Much, Report Suggests,”, February 2025.
5. Yehoshua Pfeffer, “Haredi Faith: Theology and the Draft Controversy,”, SAPIR, August 12, 2024.