Selective Sacrifice Is Breaking Israel

There are moments when a community must stop consoling itself with its own vocabulary.

Israel has become very skilled at speaking the language of unity, sacrifice, security, mourning, resilience, destiny, and survival. These words are not false. That is precisely why they are dangerous. Falsehood collapses quickly. True words can be abused for a long time.

A state may ask its citizens for sacrifice. Israel, of all places, knows this. It may ask young people to serve, families to live with fear, reservists to return again and again to the edge of exhaustion, and the bereaved to stand in cemeteries while politicians speak of national responsibility. It may ask a people to carry an unbearable history without turning that history into paralysis. But a state cannot ask some citizens for blood while allowing others to negotiate exemption as political currency.

That is not Judaism. That is not solidarity. That is not covenant. It is administrative idolatry wrapped in sacred language.

From within, not against

I write this from within the community, not against it. Difficult words are spoken out of care, not hostility toward the community of which one is a part. Sometimes loyalty does not mean silence. Sometimes loyalty means refusing to participate in a comforting lie.

Tochacha — rebuke — is not betrayal. It is one of the forms by which a community refuses to rot politely. The Torah does not say: remain silent when your people turns sacred language into protection for injustice. It says, “You shall surely rebuke your fellow.” The prophetic tradition did not flatter kings, priests, or religious elites when they converted holiness into cover for unequal burdens. It spoke because covenant without justice becomes theatre. And in a defensive war, the old language of shared burden becomes harder to avoid: Rambam’s formulation of milchemet mitzvah is severe precisely because danger to Israel cannot be outsourced to one part of the people while another part negotiates sanctified distance from it.

The Haredi draft crisis is too often described as a dispute between religion and the state. That is already too polite. The real issue is not whether Torah study matters. Of course it matters. A Jewish state that cannot understand the gravity of Torah has already become spiritually stupid. But Torah cannot become a shield against the common burden while other families are asked to give their sons, their daughters, their sleep, their sanity, and sometimes their dead.

A community cannot survive when mourning is universal but obligation is selective.

The exposed fracture

This is what Memorial Day exposed. The ceremonies still exist. The sirens still stop traffic. The flags still move in the wind. The language of national grief still functions. But beneath it something has shifted. Many Israelis no longer hear only mourning. They hear a question: who is entitled to speak of sacrifice without paying its price?

That question is not left-wing. It is not right-wing. It is not secular resentment. It is not hatred of religion. It is the most basic test of a political community: can the state distribute burden without turning proximity to power into immunity?

Israel is failing that test.

This failure did not begin yesterday. October 7 did not create it. October 7 exposed it with unbearable clarity. A state that asks its citizens for trust must be able to account for its own failures. A leadership that demands endurance must submit itself to judgment. A government that sends soldiers to war cannot behave as if political survival were more sacred than public responsibility.

That is why the current opposition drama matters, but is not enough. Bennett and Lapid may create a necessary electoral alternative. They may even restore a measure of competence, seriousness, and administrative normality. That matters. After years of poison, even ordinary competence can look like revelation. But Israel’s crisis is deeper than a change of leadership.

The exemption-machine

The problem is not only who governs. The problem is what kind of exemption-machine the state has become. Too many Israeli disputes now turn around the same hidden mechanism: who is exposed, who is protected, who must obey, who may negotiate, who must bury, who may preach, who pays in blood, and who pays in slogans.

A Jewish state cannot be built on the selective admissibility of duty.

If the state is Jewish only when it protects religious privilege, it is not Jewish. It becomes a system of privilege using the flag as a screen. If the state is democratic only when elections preserve impunity, it is not democratic. It is procedural theatre. If the state speaks of unity while managing unequal sacrifice, it is not unified. It is merely synchronized for ceremonies.

The most dangerous threat to Israel is not criticism from outside. It is the internal habit of confusing survival with self-exemption. A people can survive enemies. It is much harder to survive a moral architecture in which every sector learns to translate national emergency into private advantage. When that happens, the state does not collapse dramatically. It hollows out while still singing.

That is why the question of Haredi service cannot be postponed forever. Not because every young Haredi man must be humiliated into sameness. Not because secular Israelis are pure. Not because the army is a metaphysical solution to Jewish existence. It is not.

The question is simpler and harsher: can there be one people when one part of that people is structurally protected from the burden that defines the citizenship of another part?

If the answer is no, then the language of unity becomes an insult.

Religious courage

Israel does not need more speeches about togetherness. It needs a rupture with the politics of protected exception. It needs an inquiry into October 7 that will not be delayed, diluted, or buried beneath coalition arithmetic. It needs a draft arrangement that does not treat law as a suggestion when the lawbreaker is politically indispensable. It needs leaders who do not come to cemeteries as if grief were scenery.

And it needs religious courage.

The deepest religious courage today would not be the defense of exemption. It would be the willingness to say: Torah cannot depend on injustice. Torah does not become greater when another mother’s son is exposed to danger in my place. A sacred text does not need political immunity. Only a frightened institution does.

That sentence should shake the room.

Israel is not being asked to abandon Judaism. It is being asked to stop using Judaism as a technology of unequal burden.

No more comforting poison

There is still time for repair, but not through sentimental unity. Sentiment is cheap. The dead have already paid for too much sentiment. Repair begins when the same state that asks for sacrifice accepts accountability; when obligation ceases to be negotiable under coalition pressure; when Jewish language is no longer allowed to sanctify civic escape.

A community sometimes needs comfort.

But sometimes comfort is poison.

Israel does not need comfort now. It needs to be shaken awake before selective sacrifice becomes the quiet grammar of its future.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig