Holiness in a Secular Age: Understanding the Ultra-Orthodox Struggle in Israel

During my travels in Israel, I had the opportunity to meet with an ultra-Orthodox rabbi. As a Christian who has spent considerable time studying Judaism, participating in Jewish religious life, and thinking about the relationship between faith and society, I was interested in understanding a community often discussed in political terms but less frequently understood in religious ones.

Much of what we hear about Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews, commonly known as Haredim, concerns military service, government subsidies, religious education, and political influence. These are important issues, particularly in a nation where questions of citizenship and national survival have profound consequences. Yet concentrating exclusively on these controversies risks overlooking something fundamental about Haredi life: the conviction that preserving a community ordered around God’s commandments requires deliberate resistance to many forces shaping contemporary society.

I recognized something familiar in that conviction. Every religious community must confront the relationship between its deepest commitments and the surrounding culture. How much accommodation is possible before religious identity begins to disappear? How can a community preserve its traditions while remaining part of the society around it? And what happens when religious commitments appear to conflict with civic obligations?

These questions have occupied religious thinkers for centuries. In modern Israel, they have become matters of national consequence.

The Jewish Pursuit of Holiness

The religious foundations of Haredi life begin not with resistance to modernity but with the Jewish understanding of holiness.

In Leviticus 19:2, God instructs Israel to be holy because God is holy. Jewish tradition developed an extensive understanding of how holiness shapes ordinary life, including food, dress, sacred time, family relationships, business conduct, and responsibilities toward others.

The Hebrew concept of kedushah, or holiness, involves distinction, dedication, and ordering life around sacred obligations. Within Haredi communities, this commitment finds expression in religious education, observance of Jewish law, communal institutions, and the centrality of Torah study.

For many Haredim, studying Torah is not simply preparation for employment or the acquisition of knowledge. It is a religious calling. The concept of Torah lishmah, studying Torah for its own sake, places learning within the life of worship rather than treating it primarily as an instrument of economic advancement.

Yet Jewish tradition has long debated the relationship between religious study and ordinary responsibilities. Pirkei Avot 2:2 praises combining Torah study with worldly occupation, while the Babylonian Talmud, in Berakhot 35b, preserves a debate over Torah learning and earning a livelihood. The tension between sacred study and material responsibility therefore exists within Jewish religious thought itself.

Modern Haredi communities represent particular historical responses to these questions. Their commitments draw upon ancient Jewish traditions, but their institutions developed through changing circumstances, including the emergence of Hasidic and Lithuanian religious movements, Jewish emancipation, the Enlightenment, religious reform, Zionism, and the destruction of European Jewish communities during the Holocaust.

That history matters. Haredi identity cannot be understood exclusively as resistance to contemporary culture. It also reflects the determination to preserve a religious civilization whose institutions, languages, patterns of learning, and communal life have endured persecution and extraordinary upheaval. For communities shaped by this memory, continuity can be experienced as an obligation to preceding and future generations.

An Ancient Struggle Across Religions

Although Haredi Judaism’s theological foundations are distinctively Jewish, the dilemma it confronts is familiar across religious traditions.

In Christianity, Jesus’ prayer in John 17:14–16 describes his followers as belonging to God while remaining present in a world whose values may conflict with their commitments. Christians often summarize this tension as being in the world but not of it.

Beginning in late antiquity, Christian ascetics such as Anthony of Egypt withdrew into the desert to pursue lives organized around prayer and spiritual discipline. The Desert Fathers and Mothers, followed by generations of monastic communities, sought distance from influences they believed could compromise religious faithfulness. Yet monastic institutions also became centers of hospitality, learning, and service.

Other Christian communities developed different approaches. The Amish established boundaries governing technology, dress, education, and cultural participation. Hutterites developed communal economic arrangements. Mennonites adopted varied practices of separation and engagement, while Quakers combined commitments to simplicity with substantial participation in social reform.

These traditions are not interchangeable. What they share is not a uniform rejection of society but the conviction that religious fidelity may require boundaries around certain cultural influences.

The Christian theologian H. Richard Niebuhr examined this problem in his 1951 book Christ and Culture. Among his categories was “Christ against culture,” describing movements that understand aspects of prevailing social life as incompatible with Christian discipleship.

That category offers a useful analogy, though not a complete explanation of Haredi Judaism. Haredi Jews are not Christian monks, nor do they universally reject modern institutions. Their communities operate businesses, participate in elections, negotiate public policy, and selectively employ contemporary technologies.

The important distinction is between rejecting modernity altogether and refusing to allow modernity to determine the terms of religious identity. For many Haredim, the question is not whether technology, employment, or civic institutions can be useful, but whether their use can remain subordinate to religious obligations.

The Paradox of Haredi Life in Modern Israel

Israel’s Haredi population is frequently discussed as though it were a single community. In reality, it encompasses several religious and cultural traditions, including Hasidic groups, Lithuanian or Yeshivish communities, Sephardi Haredim, and people adopting different approaches to modern education, employment, and public participation.

Their attitudes toward Zionism, military service, secular education, technology, and relations with the state can differ considerably.

This diversity matters because Haredi society’s demographic and economic significance is increasing.

According to the Israel Democracy Institute’s 2025 statistical report, approximately 1.45 million Haredim represented 14.3 percent of Israel’s population. Fifty-seven percent were younger than twenty, compared with 31 percent of the population overall.

These figures suggest that questions once regarded primarily as matters of religious accommodation will increasingly shape Israel’s economic, educational, and political future.

Employment statistics complicate popular stereotypes. Approximately 81 percent of Haredi women and 54 percent of Haredi men are employed. The difference reflects, among other factors, the distinctive role of extended religious study in many men’s lives and the substantial economic responsibilities assumed by women.

Haredi women are essential to family and community life as well as economic participation. Many navigate the demands of religiously observant households alongside employment and professional training.

Their experiences remind us that a religious community cannot be understood entirely through its most prominent male authorities. Within Haredi society are individuals pursuing different educational opportunities, employment paths, and relationships with the surrounding culture while maintaining religious observance.

Some advocate greater engagement with Israeli society from within Haredi tradition itself.

Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer, a Jerusalem community rabbi, legal scholar, and head of the Iyun Institute, represents an important example. As founding editor of Tzarich Iyun, he has helped develop a forum examining contemporary questions from within Haredi Judaism.

His 2024 essay, “Haredi Faith: Theology and the Draft Controversy,” published in SAPIR, argues that some influential strands of Haredi thought have placed excessive emphasis on divine intervention while diminishing the religious significance of human action and responsibility.

Drawing upon Jewish sources, Pfeffer offers an understanding of faith in which trust in God does not diminish the obligation to act. Religious fidelity can require engagement with economic life, public institutions, national security, and the responsibilities of Jewish sovereignty.

His argument matters because it emerges from within the religious world under discussion. It challenges the assumption that civic participation necessarily represents surrender to secular values. Instead, civic responsibility can become an expression of religious commitment.

The debate, therefore, is not simply between Haredi Judaism and the secular state. It also concerns how Haredi communities themselves understand the relationship between religious faithfulness and responsibility for the wider society.

Religious Freedom and Shared Responsibility

Understanding Haredi religious commitments does not resolve every question arising from their relationship with the modern state.

Israel contains citizens with different understandings of Jewish identity, religious obligation, and political authority. Secular, traditional, religious Zionist, and Haredi Jews disagree about the proper relationship between religious law and civil institutions. Israel’s Arab citizens, including Muslims, Christians, and Druze, also possess legitimate claims to equal citizenship and religious freedom.

A democratic society must negotiate these differences without demanding that all its citizens adopt the same religious or secular worldview.

The difficulty arises when religious distinctiveness intersects with common civic obligations.

Military service makes this tension especially visible. For many Haredi families, sustained Torah study is a sacred responsibility that contributes to Jewish survival. From that perspective, full-time religious learning is not simply an alternative occupation but an expression of duty.

Yet other Israeli families understand national duty through military service, personal danger, reserve obligations, and the possibility of losing a loved one in war. For them, arrangements permitting large numbers of eligible Haredi men to avoid military service raise questions about equal citizenship and the distribution of sacrifice.

In June 2024, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the government lacked a lawful basis for maintaining blanket exemptions for eligible Haredi yeshiva students. The debate continued through legislative proposals and judicial challenges. In July 2026, legislation seeking temporarily to restrict enforcement against certain draft evaders was prevented from taking effect by an interim Supreme Court order.

These disputes illustrate the difficulty of reconciling religious accommodation with equality and national security. They also demonstrate why public debate cannot be reduced to accusations of religious selfishness on one side or secular hostility on the other. Genuine religious conviction is involved, but so are political influence, institutional interests, public resources, and the distribution of civic burdens.

Religious freedom deserves protection. It does not follow that every political arrangement sought by religious authorities is necessary to preserve that freedom.

The same problem appears in education and public finance. Religious communities have legitimate interests in educating children according to their traditions and sustaining communal institutions. The wider society has legitimate interests in ensuring that young people possess the knowledge and skills necessary for employment, citizenship, and personal choice.

Public support for religious institutions raises questions of accountability, particularly when government resources must serve communities with different beliefs.

These concerns should not become arguments for compulsory cultural assimilation. A democratic society does not need every citizen to embrace the same lifestyle or understanding of human flourishing. But neither does religious difference automatically settle questions of public responsibility.

Respect for communal autonomy must also include individuals within religious communities. The freedom to maintain a tradition is important, as is the freedom of women and men to make meaningful choices about education, employment, family life, and religious observance.

The relevant distinction is between religious accommodation, which can strengthen pluralism, and arrangements that impose unequal obligations or deny meaningful freedoms, which can weaken public trust.

Living Together Without Becoming Alike

As a Christian, I recognize in Haredi Judaism a concern that has shaped much of my own religious tradition: faith must mean more than adopting the assumptions of the surrounding culture.

Religious communities that cease examining those assumptions may discover that their beliefs have become reflections of prevailing social expectations. Their scriptures remain and their rituals continue, but the distinctiveness of their moral and spiritual vision gradually disappears.

The Haredi determination to resist that process deserves understanding.

Yet religious history reveals another danger. Communities seeking to preserve holiness can become so concerned with protecting their boundaries that they neglect obligations to people beyond them. Religious institutions may confuse established arrangements with eternal principles, or institutional interests with divine requirements.

Christian history offers abundant evidence of communities that sought to protect faithfulness while becoming entangled in political privilege, social exclusion, or coercive power. Understanding religious motives therefore cannot mean exempting religious institutions from moral criticism.

A constructive approach begins by distinguishing essential religious commitments from arrangements that can be reconsidered without surrendering them.

For Haredi communities, that might involve expanding educational and employment pathways compatible with religious observance, developing appropriate forms of military or civilian national service, and creating opportunities for women and younger members to contribute more fully to society without abandoning their religious identities.

For the broader Israeli public, it requires recognizing that integration need not mean secularization. Participation in the economy, professional education, or public service should not require surrendering Sabbath observance, religious dress, dietary practices, or the centrality of Torah.

Government must protect religious freedom while establishing fair standards for citizenship, public funding, education, and national obligations.

Such an approach will not eliminate every disagreement. Some conflicts involve genuinely competing commitments that cannot be resolved through goodwill alone. But it can shift the question from how to make Haredim more like other Israelis toward how people with different understandings of the good life can share responsibility for a common future.

This is not simply a challenge for Haredi Judaism. It is a test of pluralism itself.

The easier form of tolerance permits differences that carry few consequences. The harder form creates institutions through which people whose fundamental convictions differ can live together without erasing those differences or abandoning their obligations to one another.

Religious liberty does not require a community to become culturally indistinguishable from the majority. Shared citizenship does not permit any community to disregard the legitimate claims of others. Both principles must be sustained if pluralism is to mean more than uneasy coexistence.

The Haredi struggle to preserve holiness in a secular age is ancient in its spiritual concerns, modern in its institutional forms, and increasingly consequential for Israel’s future. It deserves neither romanticization nor contempt, but serious understanding joined to an equally serious commitment to justice and shared responsibility.

Ultimately, the challenge is not to create a society in which everyone thinks, worships, or lives alike. It is to build one in which deeply different communities can preserve what they hold sacred while accepting meaningful obligations toward those who do not share their convictions.

That is not merely the challenge facing the ultra-Orthodox. It is the challenge of living together without becoming alike.

Notes and References

1. Jewish sources. Leviticus 19:2; Pirkei Avot 2:2; Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 35b. These texts address holiness and the relationship between religious learning and ordinary responsibilities.

2. Christian theology. John 17:14–16; H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (Harper & Brothers, 1951).

3. Haredi history. David Sorotzkin, “The Formation of Ḥaredism—Perspectives on Religion, Social Disciplining and Secularization in Modern Judaism,” Religions 13, no. 2 (2022): 175.

4. Demographics and employment. Israel Democracy Institute, Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel 2025, published January 2026. Population data; employment data.

5. Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer—biographical note. Rabbi Yehoshua (Joshua) Pfeffer is an Israeli Haredi rabbi, Jewish legal scholar, and head of the Iyun Institute. He serves as rabbi of the Ohr Chadash community in Ramot, Jerusalem, and is the founding editor of Tzarich Iyun, a journal exploring contemporary religious and social questions. He has served as a rabbinical judge and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law from Hebrew University, where he has also taught. His work addresses Haredi religious identity, civic responsibility, military service, and engagement with modern Israeli society. Sources: Iyun Institute and Ohr Chadash.

6. Haredi theology and national responsibility. Yehoshua Pfeffer, “Haredi Faith: Theology and the Draft Controversy,” SAPIR, August 12, 2024.

7. Military conscription. Israel Democracy Institute, analysis of Israel’s Supreme Court ruling, June 26, 2024, and “Law to Freeze the Arrest of Haredi Draft Evaders,” July 2026.