By Rabbi Josh Wander
I grew up in the American yeshivish world, a world that is often confused with the Israeli Chareidi world. From the outside, they may look remarkably similar. The black hats are the same. The white shirts are the same. The yeshivas study the same Gemara. The language, customs and even many of the rabbinic influences overlap. When I first came to Israel to learn in Chareidi yeshivas, I too made the mistake of assuming that these were essentially the same communities separated only by geography. They are not.
In most Orthodox communities in America, the idea of a young man learning in kollel for a few years and eventually going out to work is hardly revolutionary. Studying in a secular university, while certainly debated in some circles, is widely accepted as a practical reality. Technology is used. People become doctors, lawyers, accountants and businessmen while remaining completely committed to Torah and mitzvos. The “threat” of being drafted into the military does not exist, and therefore military service has never become a defining theological or social dividing line.
After consulting with my rabbis, I decided that drafting into the IDF was the correct path for me. At the time, there were very few religious military options available. The infrastructure that exists today simply did not exist then. I eventually worked out an arrangement with my local Hesder yeshiva and joined their program.
For those unfamiliar with Hesder, it is traditionally a five-year framework combining intensive Torah study with military service. A student spends a period learning in yeshiva, enters the army, returns to the beit midrash, serves again and ultimately completes the program immersed once more in Torah study. Perhaps most importantly, the young men you learn Gemara with are often the same young men you serve beside in uniform. The chavrusa sitting across from you in the beit midrash may later be standing beside you in the field.
Something remarkable happens in that process. Almost everyone I knew who completed the program emerged stronger physically, emotionally and, yes, spiritually. The simplistic assumption that exposure to the army automatically destroys religious commitment simply did not match the reality I witnessed. For many, responsibility, sacrifice, discipline and the realization that they were physically protecting Am Yisrael gave their Torah an entirely new dimension.
It was only then that I began to understand the enormous gap running through Israeli society. Years later, after returning to America for graduate studies, I came back to Israel with young children who needed to be enrolled in school. Because children are individuals, we decided that some would be better suited for the Chareidi educational system while others would thrive in the religious, non-Chareidi system. To us, this seemed perfectly logical. Different children have different personalities, strengths and needs.
The municipality did not see it that way. We were told, essentially, that we had to choose: Chareidi or religious. Pick a box, pick a camp, pick an identity and place your family inside it. But what happens when you do not fit inside the box? That question has followed me for decades.
Today I find myself living on the edge between different Israeli worlds. I am part of groups in which people regularly disparage and criticize the Chareidi community at every opportunity. I am also part of groups where the exact opposite occurs, where the army, Religious Zionists and broader Israeli society are viewed with suspicion, contempt or outright hostility. I sit in both rooms, and perhaps because I sit in both rooms, I hear things that those firmly planted in one camp never hear.
I hear the caricatures and the sweeping generalizations. I hear intelligent people describe hundreds of thousands of fellow Jews as though they are a single organism with one opinion, one motivation and one personality. I hear people who have never seriously spoken to a Chareidi family explain exactly what “the Chareidim” believe. I hear Chareidim who have never spent a night on a military base explain exactly what happens to religious soldiers in the IDF. Each side has constructed a fictional version of the other and then declared war against its own creation.
Last week, I experienced just how deep this division has become. I was driving through an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem when several young children stopped my car. They noticed the IDF emblem displayed on it and began spitting at me. The irony would almost have been funny if it were not so tragic. I look Chareidi. To those children, I could easily have been their father, their rebbe or their neighbor. But they saw an IDF symbol and nothing else mattered. The enemy had already been identified.
How sad and how deep the brainwashing must be for Jewish children in Jerusalem to be taught, directly or indirectly, to spit at a symbol representing Jewish soldiers who are currently risking their lives to protect them. But those of us on the other side must be careful before climbing onto our moral high horse. I have heard equally disgusting language directed toward Chareidim. I have watched people celebrate their humiliation, mock their Torah learning and speak about entire communities as parasites and enemies of the state. The poison is not confined to Mea Shearim. It flows freely through social media, political movements and dinner-table conversations across Israel.
After decades of moving between these communities, I have become convinced that there are two great wedges being driven between them: politics and education. Politics may be the greatest culprit of all. Much of the hatred on both sides is not organic. It is cultivated. Politicians need camps, enemies and frightened voters who believe that if the other side gains power, everything they value will be destroyed. Chareidi politicians benefit when their communities fear the secular state, while secular politicians benefit when their voters fear Chareidi domination. Each election cycle requires another crisis, another insult and another existential battle. Division gets votes.
The second wedge is a profound lack of education. The Chareidi world has, in many cases, refused to provide its young people with the basic tools and skills necessary to communicate and interact with the rest of the country. This is not merely a debate over mathematics or English. It is about giving young Jews the ability to understand the society in which they live, communicate with their fellow citizens and participate confidently in the national conversation. Isolation may preserve certain things, but it also creates ignorance, dependency and fear.
Yet the educational failure is hardly one-sided. The non-Chareidi world often makes almost no serious effort to understand its Chareidi counterparts. Many Israelis know more about foreign cultures than they do about the Jews living a few neighborhoods away. They do not understand the language of the beit midrash, the structure of Chareidi society, the authority of its rabbinic leadership or the genuine fears that drive many of its decisions. Instead of education, they rely on television panels, political slogans and social media clips. We have created two populations that increasingly lack the vocabulary to speak to one another.
And then came October 7. For one brief and extraordinary moment, the walls collapsed. Nobody asked what kind of kippah you wore before delivering food to a displaced family. Nobody checked your political affiliation before collecting equipment for soldiers. Chareidim, secular Jews, Religious Zionists and traditional Jews stood together in warehouses, hospitals, hotels and homes. Politics suddenly seemed obscene, and the communication barriers that we had spent decades insisting were impossible to overcome disappeared almost overnight.
We instantly bridged the gaps, and that is what makes our current division so much more painful. We now know it can be done because we have seen it with our own eyes. The claim that Israeli society is simply too fractured, too diverse or too ideologically divided to unite is no longer believable. Under the most horrific circumstances imaginable, we proved the opposite. The question is why we apparently require a massacre to remember that we are brothers.
In some ways, American olim are uniquely equipped to bridge this gap. Many of us grew up in Orthodox communities that do not fit neatly into Israel’s rigid religious categories. We know people who learn Daf Yomi before going to the office, doctors who take halacha seriously, businessmen who spent years in kollel and university graduates who are completely at home in a beit midrash. We understand the Chareidi language because many of us grew up speaking it, but we are not necessarily frightened by the outside world. We understand higher education, technology and professional life without automatically viewing them as a rejection of Torah.
At the same time, after making Aliyah, many of us have served in the IDF, sent our children to the army, paid Israeli taxes and experienced the realities of living in a Jewish state surrounded by enemies. We understand why the broader Israeli public is so frustrated. We know what it means when a father disappears into miluim for months, when a business struggles because its employees have been drafted and when an entire family waits for a WhatsApp message from a son serving in Gaza. We can walk into a Chareidi beit midrash and understand the conversation, and then walk onto an army base and understand that conversation as well.
Perhaps American olim have been far too passive in this national debate. We came here and immediately allowed ourselves to be sorted into the same Israeli boxes: Chareidi, Dati Leumi, Chardal or Modern Orthodox. We chose schools, neighborhoods and political parties and slowly adopted the suspicions of our chosen camp. But maybe one of the reasons Hashem brought Jews from so many different backgrounds back to this land is precisely because Israeli society needs people who can stand between the camps and translate. This is not about compromising Torah or erasing differences. It is about translating.
Israel does not necessarily need another political party promising unity. We need human bridges. We need people who can explain to a secular Israeli why a Chareidi Jew is genuinely terrified of losing the Torah world his grandparents rebuilt from the ashes of Europe, and we need people who can explain to that Chareidi Jew why a reservist on his fourth deployment is genuinely furious when he feels that his sacrifice is being taken for granted. Both sides believe they are defending the future of the Jewish people. The Chareidi world fears the destruction of Torah, while the broader Israeli world fears the destruction of the state. One is terrified that Jewish spirituality will disappear, and the other is terrified that the physical structure protecting Jewish life will collapse. The tragedy is that both fears are legitimate.
We need Torah and we need an army. We need yeshivas filled with serious Torah scholars and soldiers standing at our borders. We need Jews capable of opening a difficult Tosafos and Jews capable of operating a tank. But more than anything, we desperately need Jews capable of speaking to one another.
Perhaps those of us who live on the edge have a role to play. We are uncomfortable to both sides because we destroy the caricatures. A Chareidi-looking Jew with an IDF emblem creates confusion. A serious Torah scholar who attended university complicates the narrative. A soldier who returns from the battlefield spiritually stronger is inconvenient, and so is a Chareidi avreich whose genuine Torah learning and mesirus nefesh cannot simply be dismissed as laziness. Reality is far more complicated than our political slogans.
I have lived in the American yeshivish world, learned in Israeli Chareidi yeshivas, served in the IDF, studied in a secular graduate school and raised children who did not all fit into the same educational box. After decades of moving between these worlds, I have reached a simple conclusion: the edges are often where you can see the clearest. From the center of a camp, everyone around you looks normal and everyone outside looks strange. From the edge, you can look in both directions, and what I see are Jews. Different Jews, frustrated Jews, frightened Jews and sometimes horribly misinformed Jews, but Jews nonetheless.
We proved after October 7 that we can throw politics aside and communicate even when we speak entirely different cultural languages. We proved that אחדות does not require אחידות, that unity does not require uniformity. It can be done because it has been done, and it needs to be done again before another tragedy forces us to remember who we are.
Those of us who understand both languages have no right to sit silently on the edge. Perhaps living on the edge is not a disadvantage at all. Perhaps it is exactly where the bridge is supposed to be built.