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The war between Hamas and Israel. Clerics, exempt from military service and long indifferent to security issues, are divided over whether they see the Hamas attack as divine punishment or whether they want to join the war effort.
There is excitement in a Lithuanian synagogue in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Bnei Berak, 200,000 religious people in hats crowd the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Inside the modest plastered concrete temple, dozens of men sweated over their Talmuds. “We are at the front,” says Shlomo Cahen, a French-speaking man with a bushy orange beard, flanked by his young son-in-law Israel Breisachem. The front here, 80 kilometers from Gaza? “Everything happens up there. Prayer and study help our soldiers, weapons are not everything.” So they have worked hard since the Hamas attack on October 7th and the start of the war.
For decades, the Haredim (“God-fearing” in Hebrew) have lived in a kind of parallel dimension in Israel. They barely recognize the state founded in 1948 by the Hilonim Zionists (“secular,” to speak of non-religious Jews), who had cobbled together a hybrid object that reconciled liberal aspirations and Jewish identity, far removed from the strict theocracy that dreams of them religiously to hasten the appearance of the Messiah. In Israel’s early years, the Haredim acquired a negligible amount of Ai