By David J. Butler

David Ben-Gurion made countless decisions that shaped the modern State of Israel. Few have had more lasting consequences than one that, at the time, seemed almost inconsequential: exempting a few hundred yeshiva students from military service.
He regarded the arrangement as temporary. The old world of Eastern European Torah scholarship had been nearly destroyed.

It deserved preservation. Besides, Ben-Gurion believed that the revolutionary experience of Jewish sovereignty would eventually create a common civic identity. The divisions of the Diaspora would recede. Living together, fighting together and building together would produce a new kind of Jew.

Perhaps that was his greatest miscalculation.

For decades, Israelis have argued about military exemptions, yeshiva stipends and coalition politics. Those debates focus on fairness and economics. And they miss the larger question. What if the issue was never money? What if Ben-Gurion was wrong? Not about the necessity of a Jewish state. Not about preserving Torah scholarship. But about the assumption that sovereignty itself would eventually create consensus.

Political Zionism was revolutionary. Herzl, Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion sought not merely to bring Jews back to the Land of Israel, but to bring Jews back into history. Jewish sovereignty transformed responsibilities once borne by others into obligations borne by Jews themselves. Defending Jewish lives, paying taxes, cultivating the land and assuming responsibility for collective destiny became more than practical necessities. They became the unavoidable burdens of self-government.

Much of the mainstream Haredi world never fully embraced that revolution. This is not to say that Haredim reject the Land of Israel or Jewish life within it. Quite the opposite. They believe deeply in the holiness of the land and in Jewish settlement. But many never accepted the Zionist proposition that sovereignty itself changes the priorities of Jewish life.

For Zionists, self-government carries responsibilities. Protecting Jewish lives, participating in the economy, paying taxes and accepting responsibility for the common good are not merely practical necessities; they are indispensable elements of national life.

Much of the Haredi world sees things differently. Torah remains the organizing principle. The state is important. It should sustain Jewish life and protect Jewish communities. But it is not the central fact around which Jewish existence revolves. And if sovereignty is not the organizing principle, there is little contradiction in participating in the state’s political institutions, receiving its subsidies, influencing its policies and relying upon its protection while resisting many of the obligations that
sovereignty imposes.

That is not hypocrisy. It is a different understanding of Jewish life.

The real surprise is not that the Haredim remained faithful to their beliefs. The surprise is that generations of Zionist leaders convinced themselves that the philosophical divide would somehow disappear. Coalition agreements substituted for consensus. Budgets substituted for clarity. Everyone acted as though time itself would solve the problem. Instead, time deepened it.

The Haredi population grew. Its institutions expanded. Its political power increased. But the underlying assumptions remained unchanged. One side viewed sovereignty as the organizing principle of Jewish national life. The other viewed sovereignty as the framework within which authentic Jewish life could flourish. And both sides learned to live with the contradiction.

The Zionists assumed that demography, prosperity and common experience would eventually narrow the gap. The Haredim assumed they could preserve their traditional worldview while benefiting from the institutions and protections created by others. Successive governments avoided confronting the tension because confronting it risked political instability.

Temporary arrangements became permanent realities. For decades, the cost of this arrangement could be managed. Oct. 7 changed that.

Sovereignty ceased to be an abstraction. It meant reserve duty. It meant casualties. It meant families separated for months, businesses shuttered and parents burying children. It meant asking for ever greater sacrifices from those who accepted sovereignty not merely as a convenience, but as an obligation.

And perhaps that is why emotions have become so raw.

The issue is no longer fairness. It is whether a nation at war can indefinitely sustain two competing understandings of Jewish responsibility. Can one part of society provide soldiers while another provides prayers and still preserve a common destiny? Can a sovereign Jewish nation survive if a rapidly growing segment of its population regards sovereignty as instrumental rather than foundational?

These are not economic questions. They are civilizational ones.

Perhaps the deepest divide in Israeli society is not between left and right, religious and secular, or hawks and doves. Perhaps it lies between those who believe Jewish sovereignty changed Jewish history and those who believe Jewish history transcends sovereignty.

For generations, Zionists assumed time was on their side. They believed the state would shape its citizens more than its citizens would shape the state. Perhaps they were wrong.

Perhaps the compromise that Ben-Gurion crafted was not temporary but permanent.

And perhaps the question Israel can no longer avoid is not whether Haredim should serve in the military or how much money should flow to yeshivot. The larger question is whether the Jewish state can endure without a shared understanding of what Jewish sovereignty requires.

Because nations can survive political disagreements. They can survive religious disagreements. But they cannot indefinitely survive disagreement over the meaning of the nation itself.

That may prove to be the Jewish argument nobody wanted to have.

And perhaps David Ben-Gurion’s greatest miscalculation was believing that history itself would eventually settle it.

David J. Butler is an attorney. He is president of Dvash Consulting, LLC and a member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, which owns and publishes Baltimore Jewish Times.