Torah in a Sovereign State
Friday February 6, 2026 – י״ט שְׁבָט תשפ”ו
This week, we stand once again at Sinai. We receive the Torah as a sacred text, a moral and ethical guide, our collective narrative and master story, and as the central defining moment of our people – arguably even more formative than our redemption from slavery in Egypt. Matan Torah is the moment of revelation, when a newly freed people accepts a covenant that will define not only what we believe, but how we behave. The drama of thunder and fire gives way to something quieter and far more demanding: a way of living in the world, bound by law, responsibility, and mutual obligation.
The Torah given at Sinai is more than a statement of faith; it is a blueprint for society. “You shall not murder,” “you shall not steal,” “love the stranger, for you were strangers…” and “remember and keep Shabbat”—these are not abstract ideals but organizing principles for communal life. Revelation begins with God speaking, but it continues in the ways human beings interpret, apply, and live Torah across time and circumstance. Sometimes the Torah’s demands are strikingly clear. It is a minor miracle of the Jewish state that everyone who boards a public bus encounters the verse “מִפְּנֵי שֵׂיבָה֙ תָּק֔וּם” — “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old” (Leviticus 19:32), a quiet but persistent biblical reminder of basic human decency woven into daily life – just one of a myriad of such examples.
And yet, from the very moment we received the Torah, we began to interpret it. Out of love, reverence, fear, and devotion, we undertook an intense—sometimes anxious and meticulous—process of guarding the law by building what the rabbis famously called fences around the Torah. The Torah itself invites this process. “Lo bashamayim hi”—it is not in heaven (Deuteronomy 30). The tradition that flows from Sinai assumes argument, debate, and a multiplicity of readings, all undertaken in the name of covenantal responsibility. To receive Torah is not only to revere it, but to wrestle with it.
That tension—between shared commitment and divergent interpretation—has animated Jewish life for three millennia. It is now playing out, as it must, in the State of Israel: the arena where Judaism meets sovereignty, public culture, civic responsibility, and democracy.
Rather than understanding Israel as divided between those who care about Torah and those who do not, we would do better to see it as divided between fundamentally different understandings of what Torah demands of a society: who bears responsibility, how power is exercised, and how obligations are shared among citizens. These differences are not theoretical. They shape policy, budgets, legal frameworks, and ultimately, lives.
Torah is embedded everywhere in Israeli society—in architecture, art, music, slogans, protests, speeches, and headlines. It forms the subconscious grammar of public life. And yet, at times, our interpretations drift far from their original ethical intention. For instance, the prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (a command repeated three times in the Torah: Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21) has, over centuries, produced the requirement to separate dishes, divide food courts, and has created elaborate systems designed to prevent even the most remote infringement. There are countless such examples. The fences grow higher and the distance from the original legal intent only widens.
Against this backdrop, Orly Erez-Likhovsky and I devoted a recent episode of The Pluralist Podcast to one of the most sensitive and consequential questions facing Israeli society today: the place of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) society in a Jewish and democratic state. We sought to examine Haredi life through a lens that resists caricature, focusing on a community deeply committed to Torah—but committed to a particular interpretation of Torah.
The conversation was prompted by a tragic case that made headlines: the deaths of two infants in an unregulated childcare setting. But it quickly became about something much larger—not identity or belief, but power, responsibility, and what it means to live together in a shared society.
Too often, discussions of Haredi society collapse into buzzwords or culture-war tropes. Instead, we tried to slow the conversation down, add context, and insist on criticism without demonization—while refusing to ignore the very real consequences of policies that affect children, women, and the long-term viability of the state. The tragedy was not framed as a moral failure of individuals, but as the predictable outcome of structural decisions: underfunded services, lack of oversight, and a political system that has allowed entire sectors[1] to opt out of shared civic responsibility while remaining deeply dependent on the state.
Over time, large segments of Haredi society have constructed ever-higher fences around the Torah—layers of stringency that elevate particular mitzvot above all others. Shabbat observance, norms of modesty, and full-time Torah study have come to function not only as religious practices, but as the primary markers of belonging and legitimacy. In doing so, values that are sacred and meaningful in themselves are sometimes detached from the Torah’s broader ethical system, producing an insular worldview in which separation and communal survival eclipse shared civic responsibility. What emerges is not merely a different interpretation of Torah, but a self-contained religious culture with its own hierarchy of obligations.
These arrangements are often justified in the language of Torah—full-time Torah study as the highest value, insularity as religious necessity—but their impact is felt far beyond the walls of the beit midrash (house of study) or the kollel (full-time study for married men). This is where Parashat Yitro becomes urgently contemporary.
At Sinai, Torah is given to the entirety of the people of Israel. The covenant is collective. The commandments presume a society in which parents can work without endangering their children, in which courts protect the vulnerable, and in which leaders are accountable to the people they serve. Even Yitro’s advice to Moses—to establish systems of shared leadership and responsibility—is a reminder that spiritual aspiration cannot come at the expense of functional governance or basic compliance with communal norms.
From a Reform and liberal Zionist perspective, living by Torah means taking that collective responsibility seriously. It means building institutions that protect life, ensure dignity, and balance religious freedom with the obligations of citizenship. Interpretation is not merely an intellectual exercise, a theoretical “what if?” It is about consequences.
The deepest strain in Israeli society today is not simply between secular and religious, or between Haredi and non-Haredi. It is between visions of Torah as a private ideal insulated from civic responsibility, and Torah as a public ethic that demands participation, accountability, care for the whole, and continual evolution.
Nowhere is this tension more dangerous than in the growing, principled refusal of large segments of Haredi society to enlist in the IDF. In a nation where security is a shared burden and military service is both a civic obligation and a social adhesive, this refusal risks becoming not only a source of resentment but a force of internal unraveling. External enemies threaten Israel’s borders; the collapse of shared responsibility threatens its very fabric.
Receiving Torah at Sinai was a unifying moment—but it did not erase differences. It created a framework within which differences could exist without fracturing the people. The challenge of our time is to reclaim that model: passionate disagreement grounded in shared fate.
Parashat Yitro reminds us that revelation is not measured by how loudly we invoke Torah, nor by how high we build fences around it, but by how faithfully we live its values together. The question before Israeli society is not whose Torah is more authentic, but whether our interpretations lead to a society that is safer, fairer, and more humane for all who live within it.
That question is not marginal. It is the work of the covenant itself—and it may determine whether Israel can endure threats from within as well as from without.
Shabbat Shalom.
P.S. Catch the latest episode of The Pluralist Podcast – with Orly Erez-Likhovski and Rabbi Josh Weinberg:
Separate Fate or Shared destiny? Haredi Life in the Jewish State. We take on one of the most sensitive and misunderstood questions in Israeli society today: the place of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) society in a shared Jewish and democratic state.
[1] These challenges must be understood within a broader structural context. Both Haredi and Arab communities in Israel continue to face high levels of poverty, underinvestment, and limited access to economic mobility—realities that demand serious, sustained policy responses rather than slogans or blame. At the same time, the scale of the challenge has changed dramatically. What began as a temporary exemption granted by David Ben-Gurion to roughly 400 Haredi men in the 1950s has grown into a system involving an estimated 100,000 individuals today (as discussed on The Pluralist Podcast). As the Haredi population grows rapidly and constitutes an ever-larger share of Israeli society, the cumulative impact of widespread exemptions from military service and workforce participation raises urgent questions about social cohesion, fairness in sharing civic burdens, and the long-term sustainability of Israel’s economy and state budget. Without meaningful integration strategies—educational, economic, and civic—the strain on Israel’s social contract risks deepening divisions at precisely the moment when shared responsibility is most needed.