What does it mean to be religious when Jews are not just a community but a country – and when the word itself has become a label that divides?

On October 7, 2023, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust tore through Israel’s south. In the days that followed, something rare happened. For a brief, fragile moment, the usual walls came down. Haredi and secular, Dati Leumi and Russian immigrant, kibbutznik and settler – we were not categories. We were simply Jews: bleeding together, mourning together, sitting shiva together.

That moment sadly has not lasted – it has dissipated.

The fractures have returned, and in some cases sharpened. Not only the familiar arguments about budgets or exemptions, but something more corrosive: the weaponization of the word religious. Who is sacrificing enough? Whose Judaism is authentic? Who gets to speak in the name of the Jewish people?

I did not carry these questions at the center of my life before October 7. But as a father of a soldier, and as someone whose friends have buried sons lost in war, I do now. Because in Israel, “religious” is not merely a personal descriptor. It is a public argument with real consequences for national cohesion – and national survival.

Here is my claim: being religious should not be a label. There is a framework but it is about a direction of travel. And unless we recover a definition broad enough for a Jewish state, we will keep turning one of Judaism’s most sacred ideas into a wedge that divides Jews from one another – and Jews from Judaism itself.

The problem with the label

Israel is a masterclass in taxonomy. Walk through any city and the categories announce themselves in clothing, neighborhoods, schools, and voting patterns: Haredi, Dati Leumi, Masorti, Hiloni – and countless hybrids. Abroad the names change, but the instinct remains: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.

These categories are not meaningless. Communities need language. The tragedy is what we have done to the word religious. We have turned it into a static badge and a tribal boundary, when faith is anything but static. All we have to do is take an honest look at our children and we will see that it is not a static thing.

No honest person’s religious life is a straight line. It moves, stalls, deepens, fractures, repairs itself. Faith is not a destination where you arrive and judge others from a height. It is a movement – sometimes steady, sometimes faltering – toward something larger than the self.

When “religious” becomes a marker of superiority rather than responsibility – and worse for special privileges –........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)