Who Speaks for Judaism when the Majority of Jews Don’t?

The question Israeli elections are forcing on Jews who stopped asking

In October 2026, Israel holds a national election. Observers will frame it, as they always do, in the familiar vocabulary of political analysis: security, judicial reform, religion and state, the economy — and now the cascading consequences of October 7, the confrontation with Iran, and the realignment of American foreign policy under Trump.

These are real issues. Beneath them, however, lies a question no election can answer: can the Judaism of the Jewish State generate responses up to the level of the questions imposed by this century — or has it become captive to formulations designed for a world that no longer exists?

That question did not arise in a vacuum. It arose because for decades most Jews carried-and continue to carry- their Jewish identity without examining its content. This Jewish majority assumed that Medieval and Rabbinical Judaism, in all its contemporary iterations, would eventually yield to the weight of its own anachronism. Modernity would take care of it. History would render it irrelevant. It was a comfortable assumption — and a catastrophically mistaken one.

That same dismissiveness — the refusal to take seriously what one prefers to ignore — runs through the cascading crises now defining this election: the catastrophe of October 7 and its unresolved aftermath; the failure of the confrontation with Iran to halt its nuclear ambitions or dismantle the network of proxies encircling Israel; the radical realignment of American foreign policy under Trump; the refusal of the Haredi world to share the burden of military service; the settlers and Religious Zionist push to expel Palestinians from the West Bank; the encroachment of religious authority into civil and military life — in particular, the effort to erase women’s visibility from society. In each case, a majority assumed that what it refused to engage would simply........

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