The growing weight of sacrifice — and the troubling tone of the national debate.

As the newly formed United Nations debated the future of the British Mandate of Palestine, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann warned that a state would not be handed to the Jewish people on a “silver platter.” Poet Natan Alterman responded with a poem that has echoed through the generations. In it, at some future hour, a young man and woman step forward to confront the nation. Coming from a battlefield, they are silent and spent, they stand before their people, and the nation is told to behold them — for they are “the silver platter upon which the state was given.”

That was not metaphor. It was reality.

Young men and young women — some not so young — responded full-heartedly to the military call-ups after October 7. Yet although the religious Zionist community comprises roughly 20–22% of Israel’s population, its sons account for approximately one-third of the fallen in this war — far beyond their........

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