When Did “Lately” Begin?

An Elul question about the boundaries of our grief

A recent family message about the death of another young person during Bein Hazmanim began with words that were entirely natural: “Terrible. It seems that the middas hadin has really been strong against us at this time. There have been so many tragedies lately.”

I shared the sorrow. There is something especially heartbreaking and frightening when a young person dies, particularly someone we know or to whom we feel some connection. Hashem yerachem. May the family somehow be given the strength to endure its terrible loss.

But one word stopped me: “lately.”

In the past few weeks, news sites serving chareidi and yeshiva communities have reported a horrifying series of deaths during bein hazmanim. The headlines have spoken of a “black and horrifying twenty-four hours,” of “tragedy following tragedy,” and of families suddenly losing their children. A VINnews op-ed by Yehuda Dov asked, “How Many Will We Cry For This Bein Hazmanim?” These are fair and necessary questions. The calls for greater attention to water safety, hiking, vehicles and basic precautions are long overdue.

Yet there is another question that Elul demands we ask: Whom does the “we” include?

I am not, chas v’shalom, suggesting that any tragedy is a punishment for anything. None of us has access to the Ribbono Shel Olam’s accounting, and people who confidently assign reasons for suffering generally reveal more about themselves than about the ways of Hashem. The cheshbon hanefesh I am proposing is not about why suffering occurred. It is about how we have responded to the suffering already before us.

For a very large part of Klal Yisrael, “lately” began on October 7, 2023.

Official Israeli figures now record nearly 2,000 civilians and members of the security forces killed since the war began. More than 25,000 wounded Israelis have entered the Defense Ministry’s rehabilitation system, many of them with psychological injuries. The IDF recorded twenty-two suspected suicides in 2025 alone. And National Insurance figures published this summer show that almost half of the reservists who have served since October 7 accumulated at least 150 days of reserve duty; one in five served more than 300 days.

Those are not merely statistics. Behind those numbers are young widows, bereaved parents, and children who learned to stop asking when Abba was coming home. You find wives who carried households alone for months, ruined small businesses, and soldiers who returned physically intact but still fight the war every night when they try to sleep.  Too many have not made it — just this week I read of William Shakin ע"ה, a YU student who went to fight in Israel as a lone soldier, who succumbed to PTSD.  They are so many religious soldiers—yirei Shamayim, graduates and students of yeshivot, fathers who put down a Gemara and picked up a rifle because Jewish lives were in danger.

Much of the chareidi world has been insulated from this reality. Not entirely, of course. Some Chareidi Jews have davened, donated, cooked, visited the wounded and performed extraordinary acts of chesed. ZAKA volunteers entered scenes most of us cannot bear to imagine. There are chareidi soldiers who have served with courage. Many families have opened their hearts and homes. Any honest account must say this clearly.

But an honest account must also say that life in much of Yerushalayim, Beit Shemesh and Bnei Brak has continued far more normally than life in communities where fathers, sons and husbands repeatedly disappeared into reserve duty. Much of the time, walking around those streets and then visiting homes and families in most of the rest of Israel can feel like moving between two different countries.

What has been most visible from outside the chareidi community has not been shared national mourning or shared sacrifice, but demands: demonstrations against the draft, protests over arrests, battles to preserve government benefits, and increasingly extravagant language about a government “war on Torah.”

That language is not imaginary. Yated Ne’eman has declared “war” after the arrest of yeshiva students and described enforcement as persecution for the “crime of Torah study.” Earlier, Hamodia described a Supreme Court draft ruling as “declaring war on the Torah world.” Matzav has repeatedly presented draft arrests as a crisis facing the Torah world, including a rally whose message was, “If One Bochur Is Arrested, We’ll All Go to Prison.” When the government attempts to levy economic sanctions against those who refuse to serve, the measures are often portrayed as evil attacks targeting the Olam HaTorah for the “crime of learning Torah.”

To be fair, the newspapers and websites associated with chareidi and broader yeshiva communities are not monolithic and do not all say the same thing. At times, they publish forceful calls for chareidi self-examination, and some reports present both the chareidi protest and the authorities’ explanation.

There is also real anti-chareidi hostility in Israeli society, and it would be dishonest to pretend that drafting yeshiva students is as simple as sending out induction notices. As I have written elsewhere, the IDF has failed religious soldiers in the past, and no expansion of chareidi service can be morally serious without enforceable protections for tefillah, kashrus, Shabbos, tznius and a genuinely Torah-observant environment. The hesitation and mistrust are understandable; some previous efforts have not worked well.

But those problems could be addressed if there were a collaborative spirit between the army and chareidi leaders, with both sides sincerely committed to building frameworks that would satisfy the country’s security needs while protecting the religious lives of the young men who serve. To be honest, however, there has not been much genuine institutional willingness within the chareidi world to make such a partnership work. Whatever cooperation has existed has generally been limited and begrudging, while the dominant leadership position has remained opposed to compulsory service even for many young men who are not seriously learning.

But acknowledging those truths does not make every demand for shared responsibility an attack on Torah. It does not turn every enforcement measure into a gezeiras shmad. And it does not answer the pain of a reservist who has served 200 or 300 days and then watches political leaders demand continued communal exemption even for men who are not seriously learning.

The Sanzer Rebbe recently made much the same point: Most ordinary Israelis do not hate Torah, and it is a serious mistake to tell ourselves that they do. Much of the resentment in Israel comes from people who feel that they and their children are being asked to carry an unbearable burden while another community demands public support, broad exemption and the right to block roads when either is threatened. It has been deepened by the demonstrations, incendiary language and other very negative images coming from parts of the chareidi community. Worse still is the suspicion that their grief has not fully entered our emotional world—that we care, certainly, but from a safe distance, before returning to ordinary life.

This is also part of the problem with the way “Olam HaTorah” is sometimes used. For too many people, the “we” seems to include only their own version of the Olam HaTorah—not the hesder student who returned from Gaza to the beis medrash, the talmid chacham serving in reserves, or the young man killed with a sefer in his pack. Their Torah, too, is Torah, and they are no less a part of the Olam HaTorah.

Living between these worlds, I watch this unfold with a heavy heart. From Lakewood, Monsey or Brooklyn, the story can appear terribly simple. A headline says that a bochur was arrested “for learning Torah.” An appeal describes “harsh sanctions on the chareidi community.” A clip shows police confronting demonstrators. The response is immediate: money is raised, outrage is shared, and the Israeli government is cast as the ancient enemy in a familiar story.

Consider a recent Jewish newspaper report promoting a major Keren Olam HaTorah gathering. It described an “unprecedented funding crisis,” 120,000 affected lomdim, and institutions that are “the beating heart of the world of Torah.” It movingly described the hardships confronting yeshivos and families. But it said nothing about why the legal basis for that funding had collapsed, the army’s manpower needs, or the families carrying hundreds of days of reserve duty.

This was not an isolated omission. Much of the Keren Olam HaTorah campaign’s messaging to American audiences has presented a distorted and radically incomplete account of what is happening in Israel. Government support for yeshivos is treated as a natural entitlement whose withdrawal can only be understood as persecution, while the court rulings, the army’s manpower crisis and the extraordinary burden on reservists and their families largely disappear from the story. The individual facts being presented may be true, but the resulting picture is far from the whole truth—and it is precisely the picture many in the American chareidi and broader yeshiva communities receive.

But distance edits out the other half of the picture. Before forwarding the next message about the persecution of the Torah world, speak to an Israeli woman whose husband has spent hundreds of days in uniform. Speak to a religious-Zionist rosh yeshiva who has buried talmidim. Speak to parents whose son survived Gaza but did not return as the same person. Then ask whether the disagreement is really between Torah and its enemies—or whether it is a painful dispute within Klal Yisrael about what Torah now asks of us.

Elul is not a season for one community to put another on trial. The non-chareidi world also needs a cheshbon hanefesh: Have legitimate anger and fear turned into contempt? Have people spoken about chareidim as parasites rather than Jews? Have politicians exploited the draft crisis to humiliate an entire community? Have we adequately respected the spiritual fears of parents who do not trust the army with their sons? Torah learning is not a hobby, and a Jewish state has an obligation to preserve serious, exceptional scholarship and to build service frameworks in which a religious young man can emerge more committed, not less.

But the chareidi world—and the broader yeshiva community, particularly in America—must ask their own questions. Have we allowed the protection of genuine lomdei Torah to become a claim of exemption for an entire social group? Have our newspapers taught readers to interpret every loss of privilege as hatred of Torah? Have we shown the same public anguish for soldiers killed protecting us that we show, properly, when a young person from our own community dies during bein hazmanim? Have we listened carefully enough to the wives, parents and children carrying a burden from which most of us have been spared?

The policy solution will require patience: protection for a limited number of outstanding full-time scholars, meaningful national or military service for many others, strong and enforceable religious safeguards, and a transition that does not destroy families or institutions overnight. Reasonable people will disagree about the details. But no political formula can repair the country unless each community first recognizes the other’s pain.

Perhaps that is the beginning of our avodah this Elul. Our work this Elul is not to calculate why Hashem sent one tragedy or another. It is to enlarge the boundaries of the word “we.” We do not need to abandon our principles to ask whether defending them has made us deaf to another Jew’s cries. It is easy to sing “Acheinu kol beis Yisrael”; Elul demands that we actually mean it

There have indeed been many tragedies lately. The harder question is whether all of them have felt like ours.