It is a pleasure to engage with such a thorough, thoughtful, and candid article as Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer’s on the challenges that face Israel’s haredi sector and the ideological evolution that led to these challenges in their contemporary form. I agree with almost everything he writes, and I see Moti Leitner’s new political party, the Haredi Public, as an important and positive development. I wish it success in the upcoming Knesset elections.
To some skeptics, Leitner’s project is quixotic and of little significance, as the party is unlikely to garner enough votes to win even a single Knesset seat. While I agree as a matter of electoral prognostication, such skepticism misses the importance of what is happening. Even if the new party gets 1 percent of the vote—assuming most of it comes from haredi voters, living in haredi neighborhoods—it would have achieved something significant. The mainstream haredi parties, which are already losing young voters, would be forced to change direction to maintain their constituencies. This is especially true of the Sephardi haredi party Shas, which does poorly in youth polls. Although such changes might be incremental, they would hardly be negligible.
In what follows, I’d like to examine an additional issue that doesn’t come up in Pfeffer’s essay, but is intimately connected. As Pfeffer himself notes, the challenges he discusses don’t belong exclusively to the haredi sector; they affect the whole country, and they require systemic changes in Israel.