“It’s crucially important to understand that at least 70% of the Haredi community is against demonstrations and would never take part in them,” Rabbi Karmi Gross told an audience at the JNS International Policy Summit at Jerusalem’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel on June 23.

“What you see in the streets is a small sampling” of the Haredi community, Gross said of the current disruptive demonstrations against the IDF draft, while acknowledging that very few influential Haredi leaders have publicly spoken out against it. “But as far as agreeing with such a worldview, almost no one agrees with it. It is not the right way.”

Gross, an influential educator, is also the founder and head of Beit Midrash Derech Chaim, the first ultra-Orthodox post-high school yeshiva to include army service as well as academic studies leading to gainful employment.

Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeiffer, who moderated the session, is a board member of Netzah Yehuda, an organization that supports Haredi IDF soldiers. He also served in the army. He is the founder and editor of Tzarich Iyun, a journal of Haredi philosophy, and a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, among other roles.

According to Pfeiffer, “Israel today desperately needs a different kind of politics in the social-political sense—of course, not without disagreement. Not one of sentimental unity, where people pretend that deep conflicts do not exist, but a politics of trust, sincerity and responsibility … a community fighting fiercely and honestly for its values while remembering that people across the table are not an obstacle but partners in a shared fate.”

“For Haredi society, this means a painful but necessary accounting,” he said. “We must ask not only whether the state understands the value of Torah but whether we have done enough to show that Torah produces responsibility, integrity and concern for the whole.”

‘We are raising a different generation’

The panel included Rabbi Menachem Bombach, founder, president and CEO of the Netzach Educational Network, which includes elementary, high school, and post-high school institutions that provide, along with Torah scholarship, a first-class academic education.

“Without secular studies, it is impossible to integrate into Israeli society,” Bombach said.

“The voice that we are trying to bring to the community is that if we want to survive and if we want to continue our legacy, we should bring up our children to be a model for Israel,” he said.

Bombach noted, for example, Netzach’s pre-academic program for Haredim who want to become physicians. “In the past few months, we helped over 40 people get accepted to medical schools,” he said.

Haredi girls are also becoming part of the system, he added. “We are raising a different generation”—knowledgeable, God-fearing, but fully a part of Israeli society.”

Rabbi Moshe Weiss, a former senior adviser to then-ministers Natan Sharansky and Yuli Edelstein, is the founder and chairman of Netspark Technologies and Internet Rimon, organizations that provide advanced, family-safe internet solutions globally.

Weiss described the tremendous growth in Haredi internet users over the past 17 years since the launch of Internet Rimon. However, he said, among Haredim, the internet is rarely used for entertainment or culture, but rather for earning a livelihood, academic training and even shopping.

He noted “the beauty of this transformation” coupled with caution about what comes into their homes, saying that “progressive society around the world is a threat to family values and Torah values.”

About 1,000 Haredim currently attend Beit Midrash Derech Chaim, which started with only eight students, Gross said. “This is a model that should be copied—to serve in the army and earn an academic degree,” he said, adding that it had never existed before in Israel, not even in the Religious Zionist community.

Prominent Haredi journalist and writer Maayan Meir discussed what she described as a “long-term social experiment that Israeli society has been running for many decades,” concluding that “it’s possible to remain a deeply conservative religious community without insisting on traditional gender roles or gender stereotypes.”

“This is probably very surprising,” she said. “Of course, Haredi society never ran an experiment to prove anything. It’s just the practical result of decision-makers.”

‘No gender fluidity’

Because Haredi men generally spend a great deal of time in Kollel (post-graduate yeshiva) while raising families, many women have taken on the role of providers, she explained.

“I’m not going to claim that it’s the perfect model,” she added, saying that one of the biggest challenges facing Haredi society in the past two decades has been coming to terms with the fact that the Kollel model does not work for everybody. There are men who are not suited to it and women who prefer to spend more time at home.

“But it works for many families, showing that it’s possible in very conservative communities where a man is still very much a man and a woman still very much a woman while not fulfilling traditional roles. If you visit a Haredi community, you’ll see many men dropping their children off at school and picking them up in the afternoon while the mothers are at work. The men are very involved.”

“I think the very fact that Haredi society was able to do these things without compromising the belief that men are men and women are women—there is no gender fluidity—is based on the fact that Jewish ideas about gender are very different from what much of Western society has adopted,” she said.

In Haredi society, people are not judged by how much money a man earns or whether a woman is engaged in activities other than domestic ones, she said, although Judaism assigns different responsibilities to men and women.

“The highest achievement a Haredi man can achieve is to be a Talmid Chacham,” one who has attained a high degree of Torah knowledge, she said. “But they also have to demonstrate what we call today emotional intelligence.”

Evolutionary vs. revolutionary

Pfeiffer concluded the program with the hope that Haredi society “will be inspired to translate its values into Hebrew” and believe they “can make a difference and bring something pure and beautiful to the State of Israel.”

“There are tens of thousands of families that have been deeply impacted by all the different projects here and many others outside of this group. And that is how it’s going to happen. It’s more of an evolutionary project than a revolutionary process.”

“There’s a lot—a lot—happening, and it will come to fruition in the near future,” he said.