During the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Israel Defense Forces deputy battalion commander Maj. Roi Klein threw himself on a grenade in the Southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil, absorbing the blast with his own body so that his soldiers would live. As he did, he cried out the words that Jews have uttered morning and night for millennia: “Shema Yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad” (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”)

Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, co-founder of the Bnei David pre-military yeshivah academy in the Samaria community of Eli, recounted this story of Israeli heroism during his keynote address on July 16 at Tekuma’s third “Right-Wing Summit” at Expo Tel Aviv.

The conference, organized by political strategist and communications consultant Berale Crombie, brought together public figures and thought leaders to discuss Israel’s future in the wake of the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, and the seven-front war that’s been going on since then.

“Twenty years ago, one man changed the face of young Israeli fighters,” Levinstein said of Klein. But the rabbi wasn’t merely conveying a moving anecdote; he was laying the groundwork for a broader argument about what a Jewish state ought to demand of itself.

“For 20 years, [Klein] was singular in his invoking of the ‘Shema,’” Levinstein clarified. “In the current war, every battalion, before entering Gaza and Lebanon, stands together and [recites it].”

He noted that the ritual wasn’t universally embraced. One commander who attempted to formalize it, he said in reference to Brig. Gen. Ofer Winter, was pushed out of the army.

However, he stressed, the phenomenon can no longer be stopped. In other words, according to Levinstein, Klein’s final appeal to God didn’t remain in Bint Jbeil; it’s become a normal part of the troops’ routine.

This, he said, is evidence of something far bigger than a battlefield custom. Among many other things, it illustrates the blossoming of a grassroots Jewish and national awakening among Israel’s younger generation, emerging simultaneously from two very different directions.

On one side are secular Israelis gravitating toward their Jewish identity, stirred not by external coercion, he explained, but by an internal search.

On the other side are the Haredim, members of what some dub the “ultra-Orthodox,” whose shift Levinstein described as an equally remarkable development: a growing nationalist and Zionist consciousness within a sector long ambivalent about, even suspicious of, both. Eight Haredi yeshivahs, he said, sent rabbis and students to his mechina (preparatory school) over the past two years to study “how Zionism, nationalism and Torah connect.”

He cited the commander of a company in the Hasmonean Brigade, one of the mechina‘s own rabbis, who took a two-year leave of absence to lead a battalion of Haredi soldiers in Lebanon. Levinstein recalled the officer’s words before deployment: “In this Haredi battalion, there’s no reason we can’t carry out any mission in Lebanon in the best possible way.”

Compulsion to serve in the IDF, he argued, would only alienate such young men; what’s drawing them forward is something they’ve chosen freely.

Levinstein sees this societal change from very different directions as an “authentic life movement driving the Jewish people to its identity, its purpose, its Jewishness.”

Here he raised the issue of what it means for a state, not an individual, to be Jewish. Since, as he pointed out, a state doesn’t lay tefillin (phylacteries) or wear tzitzit (ritual fringe), what does Jewish statecraft actually look like?

His answer was that Israel currently functions almost exclusively according to two principles—individual rights and equality—while neglecting a third: nationhood.

“If those are the only two values governing decisions,” Levinstein said, “then any decision made for the sake of other values will be rejected.”

A country, he contended, must also weigh collective and national interests, even when they conflict with individual ones. His examples ranged from settlement policy to the way the war has been fought.

He maintained that measures Jewish law would readily permit were abandoned out of concern for the civil rights of the enemy, at the expense of Israeli men and women in uniform.

“In the IDF Code of Ethics [“The Spirit of the Israel Defense Forces”], the individual rights of the enemy outweigh the value of victory, to the point where there were even efforts to remove [victory], to erase it, from the code entirely,” Levinstein stated. “[Yet] the value of victory should be at the top of the military’s ethical code.”

He rooted his assertion in the Rambam’s (Maimonides’s) “Laws of Kings,” which identifies the state’s foremost obligation as providing external and internal security—harshly put by the 12th-century scholar as “breaking the arm of the wicked.”

He went on to posit that Judaism operates on two separate planes, one private and the other public. The former involves an individual’s level of observance of mitzvot (commandments), which is and must remain a matter of personal choice. The latter encompasses the values that guide national decision-making.

Confusing the two, he said, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding and ignorance of the Jewish religion.

“The secret of Judaism,” he emphasized, “is freedom for the individual in Jewish practice, while the state should adopt and internalize Jewish values in its national decisions. That’s the meaning of a Jewish state.”

As such, Levinstein argued, the state shouldn’t hesitate to incorporate Jewish and national values into its decision-making process alongside—and, at times, above—the individual-rights framework that currently dominates public policy, including that governing warfare.

Professor Asa Kasher, who headed the committee that crafted the IDF Code of Ethics—familiarly known as Israel’s “purity of arms” doctrine—should have been in the audience to receive a sorely needed education on the damage that he and his ilk have wrought on what is already the world’s most moral army.

But he’s been too busy vilifying the government to listen to reason, let alone pearls of wisdom, certainly not from a respected rabbi.

At a rally during the height of the war in Gaza, for instance, he bemoaned the death of a soldier who had fought bravely against Hamas by asserting that young man had fallen “in vain.”

As if that weren’t sufficiently outrageous, not to mention false and deeply hurtful to the boy’s family, he turned on Jewish national hero Joseph Trumpeldor. Killed in 1920 while defending the settlement of Tel Hai, Trumpeldor allegedly announced, before succumbing to his wounds, “It’s good to die for our homeland [country].”

Kasher called the legendary statement “stupid,” declaring that it’s actually “bad to die for our country.” This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given his comments several years ago about none other than Roi Klein himself.

Interviewed on a podcast in 2016, a decade after Klein’s memorable act of selfless courage, Kasher cast aspersions on the event and its aftermath.

Was jumping on the grenade “the right reaction to the circumstances?” Kasher asked rhetorically. His reply was even worse.

“It cost him his life, and it raises a lot of emotions and thoughts,” he opined. “[But] perhaps there was something else he could have done that would have served as a better example? There is a tendency to gravitate toward the extreme in public discourse, to describe things as extremely positive or extremely negative. We only have part of the full picture but that is enough for people to crown heroes.”

If Levinstein is correct in his assessment about a renaissance of Jewish identity and patriotism, which he clearly is, Kasher and his ilk have an anachronistic view of Israel and its animating principles. Indeed, from now on, it should be the likes of Levinstein, not Kasher (whose name, ironically, is Hebrew for “kosher”), charged with formulating the IDF’s rules of engagement.