Answering Rabbis Who Call Voting a ‘Mitzvah’

A generation ago, Rabbi Binyamin Zev Kahane told his readers to stop treating the Knesset as the place from which salvation would come.

His father’s list had been barred from the 1988 election. His own was barred in 1992.

He did not answer with a plea for a better slate. The building, he wrote, runs on artificial air. A person who enters it becomes a different person. Portfolios, coalitions, and elections are irrelevant to the outcome that matters. The decisive acts, he said, would take place outside the fence of “that infectious building called the Knesset.”

Readers replied as readers still reply. “One must not despair.” “One must make an effort, even if it seems hopeless.” Kahane’s answer was six points and no consolation: No fundamental change can come through the existing system. The system is built so that it cannot admit a body seeking a fundamental change. Hope is not the same thing as a ballot. The prerequisite is to drop, now, the illusion that the system offers hope. The error that keeps the illusion alive is the attempt to have it both ways: vote for the lesser evil, and wait for an alternative to appear from outside.

He was right about the building. He was unfinished about what follows a refusal. A natural path, he said, would emerge once enough people stopped expecting a remedy from within. That is a diagnosis. It is not a program. The years since have supplied the evidence. They have not supplied the path.

The evidence begins with his father, and with the record of what an election victory was worth inside the real world of the Knesset chamber.

Meir Kahane entered the Knesset with a mandate. The Speaker declined to bring his bills forward, though the official rules gave the Speaker no such power. Sitting as the High Court of Justice, the Supreme Court held that the Speaker was “not permitted not to” table them. That double negative was the whole of the relief.

When Kahane later asked the Court to hold the Speaker in contempt, the judges explained that they had issued a “normative observation,” not an “operative order.” A man could be said to have acted against the law. He could not be compelled to stop. The Knesset then amended its by-laws to let the Speaker refuse a bill he judged racist, or hostile to Israel as the state of the Jewish people. The Speaker went on refusing to advance Kahane’s legislation. This time the Court declined to interfere. A Knesset Member who had won the vote count was completely silenced by the institution in which he had won a seat. Those cases remain the clearest Israeli exhibit of the point: winning a democratic election does not give you power inside democracy’s institutions.

Moshe Feiglin tried to change the government by joining the party that already ran it.

For more than ten years, he registered voters for Likud, ran in its internal elections, and successfully entered the Knesset. The strategy was simple: if enough of his loyalists joined the ruling party, they could take it over from the inside and turn it into something else.

By late 2014, he had amassed enough power to challenge Binyamin Netanyahu for the party leadership. Then, the rules moved. The party abruptly advanced the primary date, forcing Feiglin into a rushed, two-front war for both the leadership and his Knesset seat. He had to drop his leadership bid.

Ten days later, in the primary vote for the Knesset list, he was pushed just below the cutoff to retain his seat. Netanyahu, meanwhile, still had reserved seats to hand out at his own discretion. Feiglin’s camp alleged foul play in the middle of the night. True or not, the outcome was the same.

On January 5, 2015, Feiglin quit. He told his supporters he had joined Likud because he believed it was the vehicle that could carry them to the prime minister’s office. After a term inside, he no longer believed it. If he stayed, he admitted, he would simply become part of the problem instead of the answer.

Feiglin was not defeated in an ideological argument. He was neutralized by the rules of the house. Entering the building did not allow him to change the building; the building simply adjusted its walls to squeeze him out.

What the cameras record is not the government either.

In a short video tour, Knesset Member Matan Kahana walks the corridor that wraps around the main voting chamber. Members call it the parsa, the horseshoe. Journalists and cameras stop at the door. Inside, he says, the exact opposite of the shouting is on display: Haredi, Arab, left and right, sitting in brotherhood, peace, and friendship.

His conclusion is that the country should behave as the horseshoe behaves. The deeper truth is more useful. The hostility performed for the cameras is not the relationship that governs the house. A sound bite is not a political faction. A faction is not a program. The public argument is a manufactured product. The corridor is where the product is actually agreed upon.

The same double-faced behavior has been caught on open microphone.

In September 2021, Channel 12 broadcast a private exchange between Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz and Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked. They led two political parties presented to the public as opposites, left-wing Meretz and the nationalist right, in a government that depended entirely on that presentation. Shaked suggested dropping the Green Pass vaccine mandate for outdoor dining. Horowitz agreed that the medical science would allow dropping it for swimming pools as well. He then described the real operational problem: The difficulty was how to coerce the unvaccinated. The pass had to be kept a little longer, so that pressure would do what medicine was not doing. He added that they needed to make sure the restrictions did not look as if they lacked medical justification. To her, he said, he could speak plainly.

Medical experts called the policy a blatant lie told in the name of epidemiology. The recording proves the larger point. It shows two ministers, from camps that demonize each other’s voters, secretly coordinating a public restriction they both understood was not justified by the medical reason given in public. The public fight was just an announcement. The horseshoe corridor was the real meeting.

This rigged mechanism is older than any one election.

The Oslo Accords did not arrive because the religious public had boycotted the system. They arrived with religious representatives sitting right inside the government and the Knesset, and with an abstention at the decisive hour. On August 30, 1993, Aryeh Deri abstained in the cabinet while sixteen ministers voted in favor. On September 23, five of Shas’s six members abstained, and the agreement passed 61 to 50. Deri told the Knesset the abstention was on the direct instruction of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. The destruction of the Jewish settlements in Gush Katif was carried out by a right-wing Likud prime minister, with cover from parts of the same rabbinic world that now treats the ballot as a duty. October 7 occurred under a fully right-wing and religious coalition, not under a government of the center. If the strategy of voting for those who can be relied on were the mechanism that prevents disaster, that mechanism has been running. The disasters have come directly through it.

Shas did not fail to stop Oslo because too few people voted. Shas failed from inside the Knesset, while voting, on the instruction of a leading rabbinic authority. That is the exact opposite of proof that casting another ballot would have prevented the disaster. Telling everyone they must vote for a political list that simply bargains those votes away after election day is exactly how Oslo happened.

That brings the argument to the present day, and to the clearest current statement of the older view.

Rav David Bar-Hayim, whose concern for the Land of Israel is not in doubt, has restated that view with unusual force. Voting, he has written, is an absolute religious obligation. The great rabbis he cites said the same in their generations. To refrain from voting is to become a partner in the deeds of the wicked.

He uses a compelling comparison: if a building collapses on the Sabbath and there is even a one-in-a-million chance a Jew may still be alive in the rubble, the Sabbath rules are set aside. How, then, can a Jew withhold a vote that might save millions? In a video posted at the end of September he went further. Voting for Haredi parties, he said, is a sin, because they have already accepted Oslo and Gush Katif and will trade away land again for a sectoral advantage. The only moral act, in his account, is to vote for a specific right-wing party.

The fear he describes is completely justified. A government led by Gadi Eisenkot that freezes Jewish settlement, reopens the path to a Palestinian state, and leaves Judea and Samaria defenseless would be a massive disaster. This is not a theoretical policy debate; for the families living on the front lines, it is a matter of life, death, and exile. The terror of handing power to leaders who might dismantle your community and strip away your defenses is absolute. When the ship is taking on water, the instinct to grab any bucket, even a leaking one, is overpowering.

The standard argument is that staying home hands that dangerous government a mandate. But that argument does not survive the basic math of political legitimacy. A government elected with a 58 percent voter turnout already holds a much weaker claim to power than one elected at 70 percent. An uncoordinated boycott where voters just stay home out of laziness is a gift: the other side simply arrives, and the winner claims they speak for the entire public. But a massive, highly coordinated collapse in voter turnout in the religious-Zionist towns sends a completely different signal. It creates a visible lack of legitimacy. If the goal is to deny Eisenkot the authority to rule, the only honest options are to elect a political list that can actually bind the government’s actions, or to publicly withhold your vote to deny the system its legitimacy. Crowning a new government through high voter turnout, even if you vote for a responsible party, gives the system much more authority to enact bad policies than a low-turnout election that loyal towns have openly rejected.

There is a second difficulty, and it is a glaring contradiction in his own argument.

In 2021, faced with a medical and political consensus that a remote chance of saving life turned a novel injection into a commandment, Rav Bar-Hayim did not say to blindly follow the doctors and the rabbis. He said the exact opposite. The Torah, he argued, requires the questioning of experts. A consensus does not make something right. He cited the Talmud: a king may not sit on the Sanhedrin because no one will contradict him, and a High Priest may not decide a leap year because he has a personal interest in the weather on Yom Kippur. A conflict of interest corrupts the process even when the man is the High Priest. A doctor asked whether to vaccinate may be unable to say what he really suspects, because the hospital, the ministry, and the guild will punish him for speaking out. Coercing people with a Green Pass or threatening their jobs is not saving lives; it is abuse. Skeptics were accused of being responsible for the dead. He rejected that emotional accusation as a poor substitute for a real argument.

Yet, his current message about voting uses the exact same structure of consensus he rejected in 2021.

Rav Bar-Hayim is a fierce independent who is not personally captured by state funding, but his argument demands absolute deference to a rabbinic and political establishment that is. “All the great rabbis say so” is now treated as the final word, even though he has criticized the terrible judgment of these same figures regarding Oslo and Gaza. Conflicts of interest, which invalidated a doctor and a High Priest, are completely ignored when it comes to party lists, coalition backroom deals, and rabbinic institutions whose school budgets and building permits rely entirely on government funding. A remote risk, which he refused as a reason to compel a vaccine mandate, is now enough, and is compared to a Jew buried under rubble.

The consistent application of his own method is clear.

When an institutional rabbi’s budgets and standing depend on coalition politics, he is in the position of the High Priest on the leap year. That does not make him wicked. It means the consensus he helps form, the ruling that one must vote to keep the budgets flowing, is severely compromised. Rav Bar-Hayim correctly diagnosed that a captured medical establishment could not issue objective Torah guidance. Yet his argument for voting demands submission to a captured political machine.

The collapsed-building case is a specific doubt about a specific person under rubble. An election is a complex event with many moving parts. A single vote does not clear rubble the way a shovel does. If a one-in-a-million chance of saving a life was truly the only standard, it would have obligated everyone to accept the Green Pass and every security decree issued during the pandemic. He rejected that then. And the question he asked about the great authorities, how did they err and bring disaster, already has his answer: their judgment was compromised because they were trapped inside the machine. The missing sentence is that the election is the machine.

Your vote no longer buys a binding instruction.

The Court and the legal gatekeepers can and do freeze or undo whatever the voters decided.

Unelected civil servants and military officials can and do simply ignore a minister until they are replaced.

Backroom coalition deals can and do turn reliable right-wing politicians into people who abstain when it matters most.

When you vote for a specific person, the party system absorbs that vote and trades it away in compromises. The person whose power is strengthened on election day is not the same person who sits in the security cabinet when the call comes from Washington. Often, international pressure dictates the country’s limits before Election Day even arrives. We still have the ceremony of counting the votes. But the voters have no actual control over the outcome. Being a citizen of a country is not the same thing as giving a politician permission to speak for you.

So, what does your vote actually achieve? It reliably grants the system legitimacy.

Your vote does not secure the hills of Judea and Samaria. It does not force the army to act, and it does not stop the Supreme Court. The only thing your ballot does is give the government the right to tell Washington, the Court, the army, and the Jewish people: The public chose this. Once that happens, the government’s actions are no longer seen as the work of a corrupt system. They are seen as the will of the people. If you vote out of fear to stop a bad political deal, your participation simply endorses whatever deal is eventually made. The ritual of voting does not restrain the government; it blesses the outcome.

That is exactly why the system preaches that voting is a sacred, civic duty. A procedure that actually threatened to overthrow their power would not be venerated as sacred from every official platform. It remains legal, and it is heavily encouraged, because it is the cheapest way to turn public anger into public consent. The small victories politicians offer us, a new road, a minor appointment, a meaningless promise in a coalition agreement, keep the public playing the game. They do not change the table.

Kahane the son saw this, yet stopped at the refusal. But a refusal by itself is not enough, and a private refusal is worse than none. A citizen who quietly stays home in resentment just hands the victory to whoever actually shows up. The alternative is not apathy, and it is not giving up. The solution is to intentionally create a massive, visible void of legitimacy.

Imagine whole towns and communities publicly announcing that they refuse to authorize this count. Imagine a highly organized, undeniable collapse in voter turnout in the very places where Jewish sovereignty is fought for daily, a boycott so organized that the media cannot just dismiss it as voter laziness.

If a government takes power after these core communities have publicly withheld their votes, that government can no longer look the world, the army, or the Court in the eye and claim to speak for the Jewish people living on the front lines. The system can still count the remaining votes. But a population that has loudly declared that this system does not speak for it is much harder to count.

The massive energy currently wasted on election-week math and party loyalty has somewhere else to go: independent local infrastructures that the government cannot shut down, strong community councils, and local institutions that do not need a politician’s permission to function. If political parties can no longer treat these towns as guaranteed votes, they will finally have to face a public that has stopped supplying them with blind consent.

The only way to create real change is to demand local leaders who answer directly to their communities, rather than party bosses who trade away our rights in midnight deals. But none of this can happen as long as we treat the current rigged voting system as a religious commandment.

Binyamin Kahane was right that salvation will not sprout from the building. He was also right that it will not sprout while the public keeps one hand on the lesser evil. The necessary next step is the only thing the corruption actually fears.

The idol survives only as long as it is fed legitimacy. Stop feeding it.

Originally appeared on Jewish Home News on October 6, 2026