Warrior Rabbi

Rabbi Ronsky’s self-imposed stint of four years – after which he will return to the helm of the hesder yeshiva in Itamar, near Nablus, which he founded – was short compared to the IDF’s first chief rabbi Shlomo Goren’s 23 years and the second IDF chief rabbi Gad Navon’s 29 years.

Nevertheless, the seasoned combat commander who embraced Orthodoxy as an adult, in the wake of the national soul searching sparked by the Yom Kippur War, accrued his fair share of detractors, most vociferously of the left-wing, post-Zionist variety.

Along the way he radically transformed the IDF’s Chaplaincy Corps and expanded its scope to include functions previously performed by the Education Corps., such as enlisting Jewish history, culture and tradition to enhance combat motivation. Using his own diverse experiences as a model, Ronsky hand-picked a cadre of men with both combat experience and rabbinic training intimately familiar with the connection between battlefield courage and a strong Jewish identity.

Ronsky replaced the old image of the IDF chaplain, a vapid religious functionary who performed ceremonial aspects of Jewish adherence – distributing wine, supervising kashrut, leading prayers. He was, by contrast, a fighter-rabbi who combined battlefield experience with the religious training to make traditional Jewish sources relevant enough to instill soldiers – secular and religious – with conviction of purpose before battle.

Passages from the Bible, the Talmud, and Maimonides were used to show the troops they belonged to a long chain – albeit broken by exile – of fearless Jewish warriors.

This heady mixture of faith and militancy was not received enthusiastically by all. ...
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