Given the far-reaching nature of the Israeli government’s proposed judicial overhaul—a set of moves designed to remake institutions and the very rules of the game rather than remake policies—it was inevitable that the chaos that it has unleashed would spread further afield. For both proponents and opponents of the overhaul, it is not simply about the balance between the government and the judiciary but about Israel’s social contract, with one side believing that the need for a new social contract is rooted in current political realities and one side believing that the social contract established by Israel’s Declaration of Independence is being unceremoniously shattered. This fundamental clash played out in one of the ugliest and most damaging ways possible last week on Yom Kippur, and it highlights how Israeli society is at an inflection point that may determine whether the country can remain governable, irrespective of the fate of the judicial overhaul.

Yom Kippur featured clashes in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square between people who had come to pray at an outdoor service—organized for the fourth consecutive year by Rosh Yehudi, a non-profit whose mission is to make Israeli Jews more religiously observant and one that is not without controversy—and people who were protesting the prayer service. The ostensible point of contention was the presence of a mechitza, or divider, that is used in Orthodox prayer services to separate men and women; the Tel Aviv municipality had banned the use of a mechitza in public spaces and that ban was upheld by the Supreme Court, and Rosh Yehudi put up an improvised divider made of Israeli flags that it said complied with the regulation and that the Tel Aviv police commander signed off on. There are strong feelings on all sides about who was right and who was wrong, but the upshot is that secular protestors disrupted the prayer service on Sunday evening by tearing down the makeshift flag divider and stacking the chairs that had been set up in the square. Fights and arguments broke out again on Monday evening at the holiday’s close between attendees at the prayer service—this time with no divider, improvised or otherwise—and protestors decrying religious coercion and gender segregation.

There is lots to say about the event itself—and for what it’s worth, my sympathies lie much closer with those who were attempting prayers than with those who were preventing prayers—but it is the larger trend that this incident reflects that is more important. The people who gathered for Yom Kippur prayers see themselves as victims of radical secularists who want to impose enforced homogeneity on Tel Aviv and are hostile and intolerant to any sign of religious traditionalism. The Dizengoff Square protestors see themselves as victims of religious zealots who will not rest until they control the apparatus of the state and all meaningful public space and take over the remaining liberal bastions for themselves, neighborhood by neighborhood. But neither side is responding solely to a moment in time. This phenomenon has been building, which is what makes it uniquely fraught.

Israelis who are more religious have historical grievances that underpin the judicial overhaul push as well and perceive themselves to be looked down upon by a secular liberal elite. Scenes of secular Tel Aviv Jews tearing down an unobtrusive and permeable flag mechitza, trampling prayer books, and pulling worshipers’ ritual fringes feed this perception and fuel a desire to not only defend religious observance but to make it dominant, and perhaps even to use it as a cudgel in service of the political dominance that the right enjoys. Secular Israelis view their rights as under assault, as the current government has done a number of things in the realm of religion and state that appear like religious coercion, such as banning hametz (leavened food) from hospitals on Passover, building publicly funded electricity storage facilities so that observant Jews won’t have to use electricity produced on Shabbat, or looking the other way when bus drivers enforce gender segregation on public buses. For them, disrupting a gender-segregated prayer service in a public square that was in defiance of a Supreme Court-upheld municipal order is not an act of intolerance, but an attempt to fight back against their own rights and desires being routinely trampled by those in power.

There are two basic types of freedoms, and both are equally important. The first is freedom to, which means the freedom to do something, such as pray, assemble, or protest. The second is freedom from, which means the freedom from something coercive, such as being unreasonably searched or imprisoned without cause. If we look at what happened on Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv, it is an ugly violation of one group of Israelis’ freedom to. Leaving aside the more narrow legal question of whether the municipality’s order and the Supreme Court’s decision were being violated, you had Jews who wanted to pray on the holiest and most solemn day of the Jewish calendar in the way that they are accustomed and they were prevented from doing so. It was not a scenario where they were trying to force anyone else to participate; anyone who objected to prayers with a divider between genders were free not to pray with that group, or not to pray at all. The fact that those who wanted to pray in Dizengoff Square had other options available to them in the many synagogues in Tel Aviv does not change the fact that their freedom to exercise their religious preference for themselves in a way that did not harm anyone was unjustly limited.

But if we zoom out and look at what has happened over the past ten months, another group of Israelis has had its freedom from violated. If you are a secular Israeli who does not care about Passover’s religious strictures and you find yourself in the hospital over those seven days, your freedom from having to modify your eating habits in a particularly onerous way has been severely curtailed. If you find yourself on a bus on the wrong line or with the wrong driver, the same can now go for your freedom from gender segregation. Secular Israelis have long passively tolerated religious restrictions governing personal family matters such as marriage and death, but they are seeing those restrictions creep into their daily lives in new ways. One way of looking at the intolerance on display on Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv is that a group of radicals took things way too far because they are extreme ideologues, and another (non-mutually exclusive) way of looking at it is that a group whose freedom from has been curtailed took revenge by curtailing its perceived oppressors’ freedom to.

There is only one way out of this, which is for everyone to embrace Edmund Burke’s notion of the equality of social restraint. Burke contrasted what he called “selfish liberty” associated with individualism with liberty “assured by the equality of restraint.” In other words, liberty is only guaranteed by a web of social relations in which people respect each other and understand that their freedoms depend on mutual tolerance and the exercise of self-restraint in support of a common good. It means expanding everyone’s freedom to without curtailing different groups’ freedom from, so that observant Jews can forego hametz on Passover or pray outside with genders separated, and nobody else is forced to do either of these things. Without this self-restraint, a Jewish state that either tries to be a state of halakha (Jewish law) or tries to banish all public displays of halakha is bound to collapse in on itself.