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by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
November 8, 2002
[posted with permission of the author]
News that Hillel Halkin sleeps well at night –could not have been more timely (``If I were religious, I’d be worried," November 1- see below). Halkin’s piece arrived via Email but moments after a good friend, who, like Halkin, would be described as secular, kept me on the phone for an hour lamenting Israel’s lack of a future.
According to my friend, when Chief of Staff General Moshe Ya’alon told a group of leading industrialists last week that there is no alternative to winning a decisive victory over Arafat, even though it might take years, they responded that he was quite mad: The State of Israel doesn’t have years; its economy is on the verge of collapse. One of the major banks may soon fail under the weight of bad business loans, credit for business has dried up, and anyone who can move his factories, and in many cases his family, abroad is doing so.
Even worse, in the view of my friend, the settlers, their ultra-Orthodox allies in any right-wing government, and various parties of the Left have all, in one way or another, made common cause with Hamas, against the idea of a Jewish democratic state – the former with their dream of one state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, in which there will soon be a majority of non-Jews; the latter with their advocacy of a "state of all its citizens".
After getting off the phone with my friend, the wonder was not that anyone is sleeping poorly, but that they are sleeping at all. Thus news that Halkin sleeps soundly came as a relief. It was a further relief to learn that Halkin is convinced, despite his lack of belief in any Divine promise, that ``this land belongs to [us] inalienably." I’m not sure, however, what the source of that inalienable right is, or why it provides Halkin with such a sense of security. The American Indians presumably felt the same way, and it does not appear that they will be reclaiming former hunting grounds any time in the near future.
If he were religious, Halkin informs us, he would be greatly worried by the warnings of exile for our failure to heed God’s commands found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Not, mind you, because of the widespread trafficking in women’s bodies, our world leading rates of school violence, the general ignorance of the Torah’s teachings, or ubiquitous Sabbath desecration – all among the reasons given by the Torah for Divine wrath, but because of the treatment of their Arab neighbors by the settlers of Tapuah and Itamar.
At the very least, then, Halkin’s oped demonstrates how far the actions of a few crazies can go to alienate one’s staunchest supporters. Halkin, after all, authored perhaps the strongest defense of the settlement enterprise just a few months ago in Commentary (‘’Why the Settlements Should Stay," June 2002).
He surely knows that there is much more to the story being reported last week than the standard portrayal of settlers wantonly attacking Palestinians and depriving them of their livelihood. Last week’s murder of two teenage girls and a woman in Hermesh by a terrorist who hid himself in an adjacent olive grove demonstrates why settlers react with fear to Palestinian olive-pickers approaching their perimeter fences.
In addition, it is clear that the army can provide, at best, only partial protection for the settlements. If one’s wife and children are subjected to life-threatening stonings, and even shootings, from Arab olive groves, a call to the local muktar with the message, ``Nice olive grove you have here, it would be a pity if anything happened to it," may be the only way to protect one’s loved ones. That is essentially the strategy pursued against the fedayeen in the fifties. And no less a civil libertarian than Alan Dershowitz has recommended that Israel eliminate homicide bombers by announcing that any village from which such a bomber comes will be leveled. By comparison, cutting down a few olive trees is mild.
Still, it must be admitted that some settlers have acted to their Palestinian neighbors in ways that completely belie the oft-expressed desire to peacefully coexist with those neighbors. Just as Al Qaeda has provided an ideological justification for social misfits and common criminals around the globe, so too can Judaism be hijacked to provide cover for those suffering from multiple personality disorders.
Nor is it only the settlers who suffer from the bad apples in their midst. So does the chareidi community. My Rosh Yeshiva once told me that the stone-throwing on the Ramot Road did more to temper the first wave of the teshuva movement in Israel than anything else, as the entire hareidi community became associated in the public mind with the stone throwers. Two decades later, 50-100 descendants of the original stone-throwers now moved to Ramat Beit Shemesh, seem determined to repeat their ancestors’ original triumph. In order to force closure of a road running through their neighborhood on Shabbat, they have resorted to throwing rocks and sending flaming shopping carts hurtling at traffic below, in many cases even after the end of Shabbat.
There are many reasons why other hareidim refrain from condemning these crazies. One is that they do not see themselves as implicated by their actions. Just as no secular leader feels the need apologize on behalf of the community for every axe-murderer or drug dealer, they see no reason to apologize for those whom they see as part of a completely different community – e.g., `` fanatics." But as A.M. Rosenthal once wrote of well-heeled American Jews, ``In your eyes you may be Madison Avenue, in their eyes you’re just another hasid." So too is the entire haredi community, and more important the Torah itself, tarred by association.
Another reason that settlers and haredim alike refrain from condemning those identified with them is their reluctance to join hands with enemies of the entire settlement enterprise or the larger haredi community, who are using the actions of a few to blacken a whole community. Nothing could have served Peace Now’s cause more than the theft of Palestinian olives or the harassment of the villagers of Yanoun. And similarly, the mayor of Beit Shemesh has his own political calculus for keeping the situation heated.
Another reason for refraining from condemnation is sympathy for the protesters’ "issues". The road through the religious neighborhoods of Ramat Beit Shemesh could be closed with minimal inconvenience to secular drivers. And the haredi community has been repeatedly shafted by the municipality in the provision of buildings for synagogues and schools in Ramat Beit Shemesh.
But the Chechnyans who seized the Moscow theater also had their ``issues." A good cause, can never justify using methods forbidden by the Torah. And nothing will taint a just cause more fatally than employing immoral means.
We can thank Hillel Halkin for the reminder, that we must protest, and protest loudly, when those perceived as marching under our banner disgrace the Torah.
HILLEL HALKIN'S AGAINST THE GRAIN: If I were religious, I'd be worried
Oct. 31, 2002
Despite all we're going through in this country, I sleep fairly well. I don't lie in bed thinking about possible nuclear-tipped Iraqi missiles, or wake up in the middle of the night because Jewish settlers in the West Bank have been - as Naomi Chazan put it in these pages last Friday - "systematically, viciously, and maliciously thwarting Palestinian efforts to gather their olive crop."
I'm confident that we'll survive these and other things. But that's only because, by the sociological standards of Israel, I am a secular Jew. If I were a religious one, I'd be scared stiff.
True, we're used to hearing the opposite. We non-believers, we are told by those with greater faith, have no confidence in the future. Deep in our hearts, we lack the conviction that the land of Israel is eternally ours because we don't believe in the God of Israel who gave it to us. If only we did, we would realize that no power on earth can possibly drive us from it.
Well, perhaps not on earth. But take a look at Deuteronomy 28 (although Leviticus 27, or dozens of passages in the Prophets would do just as well): "And if you obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you this day, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth . But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God . then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city and cursed shall you be in the field . The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; you shall go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them; and you shall be a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth . The sojourner who is among you shall mount above you higher and higher; and you shall come down lower and lower . And the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other . And among these nations you shall find no ease, and there shall be no rest for the sole of your foot ."
The tocheha, as the above passage is known in Jewish tradition, gets a lot scarier than this. It gets so bad that the orah reader in the synagogue rushes through it in a nervous whisper. So let's skip its more gruesome details and make do with observing that when the Torah says "all" God's commandments, it presumably means all. This includes not only such admittedly important mitzvot as the wearing of ritual fringes or the abstention from eating fish without scales, but even such minor injunctions as "Thou shalt not steal" and "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong . for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."
And these last two are less than compatible with the behavior of the religious settlers of Tapuah, who have been (according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel) systematically picking and making off with the olives of the Palestinian village of Kafr Yusf, or of the settlers of Itamar, who have so terrorized the nearby village of Yanoun that its Palestinian inhabitants have, by all reports, deserted it en masse.
I SLEEP pretty well. Unlike most of my secular friends, I have always supported the existence of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, and cannot conceive of any acceptable peace agreement with the Palestinians that denies the right of Jews to live in these areas. Nor can I conceive - as apparently can many adherents of the Israeli Left - of any acceptable cease-fire with the Palestinians or Palestinian terror that leaves the settlers out of it. The idea that some people's lives are to be defended less than mine because they are, with the past approval of all of my country's governments, living in one part of the land of Israel while I am living in another, strikes me as morally abhorrent. And I have no doubt that, as a Jew, whatever political compromises have to be struck with the Palestinian national movement in the end, this land belongs to me inalienably.
But that is only, I repeat, because I am not a religious Jew. For if there is one thing the Bible makes clear over and over it is that the land of Israel is eminently alienable from the people of Israel. It is given to them provisionally, and this gift can and has been revoked whenever they have not lived up to their side of the bargain.
Nor is the God of the Bible anyone's fool. You can't tell Him, as former chief rabbi Mordechai Eliahu tried telling Israelis last week, that Palestinian villagers do not really own their olive crop because the land of Israel was taken by their ancestors from our ancestors. The God who says "Thou shalt not steal" cannot be cozened with cheap casuistry - and He is the God who says this land can be taken from us again.
Scary! Yet the settlement movement, which is largely religious in its leadership and composition, does not seem to be scared in the least. Although over the past 35 years the settlers in the occupied territories have, far too many times to count, been guilty of violence, theft, and severe harassment in regard to their Palestinian neighbors, I can think of very few occasions on which they or their leadership have appeared to be visibly troubled by this - certainly nowhere as troubled as they professed to be last week when soldiers were ordered to violate the Shabbat in order to evacuate settlers from a hilltop on which they had no legal right to be.
Of course, it's easy to point out that there is a pattern of behavior here that has characterized believing Jews for a long time - namely, the assigning of a far higher priority to the mitzvot she-bein adam lemakom, the ritual obligations of men to God, than to the mitzvot shebein adam lehavero, the moral obligations of human beings to one another. Perhaps this is because many such Jews read their sacred texts as telling them that what human beings do to one another is none of God's concern. If this is so, they are reading them - from the perspective of their own faith - very, very dangerously.
"Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among the fallen."
Relax: that's not Deuteronomy. It's merely Jeremiah.
The writer is an author and translator, whose most recent book is Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel.
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Tzemach Dovid)
If you would like to read other columns by Jonathan Rosenblum, please visit www.jewishmediaresources.org.
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Because of the large volume of letters, Jonathan Rosenblum cannot answer each letter personally. He does, however, read each one.
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