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Rabbi Avi Shafran
[posted with permission of Am Echad Resources]
Have you heard about the ultra-Orthodox Israeli political party that routinely demonizes the secular community for its lack of concern for Jewish religious observance? The one that caricatures nonobservant Jews in ways that evoke the work of Goebbels and Streicher? That refuses to participate in any government that includes non-religious parties, and that wants to eliminate welfare for nonreligious families living below the poverty line? You know, the party that pledges to pass legislation making it difficult for Israelis to live non-observant lives, and that wants non-religious judges to be prohibited from serving on Israeli civil courts?
The reason you haven't is because no such religious party exists. Unfortunately for the Jewish State and its citizens, though, Shinui does. And what that Israeli party's leader Tommy Lapid and his associates vilify is the religious community, for its commitment to Torah study and observance; those they portray as insidious and repulsive enemies of the state are Torah scholars; the Knesset parties they have blacklisted from participation in any government coalition with them are the religious ones; the poor they seek to disenfranchise from social services are the Orthodox poor; the laws they seek to enact are aimed at eradicating Israel's basic respect for the Sabbath, Jewish holidays and marriage laws; and the judges they feel have no right to serve in Israeli courts are observant ones.
And Shinui is poised, according to numerous polls, to win a record number of Knesset seats in the elections that are imminent at this writing, and which, as you read these words, have already taken place.
Whatever the degree of Shinui's gain, the party's increased popularity should deeply trouble all Jews who sincerely care about Jewish peoplehood and Israel's Jewish future, regardless of where they happen to stand on any particular issue. For Shinui is the first Israeli party in the Jewish State 's history to base itself on defining a group of fellow Jews as the public enemy.
Some of Shinui's supporters are no doubt of a similar mind to Mr Lapid and company. But others have embraced the firebrand despite things he has said that they would never dream of endorsing, like his 1996 suggestion that Israel carry out revenge car bomb attacks against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, or his claim that the plight of battered women in Israel has been exaggerated.
Why, then, have those Jews embraced Mr. Lapid? The reasons are manifold but public resentment of military deferments for full-time yeshiva and kollel scholars, a topic Shinui's leaders regularly raise, is certainly among them. As is the displeasure of many Israelis over their country's time-honored respect for halacha in matters like marriage - and the bureaucracies that, for better or worse, have evolved as a result.
Shinui's leaders have well capitalized on those frustrations, indeed furiously stoked them, and regularly revel in portraying religious Jews in the most ugly of lights.
But Shinui may owe its newfound popularity above all to the fact that the times, unfortunately, are good ones for demagogues. The dark blanket of hopelessness that the seemingly endless current Palestinian violence has cast over Israelis - with neither negotiations, concessions, diplomacy nor military might yielding anything but continued, indeed intensified, Arab hatred and terror - has generated a collective exasperation all too easily vented in illogical directions - including toward those who seem to have assumed a role in Israel that Jews as a group have long been forced to play in the larger world.
Never mind that those Jews sincerely believe, as Jews have for millennia, that Torah study is an indispensable factor in the security of the Jewish people; never mind that many Israeli military officials have repeatedly insisted that the army has no need for more soldiers (especially those with special religious needs); never mind that reversing the half-century old "status quo" respect for the Jewish religious tradition that Mr. Lapid dismisses as "voodoo" would imperil Israel's identity as a Jewish State - and, to many, undermine its very raison d'etre; and never mind that the "religious coercion" that Shinui's leaders regularly rail against is, according to Ha'aretz's Yair Sheleg, "nonexistent" (the last "religious law," he notes, was passed in 1993 - and was aimed not at adding any religious restriction but rather at preserving the status quo, in response to a High Court ruling that undermined it).
All that matters to the Tommy-hawks is that a subset of Israel's population presents a convenient target for the public's frustrations, dressing, as they do, differently from secular Israelis and living their lives to a different rhythm. The well-established if unfortunate human tendency to blame "the Other" for one's misfortunes helps render the Israeli public lamentably vulnerable to Shinui's vilification campaign. And Mr. Lapid and company are joy-riding that snarling, snorting horse - milking it all the while for everything it's worth.
How tragic, though, that so many well-meaning but frustrated Jews seem to have opted to join them in the saddle.
AM ECHAD RESOURCES
[Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs at Agudath Israel of America.]
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Tzemach Dovid)
AM ECHAD RESOURCES
Past issues are available on their site.
[Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America and serves as American director of Am Echad]
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