Posted on 11/19/2002 10:02:49 AM PST by Destro
It’s election time in Israel, and that can only mean one thing: Get ready for three months of chareidi-bashing. Current polls show the Shinui party led by Tommy Lapid, increasing its Knesset representation from 6 to 12 seats. The party has only one raison d’etre: stick it to the chareidim.
Still it was MK Ran Cohen of Meretz, the former champions of chareidi-bashing, who was first out of the gate in the anti-chareidi sweepstakes. Cohen found a way to attack Judaism that even Lapid did not think of. The latter must be kicking himself.
According to Cohen, it is a scandal that the chief rabbinate continues to destroy tithes from produce while Israelis are scavenging in garbage cans. Cohen found his usual ready allies in the media to help him expose this "scandal." Last Friday night, Channel One TV juxtaposed pictures of kashrut supervisors chopping up produce to those of hungry Israelis.
As Haggai Segal pointed out in Ma’ariv this week, Friday night has become the favorite time for anti-religious exposes. Religious Jews are blissfully unaware of the ambush that has been laid for them until Motzaei Shabbos, and by that time most of the pages of the Sunday papers are already in print trumpeting the perfidy of the religious and ridiculing the Torah.
It was Lapid who pioneered this technique. After the Dolphinarium homicide bombing, he spent all Shabbat bellowing on the airwaves about the scandal that the chevra kadisha would not bury non-Jewish victims: "Islamic Jihad strikes at the living, and the chevra kadisha strikes at the dead." Of course, neither the local nor international media made the slightest effort to check these charges – which were entirely false – before repeating them endlessly.
Cohen’s donning of the mantle of defender of the oppressed to ridicule the Torah has notable precedents. Korach showed the way more than 3,000 years ago. The Midrash relates that Korach performed a bit of street theater before the people: "There is a widow in my neighborhood who had a field. . . ." said Korach. "When she was about to harvest, [Moses] told her, `Give me the [gifts for the poor] – leket, shichechah, and peah. When she was about to store [the grain], he told her, `Give me [the tithes]: terumah, terumos ma’aser, ma’aser rishon, and ma’aser sheini.’ . . . The poor woman sold the field and bought two lambs. As soon as they had given birth, Aaron came and said, ‘Give me the firstlings.’ When she sheared them, Aaron came and said, `Give me the first shorn wool.’ She said, `I will slaughter [the sheep] and eat them.’ [But] Aharon came and said, `Give me the [priestly gifts of meat]. . .’
Finally, the poor widow grew so frustrated that she placed a ban (cherem) on all her property, forgetting that all banned property goes to the Kohanim. At the end of Korach’s tale, the widow was left weeping and penniless.
Korach, our Sages tell us, possessed fabulous wealth. Had he wished to help the widow of his fable he could have easily done so. His concern, however, was not with poor widows but only to mock the laws of the Torah.
And Cohen is his successor. First, he seems not to have checked his facts. Only 1% of produce today is separated as terumah and terumah ma’aseros, and that which is separated is generally taken from produce that would be unfit for market or human consumption. In Jerusalem, for instance, it feeds animals in the Tisch Zoo. (The whys and wherefores of these laws, and how our practice differs from that in the times of the Temple is beyond our purview.)
As Harvard President Lawrence Summers pointed out recently, when Israel is held to standards applied to no other country, and only Israel is subjected to divestiture petitions, in a world filled with state-sponsored savagery, we are dealing with anti-Semitism. Similarly, Cohen’s singling out of actions taken for religious reasons reveals his anti-Torah agenda. As Haggai Segal notes, thousands of chickens are destroyed in Israel yearly because producers have exceeded their allotted quotas, and farmers regularly destroy produce, in part to maintain market prices. Yet Cohen has never taken to the airwaves to decry these "scandals"; nor would he get a moment of air time if he did.
To believing Jews, Cohen’s summons to the rabbis to tell them how to dispose of tithes is laughable, roughly equivalent to someone viewing a washing machine for the first time and deciding that such a fine machine would be greatly improved by the addition of a steering wheel and a radio antennae.
In the system of tithes, Cohen sees only waste. Jews, however, have always seen them in the exact opposite fashion: as a guarantor of both individual and national wealth. In a play on the Hebrew etymology, the rabbis taught, "Tithe (aser) in order to become wealthy (l’hitasher). The idea is simple: When we use G-d’s gifts and bounty in the manner in which He has instructed us and for His purposes, He gives us more.
BUT one need not buy into the halachic system to realize how off base are Cohen’s efforts to contrast the indifferent halacha to his humanistic concern for the downtrodden. No society has ever succeeded in inculcating it its members a greater concern for those less fortunate than a Torah society. And the reason is simple. The halachah instills in its adherents an awareness that they are not the exclusive of owners of their property. Rather they hold it as trustees, subject to clear conditions.
When someone who views himself as an absolute owner gives away anything he feels filled with virtue, for he had no obligation to do so. When a religious Jew gives away 10% of his income, he is doing no more than G-d expects of him. Which one is more likely to give generously?
Political scientist Raymond Legge Jr. provides the answer. On the basis of a 1999 survey of the giving patterns of American Jewry, he concluded: "While social justice is a concept stressed most heavily by the Reform denomination, . . .the analyses indicate that in terms of financial contributions this group is least likely to practice it." Those who talk the talk of concern for the weaker elements of society, don’t walk the walk.
Orthodox Jews, Legge found, are 50% more likely to volunteer their time, than non-Orthodox. Nearly 14% of Orthodox contributed over $5,000 to a Jewish charity last year, versus 2.8% for Conservative Jews and 1% for Reform and non-affiliated. Orthodox Jews were even twice as likely as Reform Jews to contribute over $5,000 to a secular charity. These disparities become even more remarkable when one considers that the Orthodox are the least affluent sector of American Jewry, and most large Orthodox families stagger under huge tuition bills.
Legge’s conclusions hold true for Israel as well. Orthodox Jews, according to a Bar Ilan University study, give four to seven times what their secular counterparts do. A study by the Gutmann Institute, which is affiliated with the Israel Institute for Democracy, exposed the social conscience of those who define themselves as anti-religious. In this group, only 28% see helping others in need as a guiding value in life, and 88% oppose giving to charity. When Dede Zucker, who was thrown off the Meretz Knesset list for evincing insufficient contempt for chareidim, set up a free loan society patterned on those that proliferate in religious society, he found it difficult to explain to his friends the idea of giving on a regular basis.
Among haredim, by contrast, 90% view assisting others as a paramount value. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are raised regularly, in religious neighborhoods, for widows and orphans from bank orders of couples who are barely scraping by themselves.
Nor is money the only measure of concern. Each act of giving transforms a person until it becomes natural. For that reason, Maimonides taught that it is preferable to give one dollar to a hundred supplicants than $100 to one poor person. In my own neighborhood of Har Nof, the phone book lists nearly 200 free loan societies, covering everything from medicines to bridal gowns to brit pillows to bedwetting alarms to income tax advice to monetary loans.
In a serious moment, Sam Orbaum surely had it right when he wrote, "the charity, social consciousness, good deeds, communal welfare, and human kindness [of the haredim] may be unparalleled among the communities in this country. And he was not just referring to intra-communal giving. What triggered Orbaum’s tribute was the group of yeshiva students that rushed to donate blood when they learned of his need and a haredi health fund clerk who rushed vials of Orbaum’s blood after hours to a downtown laboratory to expedite the receipt of vital test results.
Before Cohen and his Meretz colleagues conduct any more demonstrations against the heartless rabbinate and cruel halachah, perhaps they should took take a little closer look in the mirror.
Given the unending stream of depressing news coming out of Israel, even the slightest ray of good news deserves to be noted. So here is one such ray: Atom, a play by Motti Golan, closed after a brief run of only 35 performances at one of Israel’s most prestigious theaters.
For those who do not already know, the plot of Atom, such as it is, concerns a ``chareidi" sect that seizes control of the Israeli government in the year 2025, assasinates the prime minister and his wife, and then drops atom bombs on various Arab capitals, with the intention of ridding Israel of infidels and thereby hastening the arrival of Mashiach.
Predictably, chareidi politicians protested the production of such blatantly anti-Semitic slanders. But those protests had little to do with Atom’s closure. Far more decisive was the play’s lack of box office appeal.
Dan Margalit, one of Israel’s most prominent journalists and a close friend of Golan’s, described in Maariv, how for the first time in his life he walked out a theater before the final curtain dropped seething with ``quiet rage." He concluded that Atom shared something in common with the traditional blood libel and even The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a complete lack of plausibility.
(Margalit predicted, however, that Atom would find an eager foreign audience. That prediction is based on solid precedents. Just two years ago, The Murder of Isaac, by Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, opened in Heilbronn, Germany. That play featured a chorus, composed of chareidi members of the Chevra Kadisha, celebrating ongoing warfare and bloodletting with the Palestinians as good for business.)
That Atom closed for want of an adequate audience is indeed good news. At the same time, we should not lose sight of fact that the play ever saw the light of day at all.
Matti Golan is not a fringe figure, but rather one of Israel’s most respected media commentators. His program Documedia, heard twice a week on radio and once on TV, is one of the few attempts in Israel to examine issues of journalistic ethics in depth and to subject the media to some rare criticism. On the air, at least, he conveys the image of a balanced and reflective person.
That Golan could harbor such dark views of chareidim and give ``artistic" expression to them is frightening. So is the fact that he did not consider his almost absolute ignorance of the chareidi community a barrier to writing about that community. That ignorance comes through in every detail. When the villain discovers that his nefarious plot has succeeded, for instance, he takes out his tzitzis and kisses them as a gesture of thanksgiving.
Golan proved totally unable to defend the basic premise of his play: chareidim live in a fever pitch of Messianic expectation and believe his arrival can be hastened by the removal of non-religious Jews. To support this absurd thesis, he could do no better that cite Seffi Rachlevsky’s book The Messiah’s Donkey, a publishing sensation of a few years back, in which the author described the three cardinal principles of Orthodox Judaism as: non-Jews are subhumans; women are quasi-people; and the blood of secular Jews may be shed with impunity.
Rachlevsky proceeded to lump all Orthodox Jews together under the rubric ``ultra-Orthodox messianists," whose standard-bearer he identified as none other than Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook. Rachlevsky either did not know, or willfully ignored, the fact that Rabbi Kook’s writings are little read or known in chareidi yeshivos.
Worse, Rachlevsky chose to ignore the chareidi world’s rejection of messianic activism. The chareidi world has, at least since the time of the false messiah Shabbetai Tzvi, generally been deeply suspicious of Messianic activisim and of claims that history has entered a new era. Such proclamations have too often been accompanied by claims that the mesorah has been superseded by new halacha for the Messianic era, as happened during the Sabbatean ferment. That is one of the reasons that chareidim never accepted the claim that the state of Israel is reishit tzmichut geulateinu.
Golan seized upon Rachlevsky’s concept of ``ultra-Orthodox messianists" not because it had any validity but because it allowed him to play upon the widespread animus towards chareidim by dressing his villains up as chareidim.
The intellectual failings of Seffi Rachlevsky and Matti Golan are only part of the issue. After every showing of Atom, the audience was invited to remain to discuss the credibility of play’s treatment of chareidi messianism, and many did. Leading Israeli newspapers also treated the Rachlevsky/Golan thesis as a credible proposition capable of being debated. That is like debating the historical accuracy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The most frightening aspect of Atom, then, is that it came to be produced at all. As Chanoch Domb wrote in Maariv, ``Junk of this caliber could never have been staged unless it were anti-chareidi junk." And Dan Margalit was surely right that the Cameri Theater would never have produced a play in which a single Arab character was portrayed as all chareidim are portrayed in Atom.
The producers of Atom cannot be faulted for having assumed that there is an inexhaustible audience for rabid portrayals of chareidim, just as the Rachlevsky’s publishers were right to assume that his rantings would appeal to a wide audience. (Yediot Aharanot, Rachlevsky’s publisher, did not even require him to document his charges, even though its own preliminary readers were astonished by his claims.) At least two other anti-chareidi plays have been produced by prestigious theater companies in recent years, and yet a third is due to open soon at one of the country’s leading theaters.
At least for now, however, we have learned that there are limits on the secular public’s credulity when it comes to wild charges about chareidim.
How about you apologize for wrongfully accusing me of smearing you on another thread, especially since the actual perp has admitted doing so? That so hard?
The level of vituperation and intolerance between the secular and religious Jews in Israel is frightening to anyone who loves Israel and Judaism. I recall the Talmud's statement that the First Temple was destroyed for the sin of idolatry, but the Second Temple was destroyed because Jews hated each other for no reason.
2. The Middle East Times is not the most objective of sources, as the structure of this article you pointed out clearly shows (and any newspaper that has this shameful comparison of the Holocaust to Palestine by a liberal Jew as a bannered feature is clearly slanted). But let's pretend the issue were just as the article portrays it. All I see is Orthodox citizens using due process of law to pass local ordinances, which even in our country are an accepted means of constraining the bill of rights reasonably to fit local tastes. It is no different from a small town forcing a pornography dealer to curtail his advertising. I don't see any violence, and I don't see anything that points to Taliban-like behaviour. In fact, what I found most interesting was the attitude of the Russian immigrants, that they are somehow entitled to change the country to fit their tastes. Really points to the errors made in immigration policy by the Israeli government, prioritizing population growth over Jewish identity, and thus ending up with a minority that is a real problem.
The fight has bewildered Beit Shemesh's Russian immigrants, who prefer a taste of the old country in their new land. They read Russian-language newspapers, attend Russian theaters and send their children to a Russian-run school.
Hey, if you like the old country so much, why'd you leave? Echoes of America's own problems with immigrants who have no interest in becoming Americans...
3. Non-violence.org is also not a place I would turn to for objective presentation of materials, much less for opinions that I have any chance of agreeing with. I mean, these people are not just opposed to war on Iraq, they oppose the so-called war on Terror. You can see what would be their obvious spin on the Israeli situation...surrender abjectly and let the Arabs overrun them. I mean, let's look at what the diverse views put out there in the symposium, all from leftist and far-from-orthodox folks. The discussion is about Orthodox promoted moves to constrain the categorization of Jewishness to a more rigid definition. The first one begins by describing Orthodoxy as the modern day equivalent of idolatry. The second claims that since no one can really follow all the rules of the Talmud, the Orthodox are hypocritical for being slightly selective and leaving out, say, the stoning of children for disobedience. A standard liberal argument against religious conservativism, and it does not impress me. There is obviously a big difference between removing some tenets that obviously do not belong in a civilized society and tossing out the whole Talmudic tradition as some Reform jews would have it.
The next few authors go on to rant about various aspects they dislike about Orthodoxy, including the assertion that exclusion is inimical to democracy. It is. But that's only a problem if you think democracy is an inherently good thing. It isn't when you lack cultural factors to prevent mob rule, which is why the republic was presented by the Greeks as the positive opposite of democracy, which was a pejorative term. In the Israeli situation, I completely understand an exclusionary approach to the definition of Jewishness as a first step in an ongoing effort to strengthen Israeli national identity.
While I think the Orthodox in this case are actually trying to fix a real problem (the continued presence of people that have no interest in sharing the Israeli mission of Jewish preservation, but rather want to mooch off of a successful country), they should be heading it off at the pass by changing immigration law. This approach is too circuitous and troublesome, and it won't fix the real problem.
What I am impressed by is the creativeness of non-violence.org in using Orthodoxy as a back-door to attack the foundations of Israeli culture and strength...such a novel tactic/sarcasm.
3. This World & I article is incomplete without a subscription, conveniently enough only excerpted up to the point where it begans to discuss the secular violence and vandalism performed in retaliation. All I see is the stupidity of youth, once again, on both sides. Destroying bus stations has more to do with childish idiocy, as is the absurd response of papering Orthodox buildings with pornography. But I don't really feel this article is complete enough to provide a coherent picture of what was happening, and if anyone can illustrate this further for me I would appreciate it.
4. The Detroit Free Press article at least makes some effort to present the context of the issues at stake when discussing the role of Orthodoxy, but the assertions about Orthodox extremism that would be most supportive of your view are presented in a highly deceptive manner, the usual "Some say..." nonsense to put forth a highly radical view of the reporter to create a false impression of a consensus. For example, I somehow seriously doubt that any Orthodox Jew would tell some lefty Jew at a protest that he wishes that "they'd finished the job at Auschwitz"...that's not only logically inconsistent, but inconsistent with everything I know about Orthodox Jews, and Jews in general...to take such an incredible statement without contesting it at all (as if hearsay from some avowedly socialist chiropracter was at all reliable) is a wonderful example of bad journalism. But the shining example is this:
Moreover, many like Don Channen will spend a lot of their lives studying. Their economic contribution to the state, therefore, will be limited.
The only way that can even be considered to be an argument against the existence of Orthodox Jewry is if one adheres, like the author of that report cited later certainly must, to a proto-marxist system of economic evaluation. To claim that 1) People who spend their life in study are somehow not valuable simply because their contribution can't be directly measured in shekels and 2) that that is somehow an argument against Orthodox Jews is completely absurd and insulting to my intelligence. Since when is this nonsense "macroeconomic" contribution of an individual a rational means of determining their worth? That is complete nonsense.
5. The Washington Report article is another case in point where the source (another lefty "give peace a chance" bunch with the usual flawed understanding of foreign policy issues). Advocating the killing of Rabin was wrong, clearly. But there is no escaping that Rabin was horribly wrong as well, and that the angry rhetoric of the Orthodox leaders did not come out of thin air. They saw the future Rabin was leading them to, and it had their deaths written all over it. But the actual "death permit" was issued by a small group; to unite the rest of what basically amounted to big talk about Rabin with the acts of that group of Rabbis is a fairly disingenuous attempt to portray the Orthodox as a bunch of homicidal maniacs.
The panicked bit about "messianic Zionism" is nothing more than a spiritual version of what, for example, I have been advocating as far back as I can remember. Complete victory over their neighbors, and make sure they are crushed. Take buffer areas, and the Sinai while you're at it. So what? It's a point of view about a viable solution to the Palestinian problem, and the fact that the Orthodox lend it more legitimacy by pointing to a fairly obvious biblical rationale for it is not insanity.
In Israel, the political system bestows unprecedented influence upon the most extreme elements.
Translation: the political system in Israel allows too many viewpoints to be aired and gain populart support that I, Allan C. Brownfeld, left-wing syndicated columnist and a card carrying member of the "Surrender today, Israel" club, disagree with.
If anything, I think a much stronger case could be made for the Israeli system causing to much moderation in policy, as it requires leaders to go to absurd lengths to obtain coalitions.
6. I really don't see the Jerusalem Post editorial adding a whole lot to your point. Israel needs political reform, but certainly not in the direction of creating an even more multilateral, paralytic mess. The blame for the divide between Orthodox and seculars lies at least evenly on both sides; to blame the Orthodox for it exclusively is absurd. They dominate the religious discourse because by and large no one else is as passionate about it. Most reform and such rabbis are either just nice guys or feeble, can't we all just get along weenies like the guy that wrote this article. It is their own fault that they are left out of the religious discourse. Not to mention that a lot of the so-called secularist are really socialists and flat out communists, which means they not only lack any moral character of their own but are ideologically driven to attack any such moral character,as it presents a very real threat to their vile belief systems...so they go after Orthodox.
The funny thing is, much like the Democrats scapegoating the the Christian right, it can only backfire in the end.
So, KantianBurke, I really have to say that this is not a very compelling case you built. Sure, if I took the quotes you cited and believed them without any explanatory context, I could at least understand your point of view. But I remain with the point I made in my very first post: there is a big difference between honestly criticizing some Orthodox political and social moves and seeking to undermine their very existence by comparing them to the Taliban (I suspect only the powerful irony inherent in making such a comment prevented you from comparing them to Nazis).
Orthodox Jews are a force for good. "Secularists" who seek to actively attack them are wrong, and will ultimately destroy Israel if they succeed (which I doubt). For what I am sure will not be the last time, I urge you to look closely at the company you keep in your viewpoints; it speaks volumes about their moral worth and integrity.
You say that the Orthodox are just like the Taliban minus the guns, and you miss the complete irony in such a statement. It is the absence of such a violent approach that is inherent in the vast differences between them; the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalism in general are a religious facade with which to further a perverse political agenda. The Orthodox are an occasionally misguided deeply religious group that turns to politics to defend its constituents. There is a huge difference.
However, now that it has been revived, KB also made the following accusation:
In June, a Conservative synagogue in Jerusalem was set on fire. Yonathan Liebowitz, a spokesman for the Conservative movement, said witnesses reported seeing apparently religious men, wearing black velvet skullcaps, fleeing as the flames raged.
This happened a couple of years ago. I remember at the time how every Orthodox rabbi in Israel and the US was made to stand up and denounce this horrible act of vandalism from the pulpit. Never mind that Orthodox synagogues are also vandalized frequently and Reform and Conservative leaders don't feel compelled to denounce that, but I digress.
Israel police eventually caught the perps. You probably did not see this covered in Ha'aretz or the JTA or in any of the usual liberal Jewish media, because the perps were garden-variety secular hoodlums. Police had picked one of them up whilst he was in the act of committing another petty crime, and during questioning he admitted to vandalizing the Conservative synagogue, and then he dropped the dime on his two accomplices. Now here is the kicker. He and his buddies thought they were defacing an Orthodox Shul! So it was not so much that they vandalized a synagogue, but they trashed the wrong one! Of course that all the attention was elsewhere just made the game more fun.
No apologies to the Orthodox have ever been forthcoming.
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