Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 27, 2022

Social media has been aboil since the death of the minister of Torah Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, leader of Israels non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox community.

Some commenters were wrapping themselves in sackcloth and heaping metaphoric dust and ashes on their heads, their dignity shattered by genuine sorrow and anguish. Facing off against them were secular people who rejoiced, whined, moaned and played the victim.

"They shut down the Gush Dan metropolitan region on us," they complained. "Our children have once again been abandoned to remote learning and the working public has once again been forced to suffer enormous economic losses due to people who dont share the burden and have been a millstone around our necks for 74 years now."

And when a picture of Benjamin Netanyahu, who came to the deceased rabbis home in the middle of the night, was published on social media, the country rejoiced and all boundaries were crossed. Petty politics and lack of faith intertwined, and the importance and holiness of the deceased dissipated into the unholy air and was treated like dirt.

Yes, instead of discussing the leadership of Rabbi Kanievsky, one of the last great rabbinic scholars, who leaves behind a leadership vacuum that is worrisome yet also hopeful, instead of respecting his significance in the eyes of his hundreds of thousands of admirers and disciples the secular community was preoccupied by its morning espresso (which was a little late), the shutdown of commerce for a single day and, above all, with diminishing the deceased and his community of followers.

A prominent feminist activist called him a miserable racist. Haaretz columnist Uri Misgav opened his column, which called for a secular day of rage against the Haredi minority, as follows: The day of Rabbi Kanievskys funeral was a deranged, dark day. A day when the state and secularism decided to cancel themselves before the Haredim. (Haaretz in Hebrew, March 20)

Around a million ultra-Orthodox Jews lost the light of their lives, the man who to them represented the Torah itself, the very essence of their existence, last Friday. And an unreasonable number of secular people you can guess from which ethnic community and which political bloc were settling accounts, behaving pettily and getting angry.

They were angry over the Haredi communitys blind admiration for the elderly leader, who was modest to a fault, and who dragged his flock into the warm and lucrative embrace of the extreme right, which gobbles up Arabs. But they were also angry over all the unsettled accounts of the past. Over the ultra-Orthodox communitys separatism, arrogance, conservatism, draft-dodging, refusal to study the core curriculum and takeovers of secular cities (from Haifa, Tiberias and Arad to Kiryat Malakhi, Netivot and Ofakim), which are almost always accompanied by conflict and harassment, suspicion and prejudice.

Instead of aiming their poisoned arrows at the Haredi community and once again displaying their inferior, almost antisemitic stereotypes these abusive secular people, the ultimate victims in their own eyes, would have been better off directing their anger at themselves and their secular representatives in government; and in this case, particularly at the police and Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev.

The police and Bar-Lev succumbed to disproportionate panic, apparently due to last Aprils fatal stampede at Mount Meron. They demanded that the rabbis funeral be put off for two days to give the security forces time to prepare, ordered to shut down the Gush Dan region for an entire day and issued an unprecedentedly aggressive press statement asking people not to leave their homes on the day of the funeral.

Instead of closing down parts of Bnei Brak based on the path of the funeral procession just as they did when Rabbi Ovadia Yosef died, even though that funeral was attended by 700,000 to 800,000 people, almost double the number at Rabbi Kanievskys funeral the terrified police, lacking a sense of proportion, chose to paralyze Israels most important metropolitan region, impose a closure on it, and rouse the secular communitys holy wrath.

The tiniest concession, or even momentary discomfort, is enough to wake this communitys darkest instincts toward the ultra-Orthodox, who, ever since the coronavirus erupted, have become the punching bag of those who consider themselves enlightened.

Two years ago, when the pandemic began, I discussed the crisis between the secular and Haredi communities in the documentary series The Jewish Wars. I titled the episode on the outpouring of secular racism and hatred against the ultra-Orthodox for having dared to disobey the regulations and open their synagogues and study halls Haredophobia.

It had everything the burning, primeval, almost inexplicable secular hatred; the terrible ignorance about the ultra-Orthodox community, which is currently undergoing tectonic changes (a new middle class thats more influential and integrated, a growing number of people gaining education and professional careers, the improvement in womens rights, a decline in birthrates).

It also included cheap demagoguery by politicians on both the right and the left, who not only reinforce ridiculous racist positions, but also demand that the growing ultra-Orthodox community serve in the army, study the core curriculum and fall in line with the universalist secular code that brands every religious faith as primitive, misogynist and homophobic.

For a moment, like many of my colleagues, I was convinced that this outburst of hatred would disappear when the coronavirus did and that the secular community would finally realize theres a large community here with a different worldview and different priorities, just like the Palestinians, for example. But no.

Instead of Rabbi Kanievskys death eliciting a smidgen of empathy and shared sorrow, the secular tribe has once again revealed itself as spoiled and rational in the bad sense of the word. Its a tribe that cant distinguish between the important and the trivial, a tribe that's quick to blame those non-metaphorical blacks (black-clad, that is) for all its own frustrations and sicknesses. Yes, there are times when its embarrassing to be secular.

More:

Sometimes, its embarrassing to be secular in Israel - Haaretz

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