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he’s a popular newscaster and veteran reporter for Israel TV’s Channel Two News, has a column in Yedioth Ahronoth, and does a show for Army Radio. But this media personality maintains her beat while wearing a headband wig and modest attire. Not only that, she has thousands of followers for her weekly shiurim and daily Torah tweets.

He’s a longtime favorite broadcaster of religiously oriented Radio Kol Chai’s early morning show, a satirist for Yedioth, a columnist for B’Sheva newspaper and Arutz 7, a leading lecturer on media and religion, and a sought-after emcee for myriad cultural and political events.

Together, they’re the closest thing the Israeli chareidi world has to a celebrity power couple, appearing separately and together in front of both religious and secular audiences, and rated the country’s “most liked” couple on Israeli social media.

For Israelis across the spectrum — from black hats to bare heads — Sivan Rahav and Yedidya Meir represent an island of positivity, ahavas Yisrael, and grounded Jewish values in a confused world of secular influences.

Sivan, 34, is a high-energy, never-waste-a minute media star who began her career as a child reporter for a kids’ news magazine when she was just six years old. Growing up in a secular, liberal family in affluent Herzliya, she interviewed then-prime minister Yitzchak Rabin for a youth television show when she was 14, graduated high school at 16, and by the time she was old enough to go to the army at 18, she’d already completed a BA in political science from Tel Aviv University.

As an open-minded, multicultural teenager, Sivan was honest enough to admit that the “right-wing fanatics” seemed to be the only ones with substantive knowledge about Judaism and Torah. She began seeking out Jewish knowledge, devouring books on Jewish thought and ethics, and slowly adopting Torah observance.

After university, she did her IDF service as a hardworking reporter for Galei Tzahal Army Radio. At the time, Yedidya Meir was a 20-something former yeshivah student with a black yarmulke who had found his niche covering the chareidi beat for the IDF journal  Bamahane after serving a year and a half in the military rabbinate. Shabbos, he says, was actually their shadchan.

“We had a mutual friend at Bamahane who was making a birthday party,” says Yedidya. “He wound up switching it from Friday night to Motzaei Shabbos thanks to two of the guests — me because I was frum, and a girl named Sivan who ‘had this thing about Shabbat.’ He introduced us as ‘the two nudnikim who made me change my party.’ ”

Media Bypass

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edidya, now 39, is the eldest of 11 children and son of Rabbi Eliav Meir, who recently retired after 30 years as the rav of Moshav Gimzu, a dati community in the Modiin region. His mother Ziva is the oldest daughter of Rav Shlomo Kook z”l, Rechovot’s former chief rabbi. She was orphaned as a child when Rav Kook, his wife, and two of their children were killed in a horrific accident in 1971 when their car was hit by a train. (Rav Simcha HaKohein Kook, his younger brother, took the helm of the Rechovot rabbinate, and remains the city’s beloved chief rabbi until today.)

Although Rabbi Meir is closely identified with the national-religious sector, as is the moshav where the family was raised, Yedidya and his siblings received a mainstream chareidi education — under the guiding parameters of the Steipler, Rav Shlomo Wolbe, and other gedolim to whom Rabbi Meir was connected. (Family trivia: Yedidya’s name is actually Shlomo Yedidya, after his grandfather. His family, and even Sivan, still call him Shlomo, although he began using the name Yedidya when he started writing satire — plus articles for the Hebrew Mishpacha, back in 1996 — so his yeshivah friends wouldn’t identify him.)

The scion of two rabbinic lines and a baalas teshuvah television personality from Herzliya might sound like an unlikely match, but together they’ve created a kind of family front that’s committed to a no-compromise Torah lifestyle while serving as the religious world’s ambassadors to a nation of curious yet minimally knowledgeable Jews.

Through Yedidya’s early-morning daily devar Torah, the opener of his show (“It might be the only Torah thought a listener will hear all day”) and soul-touching music that he plays regularly for start-the-day inspiration, plus Sivan’s daily WhatsApp Torah message, her shiurim, and myriad other projects, they’ve succeeded in using media to circumvent that very media, bypassing the political distractions, Internet buzz, and social network noise that distorts priorities. Instead they’re putting Torah and Jewish values out there as the possession of the entire Jewish People.

“That’s why we refuse to taint what we’ve created by entering the political arena,” Yedidya says. Both were solicited for top positions on party slates in the last elections due to their huge electoral potential: Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi party was out to recruit Sivan Rahav-Meir, and Eli Yishai’s Yachad party (which didn’t make the Knesset threshold) made an offer to Yedidya. Although listeners and viewers might speculate about their personal political leanings, the couple has never endorsed a particular party and wants to keep it that way.

My Anchor 

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ack in civilian life, Sivan had become a news reporter covering welfare, religion, and justice for Channel Two (Israel’s only non-cable commercial television station) and although she had long traded in her army fatigues and jeans for modest skirts, tops, and her trademark headband fall, she says the nuances of the religious world — the tilt and pinch of the hat, the style of knot on the tichel, even Yedidya’s black kippah — yet eluded her.

Still, she was intense, a bookworm, always reading and learning, pushing herself to a place more authentic and lasting than the competition for ratings and personal popularity. (She still is. In a very public coffee shop where we initially met, near their home in Jerusalem’s new Mishkenot Ha’uma development, the frum woman who appears on TV at least twice a week wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup and didn’t really care who noticed.) Yedidya was her alter ego, laid-back, calm, with all the time in the world, a social observer with a quick wit who was inspired more by music and regesh than books and philosophy. He’s still happiest when he shares the stage with soul singers like his good friend and occasional chavrusa Aharon Razel, musical mentor and Breslover chassid Yosef Karduner (whom he calls “my mikveh — he keeps my focus pure”), or his younger brother — popular singer and baal tefillah Yitzchak Meir.

Yedidya and Sivan complement one another, fill in each other’s gaps. “Yedidya is my anchor,” Sivan says. “I was a young baalat teshuvah out of the army. He taught me about balance, about tradition and mesorah. And he also taught me about music. When I was becoming religious, I sat at home and read books, but I didn’t know so much about opening the heart through other channels.”

He also helps her maintain her calm in a line of work that’s often frenetic and tense. “I was so driven, like, ‘I must be a journalist, I must succeed,’ ” she admits. “He balances that, he tells me, ‘It’s just the media, it’s only television, it’s not eternity, not enduring.’ ”

Yedidya is candid about his side of the dynamic: “Sivan is in constant motion. Her time is precious and she never wastes a minute. She says Chitas [the daily portion of Chumash, Tehillim, and Tanya recited by Chabad chassidim] every day, gives shiurim, is always on the run and thinking about how she can be better and make other people better. I’m a pretty laid-back guy, but she pulls me up, not only spiritually, but with everything I do. Am I happy she schleps me forward? B’vadai. I wish on every man that he should have a wife who raises him up to his best self.”

Still, because Sivan is a high-profile media personality in the wider secular world while his sphere of influence focuses for the most part on religious listeners, Yedidya concedes he’s sometimes in the shadows. The pair is chased by paparazzi, photographed together as the country’s up-and-coming “power couple,” yet Yedidya admits that Sivan is usually front and center (and he doesn’t seem to mind).

“It’s still flattering,” he says. “I think to myself, Sure it’s because of her, but maybe it’s also a little because of me? Then I’ll be at an event without her and sort of casually pose, but they aren’t interested. Instead it’s, ‘Hey, Yedidya, where’s Sivan?’ Anyway, I didn’t have to work too hard for my fame. All I did was marry her, and the next day it was Rahav-Meir — I had my name in lights.”

You Can’t Hate Close Up

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edidya is humble, self-effacing, and able to extract the good from the balagan with uncanny insight and precision. “A person who’s a clown, who looks at life with a sense of humor, can’t be a shvitzer,” he says. “It’s hard to overinflate your own importance when you see the jokes in everything.”

He might downplay himself, but his massive e-mail list where readers receive his blogs is managed by an outside professional, and thousands of Israelis won’t start their morning without his insight or his ongoing commentary on the true face of Jewish Israel.

This small item, for example, was a recent social media post that received over 5,000 “likes”: It was a photograph sent to him by a talmid in Yeshivat Beit El, showing two IDF soldiers late at night in the yeshivah beis medrash, trying valiantly to stay focused on the seforim in front of them. Yedidya described the scene in the talmid’s own words: “These soldiers had been on an all-day guard duty shift and although bone-tired, came into our yeshivah and sat down to learn. One of them even had his military walkie-talkie in one hand while the open sefer was in his other. When I saw the way these exhausted chayalim pushed themselves, it energized me too. You know how the energy drops at the end of winter zeman — well, this infused me with new koach.”

Yedidya attributes his trademark open-minded, inclusive approach to his own upbringing as “the rabbi’s son” who received a stricter chinuch than the local population, yet saw how his parents embraced everyone with love. As a child he also spent many a Shabbos in the home of his mother’s uncle, Rav Simcha Kook, who showed young Yedidya how it’s possible to uplift a kehillah without judgments or condemnations.

“Whenever I’m on the air,” says Yedidya, “I envision Sivan’s family listening to me. So I will never say, ‘Oh, those chilonim.’ You know, when you really see the person in front of you, there’s so little hostility. Sivan always quotes about Yosef Hatzaddik, that ‘they saw him from afar and decided to do him in.’ It’s because he was far away. When you know a person up close, you can’t hate him.”

That’s Sivan’s motto, and why she’s been able to keep one foot in the secular world where she came from and embrace the Torah world as well. “When I was becoming religious, of course my family was afraid of where I’d end up, but today they’re b’inyanim [with the program —Ed.]. They’re not religious, they didn’t go my way, but they went out and bought kosher dishes. The children are close to them, and they know about Kriat Shema, netilat yadayim, hechsherim.

“Baalei teshuvah need to be humble,” she continues. “Not to go on a rampage and cut off all the good things, all the relationships. We’re the ones with the mission to build the bridges.”

For Yedidya, music is the great bridge that spans all groups, and that’s why it’s an important component of his radio show. In fact, he’s always on the lookout for new songs that he feels will inspire the public. One such tune — a previously unknown song composed years ago to the words of a poem by Rav Kook — got airplay every day for a month. “I made it into a campaign, until everyone was singing it and getting inspired — from chassidim to drug addicts.”

The words are a hymn of hope, and now thanks to Yedidya, a popular ballad as well: “Ben adam, aleh l’malah aleh — you can elevate yourself because you are endowed with immense powers, you have wings of spirit, wings of eagles… seek them out and you will find your strengths at once…”

Singer Aharon Razel (of “Ani Kavati et Moshavi B’Beit Hamidrash”), a close personal friend from the time they both lived in the Nachlaot neighborhood — the Meirs subsequently moved to Ramat Hasharon and then back to Jerusalem — says he trusts Yedidya’s musical sensitivity to the extent that he sends him every new song for evaluation. “He has a special touch, a sensitive soul combined with a sharp eye for where the public is at,” Razel told a reporter after the release of his last album. “And he always wants to know the backstory, those little things that made the song come into being.”

Last summer, for example, Yedidya wrote about a special bris in the company of Mordechai Ben David. Really, it was about the power of music. Months before, the couple — baalei teshuvah living on Long Island — notified MBD that they were expecting a baby boy and that they wanted him to be the sandek, since they had started their religious journey through listening to his songs. The famed singer agreed, and they even named the baby David, after his father David Werdyger z”l. “Actually,” Yedidya wrote in parentheses, “I would have had him do the brachos — that way we could have heard him sing.”

Unlocked at Last

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aybe that ability to tap into something deeper than gossip and politics is one reason that for the last 11 years, he’s been accompanying a cadre of devoted listeners through their first cup of coffee and their morning drive. People appreciate Yedidya Meir’s special brand because he knows how to put a positive spin on life and bring the loose, frayed ends of society together, when so much of chareidi electronic media in Israel has become gossip-oriented naies full of divisiveness and scandal.

Or maybe it’s because his listeners sense a certain vulnerability and honest human struggle, the grown-up embodiment of a good boy trying to succeed but unable to keep up with the high-demand competition.

He speaks about the pain he endured growing up, struggling in a society that puts its highest value on Torah learning, and feeling like a failure.

“I was an average student, mutzlach in many areas — especially the Purim shpiels — but I just couldn’t get Gemara. Everyone was zooming ahead and I was plodding through. I couldn’t excel,” he flashes back. “I was in a yeshivah ketanah for metzuyanim and they told my parents I needed to find a new school because I was getting 70s and 80s and not 100s. Maybe I was in the wrong place to begin with, but either way, the sense of rejection caused me lasting trauma.”

Yedidya tried a few other yeshivos, including Tiferet Tzvi (“a yeshivah for kippot serugot who became chareidi”) and Kiryat Melech, but as much as he didn’t want to be on the other side, as much as he wanted to stay a yeshivah bochur, he was already one foot out of the yeshivah world.

One rebbi, however, saw the sparkle against the backdrop of failure. Rabbi Yehoshua Hartman — who currently heads the Hasmonean Beis Hamedrash in London and has undertaken the mammoth project of publishing a commentary on all the writings of the Maharal — saw his struggling student’s immense talents as the yeshivah’s star of satire. “Whoever is geshmak in batalah can also be geshmak in limud,” he told Yedidya. In other words, if you’re geshmak, you’re geshmak all around.

“He believed in me, but until today I have this phobia of seforim,” he admits, divulging what he says is one of the best-kept secrets of many men in the chareidi world who weren’t matzliach in learning. But today he’s also joyous, infused with the hope that comes with hard work and accomplishment — because after all these years he’s discovered a key to unlock the Gemara.

“In the zechut of Schottenstein, I can finally learn,” he says. “I owe the Schottenstein editors my life. It’s like pressing Enter and having access to the Gemara.”

Today he has two strong chavrusos (“but I only use the Schottenstein side — I still don’t have a natural affinity for the Gemara page”). With one he’s about to complete Seder Nashim on the daf yomi cycle, and with the other, he’s catching up (he started when the cycle was in Succah). He’s still incredulous. “Who would have thought Yedidya Meir would ever make a siyum?”

This new, amazing Torah journey, Yedidya says, permeates every aspect of his being, from his show to his writing to his family life. And there’s no one who values it more than his wife.

“He’s making me more serious,” says Sivan. “Because you can’t have a husband who’s learning two chavrutot a day and your head is still in your coalition politics. It also obligates me to get more in touch with things that really matter.”

Schedule Squeeze

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ike every working couple, the Meirs have had to figure out how to juggle family and career responsibilities, but they’re both so busy that they literally have to schedule time to meet each other in the kitchen for a cup of coffee and a ten-minute conversation. It helps to share an e-mail address, though (they use the same one). This way, says Sivan, at least each can keep track of what the other one is doing. Shabbos, of course, is precious family time, and in the new Jerusalem housing complex, which has not yet filled up with residents, and with no shul around the corner, Kabbalas Shabbos for the building takes place in the Meirs’ living room — an airy, well-appointed space with a picture window overlooking much of the city.

During the week, Yedidya starts his day at 5 a.m., goes to a shul in the nearby Shaarei Chesed neighborhood for Shacharis, then comes home and prepares for his morning show, which is broadcast from 7 to 8 a.m. from his home studio (listeners can hear archived shows on Kol Chai’s website).

The show, called Hitorerut (Awakening) is a potpourri of Torah, a news wrap of items that didn’t make the headlines or that were severely distorted, his own incisive take on trends and political developments, carefully selected music, several regular celebrity slots — and a weekly parenting corner moderated by his own mother, Rabbanit Ziva Meir.

Listeners know they can trust Yedidya to give a more accurate perspective on the headlines than the sensational spins of populist editors. Last week, for example, he clarified for his thousands of grateful listeners the truth behind the screaming headline they’d probably seen in the previous day’s news roundup — about how Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef stated that (sic) “Non-Jews Should Not Be Allowed to Live in Israel.”

The shiur in question, Yedidya announced to his audience, was actually about kiruv — how a baal teshuvah can conduct a Seder in the home of his nonreligious parents when they still have chometz in the house.

“Within that context,” Yedidya announced to his listeners, “he talked about the halachot of mechirat chometz, and then parenthetically, mentioned that in theory, although not applicable today, a non-Jew must keep the Seven Noachide Laws to be able to live in Eretz Yisrael. It was a total of 15 seconds out of a two-hour shiur.”

“You know how these reporters work?” Yedidya tells Mishpacha. “They’re sent by their editors to sit through the Rav’s derashah in order to find one sentence that can be distorted in order to get a headline.”

During the hour that Yedidya is on air, Sivan deals with the morning routine of five children, ages 11 to 1 (the studio has a state-of-the-art noise filter so listeners can’t hear water splashing, teeth being brushed, and fights over cornflakes).

With his show done at eight o’clock, Yedidya’s available to drive his children to school. Three boys — Aharon (11), Netanel (7), and Hillel (5) — attend Talmud Torah Dibros Moshe in Har Nof, their nine-year-old daughter Tamar is in Bais Yaakov of Givaat Shaul, and one-year-old Yehudit is dropped off at day care. After that, he savors his hallowed chunk of Torah learning time, sitting with his chavrusa in Har Nof’s Bnei Torah shul.

For Sivan, every day is a new and different challenge. What will be written about today? What item will dominate today’s television report? Whatever the day has in store, it usually starts out with meetings at the couple’s improvised office, Greg’s Coffee Shop just down the street. On the morning we meet, Sivan is in conference with Mrs. Rachelle Fraenkel, with whom she’s creating a national Jewish women’s inspiration project, to be kicked off with a sold-out event later that week at the Jerusalem Arena (Sivan hosted the event). And Yedidya has just finished a meeting with his close friend and communal builder Rabbi Moshe Weiss. They’re working on a national campaign to make sure every phone owned by a religious user has a secure Internet filter.

“The same people that would never bring Yedioth Ahronoth into their homes are carrying around the worst schmutz in their pockets,” he says. “It’s destroying bochurim. It’s destroying families. We have to put a stop to it.”

They’re both out of the house most of the day — and even many nights — between lectures, hosting events and performances, and Channel Two’s late-night news wrap.

Sivan admits that even when they’re physically home, they’re not always “there,” but she has a staff of devoted caregivers who fill in. “I admit it’s complex, because I don’t want to give up on anything,” she says. “Yes, I want a big family, and yes, I want my marriage and yes, I want my career — Hashem gave me this talent, and I’m trying to make it work on all fronts.”

One way they’re making it work on the home front is by employing a cook, Ayala, a Yemenite woman who actually worked as a nanny for the Meirs in Gimzu when Yedidya was a child.

“She remembers what Yedidya liked to eat when he was four, and makes the same thing for my kids,” says Sivan, who barely cooks herself, although there’s always plenty of good food at the Meirs’ — courtesy of Ayala.

Sivan and Yedidya also partner in an energetic, entertaining weekly radio program broadcast live Friday noontime on Army Radio (past shows can be heard online). The show, called Sof Shavua Zugi (Couple’s Weekend), is an hour of Sivan and Yedidya sharing the mike, talking about current events, the weekly parshah, family issues, and Jewish inspiration. “The message we want to get out to each of our listeners is that Judaism is as much yours as it is ours, because the message they get in the media is that it’s just about haggling over budgets,” says Sivan. This program, they say, is their real shlichus — and they never miss a week, no matter how early Shabbos comes in or what other pressures are on their plate.

“So many secular families tell me this frames their Shabbat,” Sivan says. “It’s the only taste they get of the holy day. We’re happy to do it every single week, no matter what. It’s a little hard with the kids because it’s just when they get home, but we have a malach of a babysitter — and honestly, it’s easier for me to do a radio show than deal with baths for five kids. She does the baths and I do the show.”

Living with the Times

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ince last Elul, Sivan Rahav-Meir has acquired another reputation. The news presenter has, for many of her fans, become a rabbanit, a presenter of Torah for an audience that needs a contemporary model to connect to the timeless Divine wisdom. Her parshah shiur — delivered on Sunday nights at the exclusive Hangar 11 in Tel Aviv and Wednesdays at Heichal Shlomo in Jerusalem — is her latest project. It requires hours upon hours of prep time and is replete with pages of source material she distributes — from Rav Shlomo Wolbe to the Lubavitcher Rebbe to the Nesivos Shalom to Rav Yerucham Levovitz — for the thousand-plus participants who come to hear her each week.

What does Sivan have to offer in a shiur that started off as a one-time Shavuos night lecture and morphed into a spiritual adventure that packs the house every week? “Well, maybe the first time people come for the novelty, to hear this celebrity who does news shows and also teaches Torah, but I don’t think that would be enough of a draw for the next week. I think the reason people like it is because I present things that speak to me, and so they speak to everyone else too. We’re living in an open world steeped in secular influences, but every Jew wants the connection to Har Sinai, to the previous generations.”

One of her main themes is the chassidic concept of “living with the times,” meaning that no matter what burning issues are happening on the political front, there’s a deeper level of reality beneath, based on the spiritual energy latent in any given parshah or chag. But in a field where breaking news becomes all-important even as it changes constantly, is it really possible to “live with the times”? To connect to a reality that transcends all that?

Actually, says Sivan, that’s why she started her daily WhatsApp Torah thought, which — thanks to a young media techie named Benayahu Yom Tov — as of now reaches over 6,000 subscribers, with dozens more signing up every week.

“I got this idea after the last elections in 2014,” she says. “I was on maternity leave with my fifth child, and suddenly something changed. All the politics just felt so shallow, and I felt awful about the Lapid-Bennett pact that tried to oust the chareidim from the government. At first I planned to write about it, vent my anger, but then I thought — why am I putting my energy into this? Do Litzman and Deri and Buzhi and Bennett really matter at the end of the day, and is this really what I want to talk about? Is this what I leave my family for every day when I fly out of the house? The answer was a resounding no. It’s too crowded in there. I don’t want that to define me. Today everyone is busy shouting at Hanin Zoabi, but I don’t want that to define me either. Of course I have my opinions — I’m not confused — but we have more important things to discuss. Let’s stop defining Judaism through the petty squabbles between Litzman and Deri and Buzhi and Bennett and put it back where it belongs — in the hands of Rashi, Ramban, Or HaChaim…”

For all her hard work, immense preparation, and an enthusiastic public, Sivan is quick to qualify that she’s no rebbetzin. “Look, I know what I’m worth,” she demurs. “I’m also just a beginner. How much Torah and halachah do I really know? I’m not really the role model here. My job is to bring people inside. Inside there are many more important people than me — the big rebbes, the big talmidei chachamim, the timeless wisdom of seforim. My job is to open the door and invite people in.”

During the past weeks “living with the times” meant, among other things, talking about korbanos — and therefore, about making what look like sacrifices for a better, more fulfilling and spiritual life. So Sivan’s Torah audience wasn’t surprised when she was in the headlines recently for what some considered a sacrifice but what she says was a basic moral duty. She turned down a tender she’d won to moderate the annual International Bible Contest held on Yom Ha’atzmaut, after she realized that iconic linguist Dr. Avshalom Kor, who has been moderating the contest for the last 28 years, still wanted to continue (he was notified by SMS that he got the boot). Postscript: she didn’t lose out from her good deed — she’ll be moderating the national torch-lighting ceremony instead.

Media Is the Message

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ot every moral issue is so clearly delineated, though. Sometimes the lines are fuzzy. Today Sivan says she’s trying to do teshuvah for her past tendencies to follow the media herd. Now she’s more outspoken against the standard media lines she realizes are based on falsehood.

The realization hit her in 2005, after the expulsion from Gush Katif. “During the Disengagement, I didn’t realize the extent of the media brainwash,” she concedes. “The media perpetrated this fiction that the Disengagement was the only viable option, that the Right would burn down the country if we didn’t go through with this plan. I was right in the middle of it and got sucked into that narrative.”

Most Gush Katif residents were religious and weren’t regular television viewers, so they had no idea who she was when she went to interview the expellees days after the evacuation. All they knew was that she was part of that evil force that created the big lie that destroyed their lives. One man shouted into her mike, “Get out of here! It’s not enough you kicked us out of our homes!?”

“After that catastrophe,” she says, “I realized how false the whole media narrative had been. I told myself I would never go blindly with the herd again.” The following year Yedidya and Sivan wrote a book about the expulsion. It’s an intimate portrait of the trauma suffered by eight uprooted families, entitled Yamim Ketumim.

Sivan says she saw the media brainwash again during the Bibi-Lapid coalition when a pervasive media campaign hinted that yeshivos were an open target for bashing, and that bochurim in black hats could be spit on and justifiably called parasites.

And so, she’s established some clear red lines. “How many times have I been in the car with my children and I’ve had to turn off the radio because of the lyrics to the songs, or because of the content of a news broadcast?” she says. “I do things differently. I have a self-imposed contract with my viewers. When I’m on the air, the whole family can listen without getting insulted or offended. When I do a story, the whole family can watch. You can give my columns to your kids. My viewers and listeners know that I will never compromise their values or insult them.”

Yet as bad as the secular media is (“It’s more dumb than leftist, and that’s the real danger, because that dumbness is taking over our brains,” Sivan comments), both Yedidya and Sivan bemoan what they say is also a threat to religious society in Eretz Yisrael — the “newsy” chareidi Internet media itself.

“These outlets are always looking for the garbage and they’ve presented chareidim to the world as a bunch of creeps, abusers, and extortionists,” says Yedidya, who has personally put those sites on his blacklist. “I was once at a conference in Eilat when this very anti-chareidi journalist started screaming against the chareidim. And do you know what she said? She said, ‘Everything I just told you doesn’t come from the secular media. It’s straight from your chareidi websites.’

“The unfortunate state of affairs,” says Yedidya, “is that today in the media, even in what’s supposedly ‘kosher’ media, Judaism has become the problem, not the solution.”

The main reason, he says, is that in the Israeli chareidi world, most of the journalists are the ones who never fit into mainstream society, the ones that didn’t succeed in cheder or got thrown out of yeshivos, and are at odds with their parents. “So this isn’t the kind of media that celebrates the good or looks for the heroes. It’s a creation of angry, disillusioned people who hate the society, even as they live within it. And the worst part is that since we’re all exposed to their writing and reporting, we start believing that our society is a lot sicker than it is. We need to stop this mess.”

And so, from their respective perches — in front of the TV camera or in the studio — Yedidya Meir and Sivan Rahav are on a journey together, bringing an enthusiastic public along with them. “We look around and realize that the media has hijacked Judaism,” says Sivan. “We want to use the media to restore Judaism to its proper place.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 607)