Jewish unity was the pre-condition for kabalas haTorah. As we read last week “Vayichan sham Yisrael neged hahar — And Israel encamped there opposite the mountain.” Rashi explains the singular verb vayichan — “as one man with one heart.”

What was the source of that unity? And how might we achieve it today?

The entire nation prior to kabalas haTorah had jointly experienced the most cataclysmic events in human history culminating in the Exodus fromEgypt and the Splitting of the Sea. They had all seen open miracles.

No such common experience joins Jews today. Most non-observant Jews inAmericawill reach their twenties without ever having met a Torah Jew — certainly without ever having spoken to one. InIsrael by contrast religious and secular Jews are constantly aware of one another and live in close proximity and they fight over slices of the government pie.

Proximity however does not breed knowledge of one another. Both sides of the religious-secular divide are prey to stereotypes about the other. Many secular Jews talk as if their chareidi brethren spend their whole day plotting ways to squeeze more monies from the state while avoiding any contributions to the welfare of their fellow citizens. And Torah Jews profess to believe that all discussion of equality of burdens is nothing more than a guise to destroy the citadels of Torah learning and turn chareidi young men into secular ones.

The animosity between secular and religious Jews in Israelharms both. From the secular perspective negative stereotypes about religious Jews often prevent non-observant Jews from learning more about the mesorah that belongs to them as well.

And Torah Jewry finds itself besieged and under attack. Every non-chareidi party ran in the recent elections on a platform of greater equality in the sharing of national burdens — shorthand for army or national service for yeshivah bochurim. No chareidi party will be a member of the coming government coalition or they will enter the coalition in a very subservient role. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu could not form a narrow coalition of religious parties — United Torah Judaism Shas and Bayit HaYehudi — without effectively handing the prime minister’s office to Yair Lapid in the next election. He would be pilloried as having sold out to the chareidim.

WHAT CAN BE DONE to change the current situation? Most important would be for religious and non-religious Jews to get to know one another far removed from the arena of politics. That is currently taking place in a number of venues. Thousands of children from secular homes have been registered in religious schools through Lev L’Achim over the past decade bringing both students and parents into close contact with some of the finest products of the Bais Yaakov system. The SHUVU school system initially created for students from Russian-speaking homes but increasingly enrolling children from mainstream secular homes has a similar impact.

Last week I met a yungerman who has established 17 kollelim (involving over 200 yungeleit) in secular neighborhoods. He hopes one day to have 150 such kollelim.

Perhaps the most ambitious efforts to create deep relationships between secular and religious Jews have been those of Mrs. Tzila Schneider. Over the past seven years she has put together first under the auspices of Ayelet HaShachar and more recently through her own organization Kesher Yehudi over 11 000 chavrusa learning partnerships between secular and religious Israelis.

Apparently there are a lot of Jews on both sides of the secular-religious divide who are unhappy with the current divisions. When Rabbi Shlomo Ra’anan first contacted Mrs. Schneider about creating a chavrusa program seven years ago she was skeptical about her ability to find volunteers in the chareidi community. But as she went around the teachers’ room in the Bais Yaakov where she taught each woman she asked expressed an interest.

Even animosity and mutual suspicion are preferable to the indifference of American Jews to one another: The former at least creates curiosity about the other. In one of the pre-army induction academies for which Kesher Yehudi provides a yom iyun every month a young woman recently told Mrs. Schneider “I grew up inRamat Gan on the border of Bnei Brak and I always wondered what are the people there really like? What are they doing until the small hours of the morning?”

Though the phone chavrusas center around Torah learning the purpose is not exclusively kiruv. The first goal is to create relationships. In the training course given to each madrichah the volunteers are told that if they see the program only as one in which they are the givers and their non-religious chavrusah is the receiver the program is not for them. The message is: You have to assume that every Jew whether religious or not has personal qualities from which you can learn and gain.

Because of Israel’s small size most successful chavrusas eventually meet one another in person and become friends. Nothing breaks down stereotypes faster than having a friend from the other “camp.” When a religious woman enlists her whole family to help her prepare for Shabbos so she can learn with her chavrusah two hours before Shabbos because that’s the only time the latter has free that effort makes an impression. The secular chavrusah can no longer think of chareidi Jews as caring only about themselves. And the religious woman’s entire family becomes a partner in their mother’s learning.

Over Succos I met Ziv and Motti. Ziv’s wife Rotem had become religious while learning with Motti’s wife Tamar and Ziv eventually followed suit. He described how he used to subscribe to the slogan dros kol dos (run over every religious person) and had viewed chareidim as shirkers of every societal responsibility — not members of the Jewish people. After getting to know Motti a kollel yungerman his attitude has changed completely. “I still want our son to go to the army ” he says. “But now I realize that it is Motti and those like him who preserve our identity as Jews and who provide the reason for which my son will fight.”

Of the chavrusas that continue for two years about 40% of the non-religious partners become shomrei mitzvos. At a gathering last week of chavrusas one of the pairs consisted of two first cousins — one from a Vizhnitz family and the other from an estranged branch of the family who is newly married her hair elegantly covered and dressed with admirable tznius.

When she first started working with university students and those in the pre-induction academies — many of whom preferred chavrusas their own age — Mrs. Schneider was wary of placing young religious girls in such a situation and went to speak to Rav Elyashiv ztz”l her next door neighbor while growing up in Meah Shearim. “We find that a little bit of light pushes away much darkness” he reassured her. “Nowhere do we find the opposite.” More recently Rav Aharon Leib Steinman told her “Enough with your sh’eilos [questions]. Just do.”

Their confidence has been more than justified.

Reconfirming European Anti-Semitism

British cartoonist Gerald Scarfe has rendered valuable service to the Jewish people with his Sunday Times cartoon depicting Prime Minister Netanyahu building an apartheid wall with the mortar of tortured Palestinians trapped within. First he has served warning of how deeply irrational hatred of the Jewish state has seeped into British elites. Second he has provided clear proof of how the contemporary criticism ofIsrael derives from the obsessional thinking of traditional anti-Semites.

Scarfe’s cartoon is one more example of a distinct genre of British political cartoons. In 2003 Dave Brown was awarded the British Cartoon Society’s annual award for portraying a grossly obese Ariel Sharon biting off the head of a Palestinian child. Last year Steve Bell showed Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary William Hague as puppets being manipulated by Netanyahu against a backdrop of Israeli flags shaped as bombs.

At leastBellwas upfront about his viewpoint:Israelwas founded on ethnic cleansing and has no right to exist. Never mind that seven Arab armies vowed to throw the Jews into the sea in 1948 and again in 1967 while Israel accepted the U.N. partition plan.

Similarly upfront was Liberal Democrat MP David Ward who accused Jews of not learning the lessons of the Holocaust in their oppression of the Palestinians. He was echoing 2003 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature Jose Saramago who opined that year “Jews no longer deserve sympathy for the suffering they went through during the Holocaust.” Saramago described the Israeli security fence which commenced in 2002 after 139 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks in a single month as “in the spirit of Auschwitz” and Ramallah as a “concentration camp.”

Both Ward and Saramago gave voice to a theory described by French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut in a 2004 Azure essay: Only the Jews failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust — the danger of dehumanizing the “Other” — because the Jews were victims rather than perpetrators. From there Europeans jump without a shred of evidence to the conclusion that Israel is perpetuating genocide against the Palestinians.

In a 2007 Commentary article Professor Efraim Karsh collected “evidence” of Israel’s genocidal intent. From 1967 to 2000 Palestinian life expectancy increased 50 percent from 48 to 72 while infant mortality dropped from 60 to 15 per 1 000 live births far lower than any neighboring Arab state. Israel built seven universities in the Palestinian territories where none had existed and adult illiteracy dropped to 14 percent versus 69 percent in Egypt and 44 percent in Syria. From 1968 to the signing of the Oslo Accords per capita Palestinian GNP grew tenfold and the Palestinian economy was the fourth fastest growing in the world.

That’s genocide for the delusional.