WHO LOSES MOST FROM VIOLENT PROTESTS?

While in Kiryat Sanz in Netanya last week long enough to daven Minchah prior to an
afternoon at Netanya’s separate beach I noticed a few women walking through
the chassidic enclave in decidedly non-chassidic dress. What struck me was that
no one from the Sanz community seemed to notice.

Later I called friends who live in the community to ensure myself that my powers of
observation had not deserted me. They told me the story of a rav
vacationing in Sanz who complained to the late Klausenberger Rebbe ztz”l
that he had seen immodestly dressed women. The Rebbe responded “That’s
amazing. I’ve been living here over ten years and I’ve never seen anything
like that.”

Another time the Rebbe learned that some of his chassidim had shouted “Shabbes” at
seaside bathers. He ordered them to cease and desist. “No one ever became frum
from being shouted at” he said. “Instead open up your windows and sing zmiros
at the top of your lungs. That might have some positive effect.”

Sadly the peaceful relations between Klausenberger chassidim and their neighbors in
Netanya Stoliner chassidim and secular neighbors in Jerusalem’s Givat Ze’ev
neighborhood Gerrer chassidim and their fellow residents of Arad and dozens
of other places around the country where chareidim and non-chareidim live side
by side will never be reported. The media always prefers stories of extremist
refugees from Meah Shearim ordering their national religious neighbors in Ramat
Beit Shemesh to remove the TVs from their homes or threatening violence against
the opening of a national religious girls’ school on a plot of land adjacent to
both communities. Such incidents allow the media to make its favorite equation
of chareidi Jews with the Taliban.

The chareidi community cannot afford that equation. We have witnessed in Europe
the backlash against rapidly growing Muslim minorities who often treat their
neighborhoods as captured Islamic territory into which police dare not enter
visitors not conforming to Islamic dress codes can expect to be assaulted or
worse and in which Islamic mores such as honor killings still prevail. The
leaders of France Germany and Britain have already declared multiculturalism
a failure and voters have enacted bans on certain forms of Islamic dress and
in Switzerland on the building of minarets. Many observers predict that blood
will flow in violent confrontations between native Europeans and Muslims.

Just as many Europeans are terrified of the threat to their cultural patrimony from
rapidly growing Muslim populations so too are secular Israelis scared of the
prospect of chareidi domination. Anything that feeds those fears endangers the
chareidi community which is very vulnerable today. The social justice protests
have again focused attention on budget allocations to the chareidi community
and revived calls for electoral reform to remove the stranglehold on the
government of small — i.e. religious — parties.

The growing chareidi population desperately needs places to live. Many mayors however
have actively worked to keep chareidim out of their cities in part because of
fears that as soon as they become a critical mass they will demand the closure
of streets on Shabbos or seek to impose their lifestyles on their secular
neighbors.

Such behavior has nothing to do with Torah. Unlike Islam which divides the world
between territory already conquered by Islam and that still to be conquered
Judaism is not a religion of territorial conquest and does not view
territorial conquest as the sign of Divine favor. The Torah has no parallel to
Islam’s obligation to impose Sharia (Islamic law) on nonbelievers through
jihad. It recognizes parallel legal systems — dina d’malchusa dina. Even
with respect to fellow Jews it is not our duty to impose halachah. We leave
that for Mashiach.

Jews have lived as despised minorities in larger Christian and Islamic societies for
most of the past two millennia. Prudence alone militated against any attempt to
foist our cultural norms on the surrounding society. Satmar chassidim in
Williamsburg for instance do not post dress code requirements in buildings
shared with Puerto Ricans. Unless one believes that the Redemption has already
arrived the same prudential considerations that have guided Jewish life for
two thousand years still apply in Israel today.

I don’t expect to convince the small group of extremists in Ramat Beit Shemesh
that their actions endanger the chareidi community. They don’t listen to Rav
Elyashiv why would they listen to me? But I do expect the chareidi mayor of
Beit Shemesh to make clear that violence will not establish facts on the
ground. A decade ago the chareidi community rightly protested when twenty-five
first-graders in a one-room cheder in the northern community of Tzoran were
confronted by screaming mobs for a month and the cheder was stoned and defaced
throughout the year. Now it is time for us to show that we understand the
principle of reciprocal respect for the rights of others upon which life in a
democratic society is based and that force is not our way.

A Justified Panic

It would be obscene to describe Hurricane Irene which claimed nearly fifty lives
including at least two precious neshamos in our community and caused
hundreds of millions of dollars in damages as over-hyped. But the projected
first hurricane in recent memory in the New York metropolitan area never quite
materialized.

I called a friend in Lakewood after the storm had largely passed to get a
firsthand report. He described how the city had braced for Hurricane Irene.
Every available flashlight flew off the shelves. A local gas station owner
reported selling 100000 gallons of gasoline enough to make up for the entire
summer shortfall.

Then my friend said something that I think we can all use. “It’s fascinating how
frantic we all were over what was only a possible occurrence. Yet a month from
now we know with absolute certainty that we will stand all alone in front of
the King and have to give account. Yet I don’t see any signs of similar panic.”

The explanation cannot be that there is still plenty of time to prepare for Rosh
HaShanah. We all know from bitter experience that there is never enough time.
Not for naught do the piercing shofar blasts call upon us to awaken from our
slumber from Rosh Chodesh Elul.

The baalei mussar explain the injunction to the judge not to take any form
of bribery “for the bribe will blind the eyes of the wise and render crooked
the words of tzaddikim” as applying to each of us as judges of our own
behavior. The yetzer has an infinite number of bribes at its disposal
and knows each of our points of vulnerability.

Negating the impact of the yetzer’s bribes is an almost impossible task as the
double language of the above-quoted verse indicates. Even when we are no longer
blinded by the bribe itself we still do not want to admit that we judged
wrongly and so we pretend that our original judgment was the right one and
continue to act consistently with it. In that fashion we make the words of
tzaddikim — i.e. those no longer subject to the bribe — crooked.

Unraveling the tangled skein of our self-deception so that we can present an accurate
annual report to ourselves and our Creator requires every available moment.
It’s time for a little panic.

****

There Must Be a Reasonable Explanation

The Zionist Organization of America issued a press release last week noting some
curious omissions from the Obama administration’s communications. Candidate
Obama omitted any Israeli city from an enumeration of cities victimized by
terrorism in his much-touted Berlin speech as a candidate in 2008. (Amman did
make it so it cannot be that candidate Obama had placed an embargo on mention
of the Middle East.) Perhaps he shrewdly estimated that his European audience
would likely be more sympathetic to the perpetrators than the victims of
terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.

And recently the administration’s talking points on the upcoming tenth anniversary
of 9/11 did not recall any Israeli city when praising the resilience of
“individuals families and communities … whether in New York or Nairobi Bali
or Belfast Mumbai or Manila or Lahore or London.” I guess they could not
think of another city whose name begins with the same first letter as Sderot or
Jerusalem.

Something other than stylistic considerations however must explain President Obama’s
failure to mention Israel in remarks praising all those nations that
contributed to relief efforts in the wake of the January 10 2010 Haitian
earthquake. Though Israel was the first nation on the scene setting up a field
hospital and provided more aid than any other country besides the United
States it merited no citation in the president’s list of contributing countries
— “Brazil Mexico Canada France Columbia and the Dominican Republic among
others.”

A pattern or just a coincidence?