A dove seeks a landing
By Avirama Golan
Haaretz, December 7, 2004
Well-meaning religious preachers love to spice every argument with a Biblical quote, sometimes mistaken but always with the best of intentions. The story of the dove that brought Noah the olive branch is particularly beloved, because it sounds like a legend that starts scary and ends well, and is rife with a message about sin and punishment, reconciliation and forgiveness.
One of the most beautiful words in the story of the Flood is tzohar. Some believe it means a small window, an opening to the heavens, and some say it is a kind of deck on the ship. One of the accepted interpretations is that the tzohar is the zenith, that place in the sky precisely above the head of the observer. Either way, the tzohar symbolizes an opening to enlightenment that in the blink of an eye it could shut down and be covered in darkness, so when it opens as briefly as it does, it should be exploited.
At the end of last week, such an opening became available to the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox parties. Hamodia, the Agudat Yisrael newspaper, calmly reported on Friday on what it called "expanding the coalition with Labor and the Haredim" (ultra-Orthodox). There was no gleeful commentary or analysis of the firing of the Shinui ministers. As opposed to Shas, which called the decline - perhaps temporary - of its rival as a "Hanukkah miracle," the Ashkenazi Haredim saw nothing to cheer about.
Why not? After all, it is obvious the prime minister is very interested in bringing the Haredim into the government. He is even ready to round off some corners in the budget to do so. Isn't that a wonderful victory? Hasn't a great opening of new opportunities been opened for the Haredim?
Well, it turns out the Haredi community and its leaders aren't so sure. One of the columnists in Hamodia emphasized on Friday that "there's no need to get carried away," minimizing the rare opportunity the Haredim are getting to take part in national-level decision making.
The self-restraint by the Haredim is a reflection of an internal dispute. Shas, whose spiritual leader has already decreed that the disengagement is a disaster and thus made the settlers very happy, is making loud noises about not being interested in cooperating with the government, while inside United Torah Judaism there is a great deal of tension between the rabbis and the politicians over the issue of disengagement.
The tension is for all the reasons in the world, from obvious ones, like the balance between giving up land and the sanctity of life, to the most outrageous, like is cooperation with Sharon good for the Jews, meaning certain Jews, meaning some rabbis with enormous economic and political power in the Haredi community, power that in the internal code of that community is known as "the spiritual future of the holy yeshivot."
There is a virulent argument now taking place around that code. While many young people, fed up with the poverty and the dependent lifestyle, want to find new ways to acquire education and a profession, seeking integration into society and the economy, the rabbis and the politicians who surround them fear that will bring down their power base. Thus, they want to close ranks and go back to the old isolationism.
How sad. Those young people who have managed to adopt a new lifestyle similar to their relatives in the U.S. and Britain, combining their religious studies with jobs that dignify the worker and a deep involvement in the community, are a bridge between the inured Haredi street and the broader public. They feel directly how the public grew fed up with the Haredi-hatred of the only platform of Shinui's leaders. It is that mood that opened the tzohar for the young Haredim seeking integration into broader society.
The rabbis and their envoys in the Knesset should understand that after years of rejection, they have an opportunity now to join the Israeli consensus, which is ready to accept them. This is a one-time-only opportunity. If they prefer their parochial considerations and resurrect the Shinui golem - which in its entirety was merely a backlash against the old Haredi style - by directing attention to the "holy yeshivot" for which most of the taxpaying public cannot find a drop of sympathy, then they could miss the opportunity. The opening to a new era of relations between Haredim and the general public would then quickly close, and the poor dove, an olive branch in its beak, once again won't find a place to land.
