A genius against the fighters in Judaism: What are we going through, what do you have, who is persecuting you?

March 12, 2022   

The High Court of Justice issued an order requiring the army to explain why it is not possible to maintain closed and defined areas for consuming chametz on Passover within the bases, and the state representative said that "the autonomy and freedom of soldiers who want to consume chametz is being harmed.". Money under the covers or investing in a portfolio? The robot will answer what is better for you Listen carefully: "The freedom of the soldiers who want to consume chametz," the freedom of the soldiers... Oh oh oh, how terrible it is here in the barracks and "gulags" of the army. How did we not know this until now, that soldiers are being deprived of their basic right to freedom! And I ask what is happening to us? For example, there are some posts on Facebook that consistently point out every week how much tefillin are a delusional invention, how much the stories in the Bible are grandmother's stories, the tzitzit is nonsense, and the tallit is nonsense. And I always want to ask these obsessive writers what do you have? Who is chasing you? What do you really want? After all, those who don't want to don't have to, why this obsession with proving that everything is false? After all, believers don't read you at all, so you write for yourself, to convince the convinced. And the problem is probably not with the believer, but with you, who may have once been believers and are unable to free yourself from the burden, from the oppressive memories of your grandfather and great-grandfather, who ate matzah on Passover and knew why. I grew up in a home that saw religious commandments as symbols of Jewish culture. We never saw the commandments as a burden, but rather as a hidden treasure. I had a father who saw Passover as a universal symbol of human freedom, who saw Shabbat as a social asset worth thousands of dollars. Years, who saw Kipur as a day of soul-searching for a person, and in the various and many customs as cultural elements and a spiritual foundation for the soul. We approached each holiday humbly, not from a place of commandment and pressure and awe and fear and "religion", but from a place of holiness enveloped in sweetness and beauty, with its symbols expressing each in its own time a moral human asset and the cultural "wealth" of the people in their country. Sadly, some of us have a desire to constantly escape from ourselves, to escape from our age-old identity, a desire to privatize the spiritual infrastructure that connects us to one people, to make it into non-binding universal folklore. Because they see it as a religious commandment and compulsion. But if we understand it correctly, we understand that it is a great light and not darkness. And all this beauty looks ugly when it is forced as a state law that goes to the High Court and is enforced by a state order and not by the order of the heart. And when the court postponed the hearing on the issue of leaven in hospitals, the Secular Forum declared it "a holiday for the secular public in the State of Israel." A holiday? Isn't that a bit of an exaggeration? Passover is a holiday! Every country has symbols, and leaven is one of the symbols of the Jewish state, symbols through which we feel what we have in common and not what separates us. The prohibition of leaven is mainly a public declaration that commemorates a holiday thousands of years ago, the essence and core of which is a story of leaving slavery and becoming free. If all our symbols were to fade away (which is something that some of us are eager to go there for), we would not have a common core, and we would become a collection of individuals, and there would be a state of Jews here but not a Jewish state. Shared symbols give the individual a meaning that he is part of a story much larger than his personal and everyday story. I would certainly be happy if Shabbat was Shabbat and Passover was all matzah, and Yom Kippur was not the holiday of bicycles. And if I want Jewish openness about its customs, I am convinced that it will only come from a place of mutual concession, in which we cease to fear each other and their customs, and respect those who do not think like us. And how wonderful Jewish openness would be then, if the whole thing became a pleasure filled with concessions of understanding and, most importantly, without an order from the High Court of Justice. • From Yehoram Gaon's weekly program on Galei Tzahal