""But we are guilty against our brother, because we saw the anguish of his soul when he pleaded with us and we did not listen, therefore this distress has come upon us.".
There is nothing more appropriate than this verse, which we read in the parshiyot during these weeks, to open an article with on a day like this, a day when we see how the sale of the movement's chairman, Rabbi Aryeh Deri, is being carried out in the most depraved way, through bloodshed.
If Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, we took the one who had been the slave of the great men of Israel for the past thirty years, and turned him into our personal victim, who pays a personal and family price on the altar of these elections.
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Is there anyone among us, those who refuse to accept this resignation, who would agree to take a hundredth of this suffering? To expose his children to a tenth of the slander that Rabbi Aryeh received? Is all we are begging him for is actually because we think that none of us can withstand the humiliations he has been going through for the past three decades?
But it is our fault that when we saw all this starting to unfold, we did not know how to stand up to everyone's outburst, and to take responsibility for all of them, and to ensure that such acts, while they were still floating in the air, would not happen. We preferred to bury our heads in the sand, and tell ourselves that surely Rabbi Aryeh could withstand any possible scenario, that he is a man strong and wise enough to withstand all of these hardships. And we forgot that his wisdom should first and foremost serve the Torah institutions, his cleverness should first and foremost serve the world of Torah, his clear thinking should help the weaker classes, those who have no one to speak for them.
And suddenly we discovered that no matter how smart he is, no matter how clever he is, he too has a heart of flesh and a large, extended family surrounding him, and they too are allowed to stop and say: Enough!
But we are to blame, because right now we owe it to the world of Torah, not to ourselves. Since we have not proven to this day that the movement is one body, which rejects from it all who do not listen to the Council of Sages, which excludes from it all who speak ill of one of its members, we are faced with a situation in which only the great men of Israel will be able to return it to the place where it should stand.
""Every man shall help his neighbor, and shall say to his brother, 'Strength!'".
The writer is a member of the Jerusalem City Council on behalf of the Shas faction.
