Yigal Guetta is not only rude. He is also not very smart • Opinion column

May 26, 2019   

Among the many pearls that Yigal Guetta dropped in an interview he gave to the '7 Yamim' supplement of 'Yediot Aharonot', he repeated his narrative again, that he was expelled from Shas because of his truth, etc., referring of course to that unfortunate affair from 2017 - when he was forced to resign from his position as a Knesset member, following his participation two years earlier in a wedding that violated the laws of the Torah. However, despite the years that have passed, it seems that no one has yet told this colorful man the truth even once: You were kicked out of Shas, Yigal, not because you attended your nephew's forbidden wedding, but because you were stupid enough to run and say it on your own initiative on Razi Barkai's show - when pride Dripping from your throat.  For the participation itself, no one would do anything to you. For the stupidity, they certainly would. Many ultra-Orthodox people, certainly when it comes to Shas voters and rabbis, have a reluctance to engage in serious patterns of behavior in terms of Torah and inclusion. The reluctance includes not only ultra-Orthodox people from Kiryat Sefer, but also traditional Mizrahi Shas voters, for whom forbidden acts of this kind are a disaster. In the days after the affair broke, I met quite a few Shas voters, both ultra-Orthodox and traditional, who expressed not only genuine disgust at Guetta's behavior, but also sincere shock at the fact that I tried to defend him.  How is this axiom, so obvious to every Haredi teenager, unfamiliar to a member of Knesset? How dare he accuse the Shas rabbis of 'extremism', when it is only because of them and by virtue of them that his name is even familiar to anyone? By the way, because of these 'extremist' rabbis, he also has television and radio shows.  Guetta's beautiful statements, accompanied by a sympathetic media chorus, not only express arrogance and condescension towards the sector and its rabbis who invented it, they also convey a lack of intelligence and embarrassing misunderstanding of a public figure who is completely unaware of the worldviews of his audience.