1.
MK Ayelet Shaked took the podium and started screaming. I watched the segment more than once (and also the parodies that were made of it). It wasn't a gradual intensification. In a few seconds, she went from one to a hundred. To a thousand.
""How many times during the election campaign did I speak to religious Zionism, and I said, and I explained, that if religious Zionism does not have political power, Netanyahu will take what is important to us and sell it to the Haredim!" she shouted.
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Then an octave or two, or three, came up, and she turned to Minister Tzipi Hotovely, who was sitting in the plenum, and said: "As the representative of the Likud, you are deceiving the religious Zionist public, because you told them, 'Don't worry, I will take care of religious Zionism.' That's how you take care of religious Zionism?! How do you let the chairmanship of the Committee for the Appointment of Judges pass into the hands of the Haredim?! How do you do that?! Shame!! Shame!!! I have no other word... When we were in the coalition, we fought until the last moment and succeeded in ensuring that the Committee for the Appointment of Judges would not be in the hands of the Haredim... We fought a full-scale war for this!! The public will not forgive you for this act of transferring the Committee for the Appointment of Judges to the Haredim!!!""
Sorry for all the question marks and exclamation points. I don't normally use them. But this time there's no choice. It's the only way to convey the spirit of the matter.
2.
Something here is a little strange to me. I've been following Shaked's activities for years, her interviews, her speeches. I've never seen her shout like that. Not even close to that. More than that: I've never heard her speak with such disgust about the Haredi. Quite the opposite. To the best of my knowledge, throughout the years she knew how to work very well with the Haredi members of Knesset and do beautiful and good things together.
Even in the bad days of the Brotherhood Alliance, Shaked was a sane voice, a connector, between the Haredim and the government. Like, for example, on the complex issue of conscription. So what happened here? What brought her to heaven?
Well, the answer to all the questions is one: We must remember that we should not be overly impressed by the speeches of politicians, even serious and ideological ones like Ayelet Shaked. Neither by passionate words nor by harsh words. They are not ordinary people, they are politicians.
Behind every emotional or angry speech they make, there is almost always a political purpose. Their anger and bitterness are two and two in their next election campaign.
3.
And that's how you should look at Shaked's horror show this week. Someone said to me with a smile: A few days in the opposition without a driver and a cabinet - and you'll see how nervous you are. So that's it, no. Humans, flesh and blood, get upset because they got up on the left side, because someone overtook them at a traffic light, because their child forgot to bring a health declaration and they won't let him into school. But politicians, when they sign up for the Knesset agenda, and go up to deliver a speech that is filmed and entered into the minutes, are a little less impulsive.
This week's screaming speech is part of Shaked and Bennett's attempt to (temporarily) return to the national religious sector. And it's amazing. Amazing twice. The first time because Shaked is speaking with insane passion about an area that until a moment ago her partner in the political journey spoke of with terrible contempt.
After all, Naftali and Ayelet came to redeem the old Mafdal precisely from this, from dealing with tax collectors, rabbis, dayanim, kashrut supervisors, and balaniots. Something new has begun. As Naftali Bennett said at the time: "We are significant in the security, economic, and political spheres. It has never been like this, and we have always only dealt with building mikvahs. Mikvahs are important, but we are not there, and I do not want them to return us to the days of the religious NCO.".
And suddenly, such concern over such a domestic issue: Who will have more representatives on the committee to appoint dayanim? Who will be elected dayanim in the Ashkelon rabbinical court? Abrechemists who studied at the Hebron Yeshiva or the Shavei Hebron Yeshiva?
And this speech is amazing a second time, because of everyone in the Knesset, who does Shaked care about? Tzipi Hotovely. Well, really. Shaked would have loved to be in Hotovely's place. That is, to be a minister on behalf of the Likud. It's a real shame that she's not there. That's the most natural place for her. After all, that's where she's headed: after Netanyahu's rule ends, that is, Sara Netanyahu's rule ends, we'll see her in the Likud.
But in the meantime, what can be done, we need the national-religious electorate. So after the dramatic withdrawal from the Jewish Home and the establishment of the New Right, in order to get rid of the world of the rabbis and the hardliners, and after the crushing failure with the electoral threshold, and after joining the Jewish Home and the National Union in the last two campaigns, and after the unspectacular success in the last elections, and after Bezalel Smotrich is gaining momentum - Shaked decided it was time to return to the national-religious base.
It is very possible that we will soon see Naftali Bennett go up to the Knesset podium and scream at MK Shlomo Kerei of the Likud that his party abandoned the production of herring for third meals in synagogues to the Haredim and that this is simply a disgrace!!!
4.
But the most outrageous thing about Shaked's speech, and also the most disappointing, is her choice, as mentioned, for the first time in her life, of an inciting line against the Haredi. Both the harsh expressions ("Netanyahu will take what is important to us and sell it to the Haredi," "a war of attrition," "shame, shame") and the tone and the passion. Save me, Jews. Because I and my people have been sold to the Haredi.
What happened? Haredi scholars are not worthy of serving as judges? Haredi Knesset members are not worthy of heading the committee for appointing judges? What can be done, MK Shaked, the Haredi bloc has many more seats than you, among other things because it is more united and more closed in on itself, and mainly because it has always cared about the rabbinical courts and not just now all of a sudden. So in the upcoming term, the committee for appointing judges will be headed not by Yuval Steinitz from the Likud, but by the new Minister of Religious Affairs, Rabbi Yaakov Avitan of Shas (who, by the way, received the qualification for the rabbinate from Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu). This is no reason to speak so ugly about "the Haredi.".
And by the way, it's somewhat amusing to see a secular woman shocked, screaming, supposedly on behalf of the entire sector, about the serious harm to the honor of religious Zionism and its heritage. Why? Because, mercifully, the Prime Minister appointed a Haredi man, not a secular one, to head a committee whose job it is to appoint rabbis to rule on the word of God as halakha, and who recently declared about himself in an interview: "I eat chametz on Passover, but in general I try to avoid carbohydrates.".
5.
Okay, so much for politics. Honestly, it's pretty boring. Power struggles between parties and politicians over appointing their own people to senior positions have always been and always will be. Now, let's talk about life itself.
For the past year, I have been involved in this world of rabbinical courts. Not from the side of the judges. From the side of the litigants. I am accompanying a dear family member who is going through a long divorce process. While waiting outside the courtroom, and generally, while waiting for months between hearings, I am exposed to more stories. More and more people whose lives, their happiness, their sanity, and the fate of their children, depend on these judges whose appointments were disputed in the Knesset this week.
Do you think that anyone who is eagerly awaiting the decision in the court - and it doesn't matter what sector they are from: ultra-Orthodox, religious, traditional, secular - cares which beit midrash the dayan who is hearing their case comes from? Did his appointment receive the support of Shas, United Torah Judaism or Yamina? Their grandmother is interested. For their part, there will be an appointment from the Joint Arab Party.
Everyone whose difficult life circumstances have brought them to a hearing in the rabbinical court, without exception, prays, with a broken and humbled heart, that they will be blessed with the privilege of falling into the vehicle in which efficient, attentive, matter-of-fact, caring and sensitive judges sit. Judges who listen to the parties' statements, and do not interrupt them impatiently because they will soon have to leave for the mincha prayer. Judges who know how to conduct a hearing effectively, who know how to formulate clear decisions and understand that the court is not the place for scholarly discussions.
Judges who understand the need to cut, because if the parties have reached the court, they have probably not been able to reach an agreement between themselves and they need a decision, not reinforcement talks about domestic peace. Judges who know what a terrible situation the people facing them are in, and how much unnecessary suffering they can save the parties, and especially the parties' children, by issuing their verdict.
6.
Don't get me wrong: there are many such dayanim, God bless them. They are Lithuanians and Hasidim and Shassids and Religious Zionists. The monopoly on the light of the face is not reserved for any sector. I only pray that they will increase. That they will take over everything. Because there is undoubtedly one sector that deserves to appoint as many dayanim as possible who grew up in it to positions in the rabbinical courts: God-fearing, men of truth, haters of bureaucracy.
• The column is published in the newspaper 'Bisheva''
