The demonstration by the extreme Haredim (the 'Jerusalem faction') at the entrance to the towns of Modi'in Illit found me and my family returning from a farewell event for my father, who was flying abroad today.
Dozens of protesters sat with their backs to the buses, dancing around the vehicles, and all of us - my wife and children, including the special one, my sister-in-law and her four small babies, my sister and her two babies, my father, who is approaching 70, waited for about an hour and a half [!] until they finally got up from the asphalt of the road and released hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cars that covered a radius of kilometers.
And like dozens of other drivers whose vehicles stopped near the incident, I went out to the scene of the incident, to observe and perhaps also understand the course of events, and then the shock hit me:
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I wasn't upset.
I didn't freak out.
I didn't even curse them in the series of insults I had formed from watching similar events on the news.
Yes, I tried to understand why. How I managed to withstand the August heat, for an hour and a half, with my wife's immense anger blowing at me from the car, without confronting the 'self-righteous'.
I don't have an exact explanation, but I think I felt - and I know this text may not be well received - like an anthropologist observing a primitive, strange, and exotic tribe.
I felt like I didn't know them. Like I'd never met them.
I carefully observed the young and old who were devoutly singing "I Believe" to the famous melody composed on the way to the extermination camps, with the cries of "Shema Israel" and "God is God" from the closing of Yom Kippur, with the fervor that enveloped their red faces from the sweat of their hats and suits, and I said to myself: Wow, what is this thing? What planet are they on and how were you unaware that it even existed?
I looked again and saw that they were wearing the same white shirt and black pants as me, but I realized that apart from these, there was no thread connecting us.
Perhaps, I asked myself with some alarm, the absolute dichotomy between the dozens of young men and women who shouted "Giveld" and "No Dead People Will Be Autopsied Here" at me is even stricter than the one that exists between me and my secular brothers?
When I photographed them for long minutes, they shouted at me, "Be annoying" and got angry, and I asked with genuine kindness that they not be selfish and let me enjoy the evening too, but in my heart I felt a great void:
I have no idea who these people are. I have no common language with them. I cannot, even when I have tried with all my might, connect with their passion. At the very least, understand their arguments. I also understand that they see me as a foreigner.
And this realization didn't make me happy. It hurt me.
