Monday, eight thirty in the morning. That we have lived and sustained and reached this time. The foreign date September 1 has become one of the happiest months on the Israeli calendar. The Ministry of Education is presenting headlines about "meaningful learning," but it seems that the most meaningful learning of all took place this year precisely during the long holidays.
So what did the children of Israel learn, specifically in July-August? Well, it was true that it was exhausting and difficult and painful, but it was also a kind of educational camp where they dealt with the basic facts of life. They didn't go to the mall and the amusement park much, but our children learned this summer that there are good people and there are bad people, there is war and there is peace, and that our struggle for our place in the Middle East is difficult and complex.
Settlement, Judaism, Zionism, mutual guarantee – these are words we don’t say much, because they sound cliché. But courtesy of Hamas, every Israeli child has been asking the most fundamental questions about the existence of the Jewish people in recent months, and their parents have also been forced to provide them with answers. And these answers, it turns out, are beyond many political and sectoral definitions. This period began, as we recall, with the kidnapping of three yeshiva students in Gush Etzion and ended with the murder of a four-year-old boy from Kibbutz Nahal Oz of the Kibbutz Movement.
Want more news, videos and stories? Join the Haredim 10 WhatsApp channel >>
To watch or not to watch, that is the question. It seems that the click dilemma is becoming the most poignant moral dilemma of Western man. Should we watch the brutal ISIS videos of beheadings? Should we watch personal photos of stars that are leaked online? Or just violent, intimate or humiliating videos that don't make the headlines? The documentation of the murder of Jewish-American journalist Steven Sotloff has once again raised the dilemma, which already appears in this week's episode, the "Ki Titza" episode.
The parsha tells of a dead man hanging on a tree, and commands: "You shall not leave his corpse on the tree, for you shall bury him on that day, for the curse of God hangs him, and you shall not defile your land." In other words, the attitude toward a person's body must be different; it is forbidden to leave it on the tree.
Rashi explains this simply: Man is made in the image and likeness of his Creator, and such a contempt of man is a contempt of the Creator of the world. He illustrates this with a parable about two brothers, one of whom becomes an important minister while the other becomes a thief and is eventually hanged on a tree.
Everyone who sees the criminal hanging says to himself: The minister himself hangs here. This is exactly the relationship between man and God, even when it is a vile thief and not an innocent American journalist. That hanged man must be hurried and buried because of his honor, because of the image of God in him.
Rashi, by the way, does not address the question, which probably did not arise at the time, of whether it is permissible to watch the video documenting the moments of that thief's hanging.
And again there is controversy over the conversion law, and again the Jews are arguing, but non-Jews don't care that much. An illusion has been created here as if if a new conversion law is passed in the Knesset, hundreds of thousands of immigrants will immediately stand in line, just waiting for the day when a few sections will change and make things a little easier for them.
Where does this premise come from? Senior officials involved in the field admit that these Jewish wars over every section of the new law are not really relevant to the public that the law addresses.
So where does the feeling come from that this is a new cellular reform by Moshe Kahlon, with immediate implications for the entire country?
A few years ago, the then-minister of immigration affairs asked me to keep it a secret. He told me his true opinion on the Law of Return, but on the condition that I not publish anything at the time. Senior officials in the ministry supported this position, but they also didn't want to say it out loud. It's explosive and sensitive, it's a sacred cow.
The spirit of the minister's words was this: "Talking about conversion is like constantly building a hospital under a broken bridge, without daring to talk about the need to repair the bridge. No one dares to say that the Law of Return should be changed, instead of bringing in tens of thousands more non-Jews and then thinking about how to convert them. After all, a significant portion of immigrants to Israel are not Jews. It is not clear whether most of them are, but it is certainly not a small minority.".
The purpose of the original law was completely different, but today there is already a mechanism of emissaries for immigration, there are already long-standing institutions with budgets and plans, the system is already working. And so according to the current law, if there is a Jewish grandfather who marries a gentile, and a gentile girl is born to them who marries a gentile, and a gentile child is born to them – he can immigrate to Israel with his entire family and receive all the conditions and benefits, even if he has no idea what the grandfather's name was. Is this what the lawmakers intended? And most importantly, is this what we intend today?""
So maybe we should leave a hot and not-so-important potato (the Law of Conversion) in favor of a hot and more important potato (the Law of Return).
In a week, the 163rd anniversary of the murder of Rabbi Avraham Shlomo Zalman Zoref will be marked. His descendant, Dr. Simcha Mandelbaum, sent me this week a new small book he published in his memory in preparation for the upcoming memorial service.
It has already been written here before about the Zionist Haredim who preceded the secular pioneers' immigration from Europe, and Mandelbaum believes that their contribution to history is not mentioned enough: "Scholars of Zionism ignore or minimize the role of those first pioneers. The immigration to Israel did not stem only from rebellion, but also from tradition. Zoraf, for example, immigrated to Israel from Lithuania, one of many immigrants who immigrated as students of the Vilna Gaon.
He arrived in Jerusalem and became the political leader of the community. He refused to make a living from the money of the 'distribution', worked in the goldsmith's shop he opened, and was also a scholar and a scholar. His life's mission was to build the 'Ruin' synagogue, around which he also built residential buildings and public and welfare institutions. From Jerusalem he sent letters and emissaries on his behalf to call on all Jews of the world to immigrate to Israel as soon as possible. His success in building Jerusalem angered the city's Arabs.
The first assassination attempt on him was unsuccessful, and the second time – he was stabbed with a sword on his way to morning prayers. On his deathbed, the 65-year-old goldsmith cried out, "Hear, O Israel," and also swore to all his descendants that they would never leave the land.
The name of the goldsmith is not well-known, but this is the first space declared a victim who fell in the building of the country in modern times. It is true that thousands were murdered before him, but the State of Israel has officially decided to start counting his fallen. When the sad number is mentioned every Memorial Day, the count begins with him.
Jewish status: ""In a little peace I left you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In a flood of wrath I hid my face from you for a moment, but with eternal mercy I have mercy on you.""
