""Blessed are the people who know the sound of war, O Lord, they will walk in the light of Your presence"; when the people do not trust in the hero but rather they themselves know the sound of war, then they will walk in the light of Your presence" (Baalasht 9).
About 250 years ago, Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov founded the Hasidic movement. The Hasidic movement came into being at a time when the people of Israel were spiritually and physically battered and battered, and the spiritual stratum of the people, the rabbis, and the students of the sages, treated the common people, who could not read or write and lived in abject poverty, with contempt and arrogance.
To prevent them from leaving the religion and to further establish their superiority, the rabbis used to oppress ordinary Jews, emphasizing how sinful, ignorant, and inferior they were.
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The Baal Shem Tov began a movement of rectification. He loved the common people and believed in them. In every good deed and mitzvah they did, he saw evidence of their inner and deep essence and understood that in order to save the people of Israel from spiritual destruction, he must encourage and elevate them.
The elite of the 'holy vessels' could not accommodate the change brought about by the Baal Shem Tov and the great Hasidic leaders. It denounced the Hasidic followers from within and sometimes even resorted to physical violence against them.
The unfettered rule that the elites had over the common people was undermined when those common people realized that instead of using their abilities to strengthen the people through the Torah, the elites used the Torah to elevate themselves, while at the same time needing the common people to be patronizing over them. The elite became in their own eyes an inseparable part of the Torah and the sacred, and therefore any harm to their status was considered sacrilege for them.
The teachings of Hasidism brought meaning to the lives of ordinary Jews, lifted their heads, restored their connection with the Creator, their sense of value, and the joy of life, and the elites could not fight this. The Baal Shem Tov recognized the value of the wisdom of the crowd and believed that it was precisely in innocence and common sense that the strength of the nation and the future of the Jewish people lay. The role of the elites, according to Hasidism, is to help the people discover their strength and realize their potential.
Recently, it seems that the story of the elites in their own eyes is repeating itself in a modern version.
For many years, the young State of Israel (and probably even before that) was ruled by an elite of the Ashkenazi and secular left. Initially, this elite was democratically elected to power, but when it began to lose, it transferred its power to power in unelected public institutions such as the judiciary and the army, and thus the elite began to weaken democracy and majority rule. The elite maintained its power strongholds through the "friend brings friend" system, careful selections for tenure in academia, the appointment of senior military officers, judicial positions, and more.
Initially, the excluded classes accepted the control of the elite and believed that judges, senior officers, and intellectuals were to be looked up to. Through oppression and arrogance, the elite succeeded in making themselves and others believe that their people were smarter and more talented than the rest of the population and therefore had the right to dictate what was right and moral and what was inferior and ignorant.
Over the years, the marginalized sectors have become stronger in many ways and have begun to demand equal rights. In addition, the disintegration of the elite's values, the progressive ideas it has adopted, and its distance from Jewish tradition have caused it to lose its connection and ideological control over other layers of the people, for whom the sense of self-worth is a product of Jewish tradition, in contrast to the elite, whose sense of worth today stems from being bizarre and avant-garde. The elite's sense of superiority lies in its lack of belonging to the masses. Absurdly, the elite needs the masses in order not to be part of them.
The elite needs an oppressed multitude that believes just like it in its superiority, but in the Israel of 2023, the multitude no longer believes in this superiority.
The masses of the House of Israel are connected to national and traditional affiliation and draw strength from roots that are thousands of years old, while at the same time they witness elites who trample on everything that is precious and sacred to them.
After the victory in the last election, the elites feel strongly that their status has been undermined. The people understand the depth of exclusion and oppression and are rebelling against it. What the elite allowed itself in the last protest has led to a deep rift and perhaps even the elimination of the remnants of popular trust in them from a moral and ethical perspective.
The national camp is beginning to understand that the true elite is the people of Israel. The people's sense of worth does not stem from strangeness, alienation, and separation, but from a sense of belonging and solidarity. We must strengthen our consciousness as the true elite through our belonging to the eternal people, through educating our children in the values in which we believe, and demanding that our leaders represent us properly and open up equal opportunities for us in all state institutions.
Also, in addition to opening equal opportunities for our children in the centers of power, we must build new circles of society and belonging that are independent of the left: strengthen right-wing media outlets, create Jewish culture, establish communities and create our own jobs. At the same time as weakening the rule of the elite in the centers of power, we must strive to eliminate dependence on them from a social and communal perspective.
It is important to strengthen and establish the positive consciousness of the national camp, the true feeling that we are moral, valuable, significant, contributing and capable. Our agreement to feel inferior and despised is our true sin. Holding our heads high and advancing our children, our conditions and our status is a sacred duty and commandment. We do not need violence, God forbid, we need a change in consciousness and from that will also come practical steps. The time has come to instill in our public the consciousness that we deserve government by virtue of our democratic right, by virtue of our being a moral public with values that seeks goodness and justice, by virtue of our belonging to the people of Israel.
Years of physical, but especially mental and conscious, oppression must come to an end.
