I live in
Rechavia, the same neighborhood of the Prime Minister’s official residence.
Every Saturday night they would come – thousands of protesters marching up
Ramban Street waving Israeli flags. They are opposed to judicial reform. They
call for the protection of democracy, protecting minorities from the tyranny of
the majority. I was amazed at the size of these demonstrations and the
determination of the marchers, who came week after week to demonstrate. It was
literally Tel Aviv converging on Jerusalem – large secular crowds in Jerusalem
the likes of which I have never seen, thousands of Israeli flags in the
streets. My secular neighbors also joined them, bringing their own flags. I saw
Maya and her husband, who live one building over, and the young lady, Shachar,
who lives right below me, a physics major at Hebrew University.
They were out to
prevent “fascism” and “Khomeinists” from destroying the beautiful country that
they and their parents had built.
My religious
neighbors watched from the side. There were no confrontations. But there was
little sympathy or identification for their cause. They were like two distinct
peoples, each with its own beliefs and ethos. A country divided.
There was no debate.
No discourse. I saw a clip of one of the proponents of judicial reform, MK
Rothman, not answering an interviewer but going on and on with his ideas. It
was sickening. In the media, each side was trying to scream louder than the
other. On the other hand, how much of the actual details of the reform were the
demonstrators aware of? Did they actually know what they were protesting
against?
When I saw them, I
felt disgust – for their secularism and what they stood for. What right did
they have to live here and displace the Palestinians if there was no G-d or
true connection to the People of the Bible? And why didn’t they protest against
the audacious, unilateral judicial reforms of former chief justice Aharon
Barak?
Some people tell
me that what they are really protesting is against the rise of the Right and
the religious parties. This was a demonstration against Netanyahu’s victory, that
the Left could never let loose its grip on power. Whatever the case may be, I
did not like them.
* * *
There was a major
daytime demonstration where I could see tens of thousands of them and their
flags from Saadia Gaon Street, overlooking the Valley of the Cross, all the way
to the Knesset. It was absolutely massive. The right had nothing coming close
to it. I was scared of their power.
Pesach is over,
but the demonstrations resume without letup.
It was Yom Hazikaron
(the memorial day for Israel’s fallen soldiers) in Israel. I was in the waiting
room of my physiotherapist when the siren went off at 11 a.m. I rose from my
chair and stood still, head slightly bowed for the duration of the siren. The
previous night, I was at a meeting when the siren went off, at 8 p.m. We all
stood up, including a chareidi fellow
from Maalot Dafna. This is serious business. That same night, there was an
alternative memorial ceremony in Tel Aviv:
Israeli and Palestinian families gathered
for the annual Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day ceremony in Tel Aviv on Monday
night. The event was organized by Combatants for Peace and the Parents-Circle
Families Forum. Despite the event being set up for 10,000 people, 15,000 people
attended the ceremony in Park Hayarkon. Bereaved families spoke about the pain
of losing their loved ones and their efforts to promote peace. Among the
participants were around 170 Palestinians from the West Bank, after Israel’s
Supreme Court overturned a decision
by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to bar their entry into
Israel for the ceremony. (The Media Line, 4/25/2023)
The Supreme Court
intervened again, overturning a decision by the Minister of Defense. While I
can understand their position – to promote peace – my gut instinct is that
equating bereaved Arab mothers with Jewish mothers is blurring the line between
terrorist combatants and Jewish soldiers who are trying to defend their
country. The same Supreme Court, in the name of democracy and individual
freedom, overturned the government’s decision to bar Sudanese “refugees” from
settling in South Tel Aviv. These refugees have destroyed the neighborhoods
they settled in with crime and violence. I know because, every Saturday night,
I would hear demonstrators from South Tel Aviv coming to my neighborhood and
trying to impress my neighbor on Rashba Street, the Supreme Court President,
Miriam Naor (Naor means enlightened) that their lives are being ruined by her
magnanimous generosity and liberalism.
Aharon Barak, as
President of the Supreme Court, did more to erase the Jewishness of the State
of Israel than anyone else in recent history. He weakened the rabbinical courts,
stating (without any precedent) that everything – even brit milah – was “justiciable.” A non-elected official, he
introduced many reforms, overturned Knesset laws, and tied the hands of the
Israeli military. He only allowed people who were likeminded to be appointed to
the Court, The right wing and traditional public was sick of him. Now, under
Netanyahu, they want to fix the court and return it to legitimacy. But the Left
and many in the center are terrified of reforms, their fears fueled by a biased
press (like the Times of Israel website) and politicians like Lapid.
However, the right-wing
lawmakers, instead of educating the public and slowly building consensus,
rushed headlong to create a legislative blitz that galvanized the Left and
created a serious rift in the country. They also didn’t take into account how
to maintain checks and balances, giving the Knesset too much power, instead. In
the end, the Likud shot itself in the foot and did more to destroy its power
than anyone else.
Tomorrow (the day after Yom Ha’atzmaut) is the
planned “Million Man March” at the Knesset for
judicial reform. Should I go? Will it only deepen the rift? An American lady in
the neighborhood passed me by today. She is in her sixties. She told me that
she was going. She wanted to know if I was planning to go. She didn’t want to
hear “no” for an answer.
The Left is far
better organized than the Right. Will the chareidim
join in? I haven’t heard anything. They are afraid. If they show support for
reform, the Left will view them with even more disgust, and it may backfire on
them.
* * *
I was afraid of
the hatred I actually felt for the demonstrators. I was surprised at myself.
But something changed all that. Two weeks before Pesach, I was getting ready to
observe the yahrzeit of mother. The
Shabbos before the yahrzeit, when I
was to daven by the amud, I arranged
for a kiddush in her memory. I wanted to say something about her but had
trouble of thinking of something I hadn’t said before.
Friday night, I
tried to bring up memories of her. And then, suddenly, something popped up. It
was a memory of something that occurred a few years ago. A friend of mine
invited me to go with him to a place I had never heard of before; it was next
to the Hebrew University campus near my apartment. It is called The Central
Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem (CAHJP). They hold
the archives of hundreds of Jewish communities, as well as of local, national,
and international Jewish organizations. The Archives now holds the most
extensive collection of documents, pinkassim (registers) and other
records of Jewish history from the Middle Ages to the present day.
I filled out a
form requesting official documents from my mother’s hometown in Poland, Szyd?owiec. I received a roll of microfilm and went
into another room to view it.
It was from some
refugee committee and had the list of names of people who had returned to
Szyd?owiec after the war. In 1939, the town of Szyd?owiec had a Jewish
community numbering some 7,000 members. The list of returnees numbered only
103. That is, 103 out of 7,000 returned after the war. And I got chills when I
saw my mother, Golda Eisenberg, listed as number 83. With that memory in mind,
I knew what to say.
After Mussaf, I
went to the back of the shul to make kiddush for everyone before they would
gobble up the herring and Yerushalmi kugel. The crowd was mostly what you would
call modern chareidi. This is what I
said:
G-d told Avraham about the upcoming exile.
Then He told him that “Afterwards, they will leave [the exile] with great
wealth.” The Egyptians loaded them up with clothes and jewelry, and so they
left with many material things. But what did my mother, for whom this kiddush
is in memory, leave her Egypt with? After spending her time there as a
teenager, standing 14 hours a day inspecting bombs that were manufactured there
for the Germans, when she was liberated, all she had was the clothes she was
wearing. She lost her parents and cousins and extended family. What did she
have?
Rabbosai, she did
have something precious that she left with – a new pair of eyes, a new pair of glasses.
Polish Jewry was very fragmented before the war. Agudah, Mizrachi, Bundists,
General Zionists, Communists. When my mother left the gates of hell, she
couldn’t see any differences anymore. There were just Jews, and she loved every
one of them. Every one that survived was like a precious jewel in her eyes.
My friends, we
have seen many demonstrators over the last several weeks march through our
neighborhood. People with very different values than ours. I admit that there
were times when I found these people to be anathema for me. I hated them. And
then I asked myself, how would my mother have viewed them? And the answer came
right away. She would have seen them as family, as fellow brothers, and
sisters. She may have disagreed with them, but she loved them, nonetheless. You
can still disagree and still love one another. That’s what my mother taught me.
That Saturday
night, coming home from shul, I saw the protesters again, walking down Ramban
Street towards Balfour Street. They looked different to me this time. Instead
of feeling estrangement, I felt a sort of kinship with them. I saw how we were
the same, even as I saw the differences. They were family.
