Loyalty can be a very good trait when it is directed at something good. As G-d is the source of good, only loyalty to G-d and anything supportive of our service to Him can constitute a worthy loyalty.
So what about a secular state that was founded on Jewish blood. Well that would hardly qualify. Nevertheless, irr -"religious" Zionists go about it with alarming alacrity, the type that should be reserved for the Creator of the universe.
An example. Purim seudah. Dati Looney guests at my table. Somebody mentions smoking which by the way is epidemic amongst Israeli chiloni. I note that I read recently that lung cancer was, if I recall correctly, the highest cause of death amongst Israeli men. My Dati Looney neigbhor who I know from America announces that the Israeli life expectancy rate is higher in Israel than America.
As we are families at a table, and since I'm not an argumentative Israeli, I say only but men are dying because of this. He says something like it's just something they do, not a big deal.
I think he was borrowing the patter of defending Israeli rudeness. The rule is that one just dismisses it as a harmless idiosyncrasy even though is neither. But we are talking about death here. Denial can be a long river.
Why this knee jerk defense of the secular state? Is pointing out that Israeli men have a health issue some kind of apikorsis? I suppose it is if you look at a secular society as a divine entity.
Another example, referring to the secularity of Israeli society, I tell a Daati Looney neighbor that in America at work I sat between two Catholics, in Israel I sat between two avowed atheists. He responds by saying that he sits between two Religious Zionists (IRZs in my parlance). What you need to know to evaluate this is that he works in one of the handful of small IRZ communities in Israel. I was working in metro Tel Aviv, which is the largest metropolitan area in the country and the most with Jews. (The entire Jerusalem district has 1,029,300 people, about 30% of which are Arabs and greater TA has 3,785,000 people with several million Jews.) So his answer is entirely intellectually dishonest as an evaluation of the state of Israel in general. So I point this out to him and he says that Tel Aviv has a list of over 100 kosher restaurants. It used to be that one couldn't find a kosher restaurant in Tel Aviv and now they are everywhere.
I don't know the true number of kosher restaurants in TA. A web search didn't supply a quick answer. But I can tell you that the total of 100 for a region with over 2 million people is not very impressive and not just because Israeli restaurants tend to be rather tiny, many with a table or two. But what does that matter to the intellectually dishonest person.
On several occasions when I worked in the TA area I walked through the city to get to know it. I remember being astonished by the utter absence of Orthodox Jews. I'd walk twenty minutes without seeing a yarmulka, remotely modestly dressed woman, shul or mezzuzah. Even the central synogogue of TA looks nearly abandoned. But still the IRZs will insist that there is a religious revival throughout the country.
Some article recently announced that 58% of Israeli Jews were religious to some extent. From Arutz Sheva, "Eight percent of Jews define themselves as hareidi, 12 percent as religious, 13 percent as religious traditionalists, 25 percent as "traditionalists who are not so religious" and the remaining 42 percent as non-religious or secular."
That's all the detail we got from the short article. Somehow Arutz Sheva, an IRZ newspaper, summarizes this as some kind of evidence of widespread religiosity in Israel. By failing to go into any details regarding the study one walks away with a convenient sound bite, one I have heard repeated in IRZ circles numerous times now.
What is a religious traditionalist? What is a traditionalist? Are we talking about the guys with shaved heads and tiny, little kippas or do they classify themselves as "religious." I know an Israeli woman who often claims to be "religious" even though her dress, speech, and conduct exhibit not a trace of evidence for her claim. I think that Sephardim in particular carry a stronger Jewish identity and use the word traditional to capture it but mean by it mostly an identification with family.
Last week, while standing in the central train station in Tel Aviv, I did my own informal study. I watched 100 people walk by and counted how many showed any signs of any religious observance. Any kind of yarmulka qualified or any semblance of modest dress. Of 100 people, 9 qualified. And this was on the walkway between platforms so I wouldn't just be considering residents of Tel Aviv but even people passing through. I then did my study on another 100 people and only 6 qualified. So where is this 58%? I propose that it exists in the imagination of the IRZ.
What is the standard for dwelling in the land? Isn't it supposed to be higher than in chutzeh l'aretz? Weren't we expelled twice in times when 99% of Jews were Torah observant with the problem being it was a flawed observance? This is dangerous. As Rav Moshe Sternbuch notes:
If you are an intellectually dishonest IRZ your job in life seems to be to paint a pretty picture wherever you can. It seems to be viewed as a religious duty.
Now let's flip the hamburger. What about defense of the Torah. Take the agunah "issue." The Dati Looney are as rabid about this subject as the Sometimes Orthodox aka Modern Orthodox in America. When I place quotation marks around the word "issue" it is because I believe this is as made up as the claims of religious observance in Israel. Not that the plight of true agunos isn't heart-wrenching. It's just that there really aren't that many of them, particularly in our era where people who fall into lakes are usually located. Most so-called agunos are women who are improperly taking their husbands to secular courts in order to take advantage of the feminist leanings of those courts. As one friend said to me, when a man goes to family court it's like being a Jew in Nazi Germany. The judge is a woman, the lawyers are women, the social workers are women, the clerk is a woman. And these are definitely not old fashioned women, not your great grandmother. It's not man friendly country. So many Jewish women improperly and contrary to halacha sue their husbands for divorce there and some wind up as so-called agunos. So we have a made up epidemic. And the Sometimes Orthodox rabbis have the whole world in a tizzy about Torah rules for divorce. I would be interested if somebody had a Geiger counter for apikoris which could tell us how much chilul Hashem, how much doubt of the Torah is caused by the endless harping about Torah rules for divorce. But on this topic, you don't see the IRZ rush to the defense of the Torah. They aren't so loyal here. Their first impulse is not to defend the Torah but rather to change it in very dangerous ways which I'll leave for another time.
So what's going on here. I'll tell you. Religious Zionism is not really religious and Modern Orthodoxy is not really Orthodox. Oh, once upon a time they might have been. I'm not questioning Rabbi Herzog or even Norman Lamm. What we have today is not the RZ or MO of those gentlemen, neither of which were raised RZ or MO. They both came from traditional Orthodoxy, truly traditional but engaged in experiments to apply their background to modern times. We are several generations in from the experiment and the result is a practice that is empty of religion even if it wears a tiny kippah and even if it dresses up in a black suit and hat. Jews should not mix with gentiles. As Rabbi Miller puts it, we don't hate gentiles, we just don't mingle with them. RZ and MO did too much mingling and we now have gentile ways of life that dress in the clothing, to a degree, of Jewish-acting Jews. The loyalty is all to the secular. The frame of reference is secular. The values are secular. In the State of Israel one really sees it. And Jewish traits like loyalty to G-d get misdirected with very toxic results.
So what about a secular state that was founded on Jewish blood. Well that would hardly qualify. Nevertheless, irr -"religious" Zionists go about it with alarming alacrity, the type that should be reserved for the Creator of the universe.
An example. Purim seudah. Dati Looney guests at my table. Somebody mentions smoking which by the way is epidemic amongst Israeli chiloni. I note that I read recently that lung cancer was, if I recall correctly, the highest cause of death amongst Israeli men. My Dati Looney neigbhor who I know from America announces that the Israeli life expectancy rate is higher in Israel than America.
As we are families at a table, and since I'm not an argumentative Israeli, I say only but men are dying because of this. He says something like it's just something they do, not a big deal.
I think he was borrowing the patter of defending Israeli rudeness. The rule is that one just dismisses it as a harmless idiosyncrasy even though is neither. But we are talking about death here. Denial can be a long river.
Why this knee jerk defense of the secular state? Is pointing out that Israeli men have a health issue some kind of apikorsis? I suppose it is if you look at a secular society as a divine entity.
Another example, referring to the secularity of Israeli society, I tell a Daati Looney neighbor that in America at work I sat between two Catholics, in Israel I sat between two avowed atheists. He responds by saying that he sits between two Religious Zionists (IRZs in my parlance). What you need to know to evaluate this is that he works in one of the handful of small IRZ communities in Israel. I was working in metro Tel Aviv, which is the largest metropolitan area in the country and the most with Jews. (The entire Jerusalem district has 1,029,300 people, about 30% of which are Arabs and greater TA has 3,785,000 people with several million Jews.) So his answer is entirely intellectually dishonest as an evaluation of the state of Israel in general. So I point this out to him and he says that Tel Aviv has a list of over 100 kosher restaurants. It used to be that one couldn't find a kosher restaurant in Tel Aviv and now they are everywhere.
I don't know the true number of kosher restaurants in TA. A web search didn't supply a quick answer. But I can tell you that the total of 100 for a region with over 2 million people is not very impressive and not just because Israeli restaurants tend to be rather tiny, many with a table or two. But what does that matter to the intellectually dishonest person.
On several occasions when I worked in the TA area I walked through the city to get to know it. I remember being astonished by the utter absence of Orthodox Jews. I'd walk twenty minutes without seeing a yarmulka, remotely modestly dressed woman, shul or mezzuzah. Even the central synogogue of TA looks nearly abandoned. But still the IRZs will insist that there is a religious revival throughout the country.
Some article recently announced that 58% of Israeli Jews were religious to some extent. From Arutz Sheva, "Eight percent of Jews define themselves as hareidi, 12 percent as religious, 13 percent as religious traditionalists, 25 percent as "traditionalists who are not so religious" and the remaining 42 percent as non-religious or secular."
That's all the detail we got from the short article. Somehow Arutz Sheva, an IRZ newspaper, summarizes this as some kind of evidence of widespread religiosity in Israel. By failing to go into any details regarding the study one walks away with a convenient sound bite, one I have heard repeated in IRZ circles numerous times now.
What is a religious traditionalist? What is a traditionalist? Are we talking about the guys with shaved heads and tiny, little kippas or do they classify themselves as "religious." I know an Israeli woman who often claims to be "religious" even though her dress, speech, and conduct exhibit not a trace of evidence for her claim. I think that Sephardim in particular carry a stronger Jewish identity and use the word traditional to capture it but mean by it mostly an identification with family.
Last week, while standing in the central train station in Tel Aviv, I did my own informal study. I watched 100 people walk by and counted how many showed any signs of any religious observance. Any kind of yarmulka qualified or any semblance of modest dress. Of 100 people, 9 qualified. And this was on the walkway between platforms so I wouldn't just be considering residents of Tel Aviv but even people passing through. I then did my study on another 100 people and only 6 qualified. So where is this 58%? I propose that it exists in the imagination of the IRZ.
What is the standard for dwelling in the land? Isn't it supposed to be higher than in chutzeh l'aretz? Weren't we expelled twice in times when 99% of Jews were Torah observant with the problem being it was a flawed observance? This is dangerous. As Rav Moshe Sternbuch notes:
Should we be so joyous to find that 58% of Jews in Israel have some kind of minimal identification with the Jewish religion?For the inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael who are on an appropriate spiritual level, the sanctity of Eretz Yisrael has a great impact on the quality of their Torah and mitzvos. However, the relationship between us and Eretz Yisrael is a mutual one: the sanctity of Eretz Yisrael is not static, but rather increases in proportion to the quantity and quality of mitzvos that we perform within it. By using the present tense instead of the future “when you will come to the land,” the passuk is telling us that the sanctity of this land is in a constant state of flux. Although it is inherently holy, the extent of its holiness depends on us. If we would not keep the mitzvos in Eretz Yisrael, chas v’shalom, we would lose our right to exist here. (Shabbos drasha newsletter for parshas behar- bechukasai, 5777)
If you are an intellectually dishonest IRZ your job in life seems to be to paint a pretty picture wherever you can. It seems to be viewed as a religious duty.
Now let's flip the hamburger. What about defense of the Torah. Take the agunah "issue." The Dati Looney are as rabid about this subject as the Sometimes Orthodox aka Modern Orthodox in America. When I place quotation marks around the word "issue" it is because I believe this is as made up as the claims of religious observance in Israel. Not that the plight of true agunos isn't heart-wrenching. It's just that there really aren't that many of them, particularly in our era where people who fall into lakes are usually located. Most so-called agunos are women who are improperly taking their husbands to secular courts in order to take advantage of the feminist leanings of those courts. As one friend said to me, when a man goes to family court it's like being a Jew in Nazi Germany. The judge is a woman, the lawyers are women, the social workers are women, the clerk is a woman. And these are definitely not old fashioned women, not your great grandmother. It's not man friendly country. So many Jewish women improperly and contrary to halacha sue their husbands for divorce there and some wind up as so-called agunos. So we have a made up epidemic. And the Sometimes Orthodox rabbis have the whole world in a tizzy about Torah rules for divorce. I would be interested if somebody had a Geiger counter for apikoris which could tell us how much chilul Hashem, how much doubt of the Torah is caused by the endless harping about Torah rules for divorce. But on this topic, you don't see the IRZ rush to the defense of the Torah. They aren't so loyal here. Their first impulse is not to defend the Torah but rather to change it in very dangerous ways which I'll leave for another time.
So what's going on here. I'll tell you. Religious Zionism is not really religious and Modern Orthodoxy is not really Orthodox. Oh, once upon a time they might have been. I'm not questioning Rabbi Herzog or even Norman Lamm. What we have today is not the RZ or MO of those gentlemen, neither of which were raised RZ or MO. They both came from traditional Orthodoxy, truly traditional but engaged in experiments to apply their background to modern times. We are several generations in from the experiment and the result is a practice that is empty of religion even if it wears a tiny kippah and even if it dresses up in a black suit and hat. Jews should not mix with gentiles. As Rabbi Miller puts it, we don't hate gentiles, we just don't mingle with them. RZ and MO did too much mingling and we now have gentile ways of life that dress in the clothing, to a degree, of Jewish-acting Jews. The loyalty is all to the secular. The frame of reference is secular. The values are secular. In the State of Israel one really sees it. And Jewish traits like loyalty to G-d get misdirected with very toxic results.
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