At the Herzliya Conference, former Shas leader Aryeh Deri took part in a panel on education toward Jewish identity, and two of his points made it into the headlines. He said that until two centuries ago, religion simply was the Jewish culture. Since then, he says, secular Jewry has given us education but no culture, and he basically equated Jewish secular culture with reality TV. As a result, he thinks that the only common denominator for a dialogue on Jewish identity needs to be that God created the world and that the Torah was given to us by God. Everything else for him is barren.
I have thought for a long time that Deri is one of the most gifted politicians Israel has produced, tragically replaced by very mediocre men (women are out of the question in a Haredi party). And I was looking forward to his return to the political scene. Quite unfortunately, Deri’s remarks betray a characteristic of weakness in the Haredi camp: They simply haven’t realized that in the last 200 years new Jewish identities, including secular Jewry, have emerged, that culturally these ways of being Jewish have been enormously creative, that secular Jews are the largest sub-group of world Jewry and in Israel (around 40 percent), and that none of us even considers accepting his precepts about how to be Jewish.
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