It's a slow week – a holiday week – so I will not burden you with more than a few comments.
1.
Another poll proves that Israelis are confused – as confused as Americans – about the current American political climate. And when there’s confusion, there’s an instinctive tendency to stick with what’s familiar. What’s familiar – as long as it is not Barack Obama. That is to say – Hillary Clinton.
51% of the Israeli respondents to a Channel 1 news survey believed “that any one of the current presidential candidates would be better for the Jewish state than Obama.” There is no clearer condemnation of the Obama era than this one. 42% of Israelis say Hillary Clinton would be the best US President for Israel, even though more Israelis (42% for him vs. 32% for her) believe that Donald Trump would be the easier President to deal with for Prime Minister Netanyahu.
In other words: Israelis prefer Clinton, whom they believe would get along less well than Trump with their Prime Minister. Why? There are several options:
– Because they believe that ultimately she would be a better President for the US and hence, in the long term, a better leader for Israel too (as Israel needs a strong America as its ally).
– Because they don’t think that getting along with Netanyahu is the ultimate test of support for Israel.
– Because they are confused, and splitting their answers on the good-for-Israel vs. easier-for-the-Israeli-PM is one way of showing it.
2.
The Western Wall situation is once again getting complicated. Yesterday, Women of the Wall and some of their supporters had to contend with restrictions imposed by the Attorney General and the police, and to make do with a service that did not include a priestly blessing ceremony (some of them did perform such a ceremony, but not in the significant way they wanted to).
Why they want to hold such a ceremony – one that the Attorney General forbade based on the argument that a female version of the ceremony violated a law enforcing “local customs” at the Kotel – I can’t tell you. They say that it is a natural desire for women who come to pray at the Kotel to also include the ceremony as part of their service. I suspect that they were looking to up the ante and challenge a government that suddenly seems reluctant to implement the compromise it agreed to just a few weeks ago.
I know that supporters of WoW aren’t going to appreciate such conspiratorial assumptions. But in fact, I see no problem in them using the blessing ceremony as a tactic for raising awareness to the fact that the Kotel deal is dying and the time for renewing the battle is now. Do they have much chance of making this a cause around which to rally Jews in Israel and around the world? That is far from certain. As the Pew Research Center survey of Israelis proved not long ago, there is a significant number of Jewish Israelis who do not see much point in letting WoW have their way (especially among men, but also among women). And as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I suspect that American Jews are currently too busy with their elections to make time for dealing with the Kotel.
3.
And something for Pesach from my recycled posts department. Here’s what I wrote two years ago about the decline in Seder participation among American Jews:
82% and 81% of in-married couples light candles and participate in a Seder respectively, 52% and 46% of the intermarried do. Interestingly, these two practices are the ones in which the decline from the 2002 study to the 2011 study is the highest – these two, and the category “being Jewish is Very Important in Respondent’s Life.”
This is not a surprise: Attending the Seder and lighting the Hanukah candles is the golden standard of minimal Jewish participation. Decline in these two categories must come with a parallel decline in the “important to be Jewish” category. Is this because the Seder is boring, chauvinistic, expensive, and all the other above-mentioned reasons? I don't think it is. Well, it is and it isn't. It is in the sense that these are all good excuses for those who do not want to attend the Seder – it takes an act of carelessness and turns it into an act of conscious reasoning. But it also isn't – because even when the Seder is boring you are not going to skip it if you think it is meaningful. And if it is expensive you'd make the effort and save on something else, except in extreme situations. And if you find it chauvinistic, you can alter the ceremony, reinvent it as many people do, instead of giving up on it. Deciding to quit the Seder altogether is in most cases really a sign that one doesn't much care much about one's Judaism.
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