Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy, co-authors of “Never Alone,” spoke with Jewish Journal book editor Jonathan Kirsch via Zoom from Jerusalem.
Jewish Journal: You point out in “Never Alone” that a million Jews have made aliyah from the former Soviet Union. How did Israel change as a result of their arrival?
Natan Sharansky: The Jews who came from Russia were people who, for at least two generations, suffered from anti-Semitism but were disconnected from everything Jewish. We were taught by our parents that the secret of survival in the Soviet Union was to make efforts to be professionally the best — that was the expression of our Jewishness. So, the Soviet Jews brought a lot of ambition and competition to Israel, and they contributed to Israel’s achievements as the “startup nation.”
JJ: Gil, how did you come to collaborate with Natan on “Never Alone”?
Gil Troy: When I finished my last book, “The Zionist Ideas,” I wanted Natan to write a foreword. After all, who else is the best symbol of modern Zionism? I received a call from his secretary inviting me to a meeting at the Jewish Agency. I’m there thinking we’re going to talk about the foreword to my book (which he had already decided to do), and Natan is talking about writing a book of his own. He asked me to collaborate with him. If the KGB couldn’t say no to him, I certainly couldn’t say no to him. It was really one of the great privileges of my life and a great adventure.
NS: When the KGB asked me questions, I’d say, “No, no, no.” With Gil, it was different. When he had an idea, I’d say, “No, no, no,” but after the third time, I’d say yes.
JJ: Natan, you played a historic role in challenging the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union is gone, do you still regard Russia as a threat to the world?
NS: Russia is not the kind of dictatorship that it was. Even if there has been some retreat from democracy, Russia does not have and cannot have a gulag and a KGB with millions of informers. Even if they want to control the brains of their people, they can’t. And economically, except for nuclear weapons, Russia is a Third World country. Russia will not be a threat to the West if the West does not go back to the fears and the illusions that it once had about the Soviet Union.
“If there is one thing that makes me concerned today, it’s not what is happening in Russia and it’s not what is happening in Israel. What worries me is the cancel culture that makes some Americans think twice before expressing themselves.”
— Natan Sharansky
JJ: You have been a leader in the fight against anti-Semitism around the world. Here in the United States, for the first time in recent memory, we have seen demonstrators in the streets who chant, “The Jews will not replace us.” Are you concerned that anti-Semitism in America has moved from the lunatic fringe to the public square?
NS: I am concerned about the rise of both left-wing and right-wing anti-Semitism. Left-wing anti-Semitism, which is mainly expressed as anti-Zionism, grows out of the modernist desire to see the world without nations and without religions, like the famous [John Lennon] song “Imagine.” Sooner or later, there had to be counterattacks from those on the right who want to restore national pride. That’s why you see posters of George Soros in Hungary that blame him for Muslim refugees. It is very symmetrical, and my concern is that people refuse to see anti-Semitism when it happens in their own camp.
GT: One of the themes of our book — and one of themes of Natan’s life — is that you have to take personal responsibility for what you believe. Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism, and it must be regarded as a red line. People on the left must fight anti-Semitism on the left and people on the right must fight anti-Semitism on the right.
JJ: Natan, you famously proposed the “town square test,” which asks whether people feel free or fearful when it comes to expressing their opinions in public. If you apply the test to Russia, Israel and America, how do these countries measure up?
NS: If there is one thing that makes me concerned today, it’s not what is happening in Russia and it’s not what is happening in Israel. What worries me is the cancel culture that makes some Americans think twice before expressing themselves. On a book tour, I met a woman who was a student at Harvard who told me she wanted to sign an anti-BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) letter, but she was worried that three of her professors wouldn’t like it. That’s something alarming. And I was shocked that it was happening not in Moscow but at Harvard.
From Russia came the first pioneers of the Jewish state in modern Israel, including Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Golda Meir, all of whom were born as subjects of the czar. Yet the fall of Imperial Russia in 1917 barred the gates to the millions of Jews who remained behind in the Soviet Union for another seven crucial decades.
One of those who found himself trapped behind the Iron Curtain was Natan Sharansky, whose life story and life’s work are told, compellingly and endearingly, in the newly published memoir “Never Alone,” co-authored by Sharansky and historian Gil Troy (PublicAffairs). It’s a book whose time has come precisely because Sharansky reminds us that what was at stake for the earliest pioneers of the Jewish state — a safe haven for Jewish democracy — is at risk today.
Born in 1948 in the Ukrainian city then called Stalino, Sharansky was a perceptive young man who soon came to understand what it really meant to live in a totalitarian state. He recalls, for example, the day when a letter arrived at his home from the publisher of “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia.” After Joseph Stalin’s death, when Stalino abruptly was renamed Donetsk, the much-feared head of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) had been purged by Nikita Khrushchev. “My father soon received [a] publisher’s letter addressed to every subscriber, instructing him to cut out the three-page article praising [Lavrentiy] Beria in the B volume, destroy it, and replace it with some new B entries sent along to fill the space,” he explains. “Subsequently, as politicians rose or fell out [of] favor, as scientists were exiled or rehabilitated, every reader had to scramble to keep up with the shifting official line.”
One principle of Soviet rule, however, did not change. Both Judaism and Zionism were forbidden to Soviet Jews during Stalin’s lifetime and long after. Sharansky’s parents used Yiddish as “a secret code” but dared not teach it to their children.“You’re such a good guy,” one of his friends at school told him. “It’s a pity you’re a Jew.” When Meir arrived in the Soviet Union in 1948 as the first ambassador from the new State of Israel, Jewish crowds shouted: “Am Yisrael chai!” If a Soviet Jew applied to emigrate to Israel, however, the application was refused — and those who were denied later came to be known as “refuseniks.”
Looking back on his life’s work, Sharansky accurately sees himself as a bridge-builder.
Denied a Jewish education in the Soviet Union, it was American popular culture that enlightened young Sharansky about the modern history of Israel. Thanks to the underground publications known as samizdat — photocopies of books that were passed from hand to hand — he read “Exodus” by Leon Uris. As for many U.S. readers, Uris’ fictionalized version of the founding of Israel was the starting point of Sharansky’s own commitment to Zionism. “I realized that many Russian Jews from my father’s generation … had shaped the Zionist movement and founded Israel,” he recalls. “I joined a story that harkened back to the exodus from Egypt, took me to Leon Uris’s ‘Exodus,’ and would soon lead to my own exodus.”
By 1973, Sharansky had become a refusenik. Allied with the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, he was an active participant in the human-rights movement in the Soviet Union. He always had been aware of the watchful eyes of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s ubiquitous secret police, but he eventually was arrested on charges of treason and espionage, both punishable by death. Sharansky told the story of his experience in the gulag in “Fear No Evil” in 1988, but he smartly reprises the nine fateful years he spent in Soviet captivity in “Never Alone.”
Sharansky is a world historical figure, but he also allows us to glimpse his charm, his courage and his sly sense of humor in the pages of “Never Alone.” Under constant surveillance by KGB agents before his arrest and imprisonment, he “called KGB headquarters to report one tail for disgracing the state by being too drunk to follow me properly.” The KGB retaliated in kind by tossing the sober, young activist into the drunk tank. “During my activist years, I visited Moscow’s Sobering Station Number 8 regularly.”
As a Jew, Sharansky “[lived] my life backward.” “I was circumcised when I was twenty-five years old, not eight days old. So, unlike most, I could give my consent.Finally, at the age of sixty-five, I had my bar mitzvah — fifty-two years late.” Appropriately enough, his Torah reading was Parashat Bo, a passage in which Moses tells Pharaoh to “Let my people go” — “those mighty words that became the slogan of our struggle for freedom in the Soviet Union.”
“Never Alone” reminds us of a poignant fact: Unlike the beleaguered Zionist movement in today’s world, the struggle to save Soviet Jewry was a consensus issue, “mobilizing French Communists and British aristocrats, pious rabbis and assimilated lawyers, American patriots and Zionist activists, countercultural hippies and Establishment leaders.” Yet Sharansky also writes with candor about the stress lines in the movement to free the Soviet Jews, both within the Jewish community in the Soviet Union and in Israel. When the Soviet Union finally acceded to the demand to let Jews emigrate, half of them chose to go to the United States or elsewhere in the Diaspora rather than Israel. As “unapologetic Zionists fighting for our right to go to Israel,” he explains, “we believed that Israel’s role was to welcome Jews home, not block them from going elsewhere.”
Sharansky returned to the Soviet Union Perm-35 labor camp for the documentary “From Slavery to Freedom.” Photo courtesy of Go2Films
His memoir is a who’s who of leaders, both Jews and non-Jews, but it’s an especially intimate one. He describes how his beloved wife, Avital, was invited to meet President Ronald Reagan. White House personnel admonished her to shake his hand and move on. Her Orthodox faith instructed her to not shake his hand at all. “Ignoring the handlers, and relying on the Jewish permission to break religious law when lives are at stake, Avital grasped Reagan’s hand and wouldn’t release it, saying, ‘I have to speak with you.’”
By 1985, the weight of diplomacy and world public opinion finally prompted Sharansky’s release from prison. Reunited with Avital, he quipped in Hebrew: “Sorry I’m a little late.” When he arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, he was greeted by Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Foreign Affairs Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the two chief rabbis of Israel. “A day that had started in the hands of my captors ended at the Western Wall in the hands of thousands of dancing, cheering, singing Jews celebrating our reunion.”
Much of “Never Alone” is devoted to Sharansky’s life and work after finally making aliyah. Rather than a kippah, he took to wearing an Israeli military cap that had been given to him long ago in Moscow by a visiting American. “It remains affixed to this day,” he reports. His goal in encouraging Soviet Jews to join him in Israel was 400,000 souls; 1 million actually arrived, “an aliyah one-fifth the size of its current population.” Sharansky observes: “Almost overnight, the number of Israel’s doctors, engineers, musicians and chess players doubled.” Sharansky himself organized a political party, Yisrael B’Aliyah, and earned a seat in the Knesset with the governing coalition under Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Riding for the first time in a government car, he mused that “the Volvo was nice, but the job was daunting.”
His job as a government minister included responsibility for “Aliyah and Absorption,” an urgent need for Israel’s new arrivals from Russia. “In the beginning I found myself oddly nostalgic for the simplicity and clarity of prison life,” he writes in a characteristically wry turn-of-phrase. “Serving in the government and the Knesset, in the heart of the political struggle, you are a prisoner to everyone else’s agendas, demands and timetables.” But he proved himself to be adept at the famously complex politics of Israel, as when he addressed the heartbreaking problem of Jewish cemeteries that refused the burial of Soviet Jews who were “Halachically non-Jewish.” The Ashkenazi chief rabbi refused to permit such burials. So Sharansky turned to the Sephardic chief rabbi, Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, who came up with the idea of “hiving off” a section, where “anyone who wanted a Kaddish said” could be buried. Thus did he address the dilemma of Russian-born Israel Defense Forces veterans who served in defense of the Jewish state but couldn’t be lawfully buried in a Jewish cemetery.
“Can I convert to Sephardi?” Sharansky joked. “They seem to have more fun.”
Denied a Jewish education in the Soviet Union, it was American popular culture that enlightened young Sharansky about the modern history of Israel.
Sharansky is an idealist and a pragmatist, a paradox that shines on every page. “I no longer had the dissident’s purity,” he writes of his life in Israel. “I had to be a politician.” In 2005, he collaborated with Ron Dermer, who now serves as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, on the bestselling “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror,” but he learned that the contest between democracy and totalitarianism required a tougher approach. “Your theories are good for the dungeons of the KGB,” Ariel Sharon admonished him, “but not the sands of the Middle East.”
His current collaborator, Gil Troy, is a Distinguished Scholar in North American History at McGill University and the author of nine books of his own, including two books on Zionism: “Why I Am a Zionist” and “The Zionist Ideas.” Sharansky reveals that [e]very English sentence in this book was written by Gil,” and yet “we weighted and played with every word and every idea, again and again, sometimes in Hebrew, usually in English, with occasional lapses of Natan into Russian and Gil into professor-speak.” The finished book, Sharansky explains, “can teach us what Natan learned during nine years in prison and Gil learned when marching on the streets of New York and Boston to free him.” Troy allows Sharansky’s unique voice and personality to shine even as he brings a historian’s sensibility to the events Sharansky describes in detail.
Sharansky opposed the Oslo Accords even though “I wanted the Palestinians to have all the rights I had, individually and collectively, as long as they could not use those rights to destroy us.” As he writes in “Never Alone,” he regarded Oslo as “reckless, shortsighted, and stupid” because of the role assigned to Yasser Arafat.Installing “a terrorist as dictator,” he concluded, “contradicted everything I had learned about the nature of dictatorships.” And he readily acknowledges his “seemingly right-wing positions made me unpopular with many Israeli and American opinion-makers,” including those he calls his “natural allies” — “the liberals who had fought with [me] against Soviet totalitarianism.”
Yet, Sharansky also enjoyed “a warm personal relationship” with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a political adversary. “Israel has suffered many tragedies since I arrived in 1986,” he muses. “But this murder of our prime minister by one of our own may have been the worst moment I witnessed, and one of the most dreadful incidents in Israeli history. When I first heard the bad news, I felt our entire Zionist enterprise was crashing.”
“Enjoying a free, meaningful life in accordance with our identities, while letting others do the same, should be our shared aim in the common pursuit of happiness.”
— Natan Sharansky
Looking back on his life’s work, Sharansky accurately sees himself as a bridge-builder. “I did spend a lot of time defending Israel to Diaspora Jews and defending Diaspora Jews to Israelis,” he writes about his service at the head of the Jewish Agency, an organization that has worked for more than a century to bring Jews to the Jewish state. But if there is a single passage that sums up Sharansky’s credo and the lesson he teaches by example and in the book, it is that identity politics — the great curse of American democracy — offers a false choice.
“I was challenged again and again to choose between these two impulses: Is my first loyalty to my people or to my universal ideals of freedom? Today, the whole world seems divided between those who choose their identity first and those who choose their freedom first. That’s a false choice. Enjoying a free, meaningful life in accordance with our identities, while letting others do the same, should be our shared aim in the common pursuit of happiness.”
Sharansky has given us a gift of the greatest value — an eyewitness account of Jewish history by someone with firsthand knowledge of what it really means to be a Jew. When we praise those who deserve to be called the makers of the Jewish homeland — Weizmann, Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky, Meir and many others — surely Natan Sharansky must be counted among them.
Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Journal.
We are on the cusp of a new year, and I sure don’t feel much like celebrating. The last seven months of the coronavirus pandemic has left more than 184,000 dead in the United States alone — with no end in sight. Last week, the fifth-largest hurricane on record hit the U.S. South. A police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back seven times. Peaceful demonstrations ensued, followed by violent unrest, after which a white 17-year-old was accused of shooting and killing two people.
What on earth is going on in this country? How can we maintain our sanity in these maddening times?
During this month of Elul, as we prepare for the High Holy Days, we have an opportunity to see the bigger picture and seek some uplift. I found this uplift last week, when the Board of Rabbis held a zoom High Holy Days workshop with Rabbi Sharon Brous of Ikar in dialogue with Pastor Eddie Anderson of McCarty Memorial Church. In the session, Rabbi Brous began by teaching the foundational premise of Judaism found in Genesis 1:27: that each person is created in the image of God. She then shared a text from a collection of interpretations called Devarim Rabbah: “Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said, ‘A procession of angels walk before a person wherever he goes, blowing the shofar and announcing, “Make way for the image of the Holy One.”’”
Rabbi Brous encouraged us to ponder that image. What would the world look like if everyone took this idea seriously? If each human life was considered worthy of a troop of angels, blowing trumpets and announcing that each is created in God’s image? Surely, people would not shoot others so recklessly!
Rabbi Michele Lenke suggested this image could be a way of understanding the 6 feet of distance we are supposed to put between ourselves and others. The 6 feet could be envisioned as making room for the invisible angels that surround each of us. When we keep our physical distance, we are not trying to get away from one another, but rather, leaving space for our angels.
In this week’s Torah portion, Moses tells the Israelites what to do when they finally arrive in the Promised Land after 40 years of struggling in the desert. Moses instructs them to put a piece of fruit from the land into a basket, give it to the priest and say a few sentences about what they learned during their journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom.
When we keep our physical distance, we are not trying to get away from one another, but rather, leaving space for our angels.
What if, like the Israelites, we finally get to the moment we’ve all been anticipating? Imagine there’s a vaccine that has been shown definitively to protect you against COVID-19 infection. Picture yourself in your doctor’s office. The nurse comes to administer the vaccine. You receive the inoculation, and when the nurse leaves, you smile with a wave of relief for having survived. You whisper the Shehecheyanu prayer, thanking God for allowing you to reach this moment.
Then, as you get up to leave, there’s a knock on the door. Your rabbi walks in and hands you a basket and asks, “What have you learned during the pandemic?”
What would you say? What object would you put in the basket to represent your experience?
Personally, I imagine putting a blanket in the basket and saying that I’ve learned the value of friendship — how much I miss sitting on a blanket with friends by the beach and schmoozing. Or I might put a swimsuit in the basket and express gratitude to God for the beauty of the ocean, which keeps my spirit afloat. I could put in a yad and express thanks for the ways Torah has kept me from drowning in my sorrows.
This time of Elul prompts each of us to reflect on the personal lessons we have learned. But what have we learned collectively?
Imagine when the pandemic ends, if we could put in our basket a shofar and say we have learned that each person’s life is sacred and worthy of a band of angels blowing trumpets to announce their sanctity. Imagine what kind of world we could build then.
Rabbi Ilana Grinblat is the vice president of community engagement for the Board of Rabbis.
(JTA) — Demonstrations by Muslims in the Swedish city of Malmo against a far-right lawmaker turned violent and included chants in Arabic about killing Jews.
Some protesters attending at least one of the rallies staged against a plan by Rasmus Paludan, the leader of Denmark’s far-right anti-immigration Hard Line party, to burn a copy of the Quran in Malmo chanted “Khaybar Khaybar oh, Jews, Muhammad’s army will return.”
The chants reference a massacre of the Jews in the town of Khaybar, in northwestern Arabia, in 628 C.E.
In the rioting, several cars were set ablaze and at least 10 people were arrested. Authorities in Sweden prevented Paludan from actually traveling to Malmo.
“We take this incident extremely seriously and call on the police and other responsible authorities to prosecute those individuals who through this act have committed incitement to hatred against ethnic groups,” the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities wrote in a statement.
“We view with disgust the burning of the Koran and other holy scriptures.”
The Malmo Muslim Network, an organization promoting the interests of Muslims in the city, sent a letter this week to Ann Katina, a leader of the Jewish community of Malmo, thanking the city’s Jews for opposing Paludan’s plan and wrote that they “condemn the anti-Semitic words of hatred that some chanted during the riot.”
Musician Roger Waters said in an Aug. 29 interview with Al Jazeera that he has never uttered any anti-Semitic statements in his entire life.
Hoda Abdel-Hamid, Al Jazeera English’s senior international correspondent, asked Waters about those who call him anti-Semitic because of his support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
Waters said he joined the movement because Palestinians have been asking for “basic human rights.” He then added that he’s not anti-Semitic.
“I’ve never done or spoken a single anti-Semitic word or act in my entire life, or had an anti-Semitic thought in my head in my entire life,” the former Pink Floyd bassist said. “The propaganda machine that the Israelis run is huge. They spend millions and millions and millions of dollars every year trying to spread this lie that anybody that speaks against Israeli government policy is an anti-Semite.”
Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement that was founded in 1959 and expanded over the next several decades, the BDS movement urges action to pressure Israel to comply with international law, the Brookings Institution wrote in January.
Abdel-Hamid proceeded to ask Waters about those who say that he has contradictory views because Waters frequently criticizes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank but not the Russian occupation of the Crimea. Waters replied that the two circumstances are different, arguing that 98% of Crimean residents preferred the Russian government over the Western-backed Ukrainian government before annexation.
“You cannot talk about the 70-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestine and the relatively recent annexation or change of power in the Crimea in the same breath,” Waters said. “They are entirely different things … it’s not as if the Palestinians in 1948 suddenly said, ‘Can you send down a load of Jewish people from northeastern Europe please to throw us out of our homes and 700,000 of us and tell us that we have to get off the land because they are going to make a Jewish state here and they don’t want us?’ ”
Abdel-Hamid then asked Waters about those who have criticized former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as being anti-Semitic. Waters decried the allegations against Corbyn as a “smear campaign,” speculating that the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs conjured up the allegations to derail Corbyn’s campaign to become prime minister of Great Britain.
“They did it very, very successfully and they succeeded in destroying him,” Waters said.
He proceeded to argue that Corbyn should have resigned from the party when Labour’s ruling body adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism in 2018.
“Anybody with a heart or soul should have resigned at that point because it is such patent nonsense,” Waters said. “How can criticizing the Israeli policy of occupation and apartheid ‑ which is what they’re operating — how can you call that anti-Semitic? That would be like calling criticism of the South African administration before the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa anti-Christian.”
Waters also criticized current Labour Party leader Keir Starmer for agreeing to a settlement in July with seven whistleblowers who accused the party of enabling anti-Semitism under Corbyn in a 2019 BBC “Panorama” documentary. At the time of the documentary’s release, Labour accused the whistleblowers of having a “personal and political axes to grind” and alleged that John Ware, the journalist behind the documentary, fabricated quotes and “knowingly promulgated falsehoods.” This prompted a defamation lawsuit against the party, and Ware reportedly is planning to sue Corbyn personally over the matter.
“These are rabid Zionists and they are involved in a huge smokescreen to cover up the vile war crimes that are being orchestrated every single day against people of Palestine by an administration in the state of Israel and that has been going on for 70 years,” Waters said.
In response to Waters’ assertion that he isn’t anti-Semitic, pro-Israel Twitter user Claire Voltaire tweeted out an i24 News video stating that Waters’ “record of Jew-hatred” includes his concerts featuring inflatable pigs with a Star of David and dollar signs on them and Waters calling Zionism “an ugly stain on the world that must be removed.”
At a time when the world seems at its breaking point and obstacles arise daily, it is important to remember the inherent good that lies within everyone. Appreciation, compassion, courage, humility and generosity are all traits that ignite again when we need it the most. We are citizens of the world, and must lean on one another to repair and rebuild.
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Celebrating the recent launch of her book, “Your Hidden Superpower: The Kindness That Makes You Unbeatable at Work and Connects You with Anyone,” Adrienne Bankert states, “We need constant reminders that kindness is not just polite. Kindness is powerful. Wearing messages from Your Hidden Superpower is only the beginning of signaling a shift in perspective and prioritizing kindness at a time when we truly need more generosity and compassion. Global Angel’s mission to give back 25% of proceeds to charity is a wonderfully conscious business platform. For years I have looked for creative ways to give to. worthy causes, and this is one simple and effective way to impact the community and positive change.”
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Most people tend to believe that they are rational. They believe that their priorities are compatible with the changing realities of life. When they face a new challenge, such as raging pandemic, they believe they know how to adapt but it isn’t always easy. When a synagogue-goer finds herself unable to attend her weekly Shabbat services, should she take part in a digital service, organize a smaller service for her family and a few neighbors, or defy the instructions of government officials and health experts and find a synagogue that keeps operating? Whatever she decides, she will find a way to rationalize it.
It also is not easy for people who feel the need to protest against racism, or government inaction, or a particular leader, or an annoying decision. But when the Israeli, or the American (or the German — we saw a similar issue in Germany last week), decides protesting is important enough for him to violate the restrictions of social distancing, he also will have a rational explanation for his decision.
Alas, as we try to assess these decisions and their feasibility, there are two components involved: objective (the virus) and subjective (the importance of prayer or a protest). In recent weeks, those components have been visible in two separate issues.
One is the anti-government protests. For the 10th consecutive weekend, tens of thousands of people have gathered every Saturday night in Jerusalem calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resignation in the wake of his indictment on corruption charges and amid allegations of his mishandling of the coronavirus. Many of them wear masks but many don’t, and there is no social distancing. There has been unrest and many arrests. In fact, there have been protests in Tel Aviv and Haifa and other cities.
The second involves the desire of many thousands of Israelis to spend Rosh Hashanah in Uman, Ukraine, near the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. If they go, they won’t be able to social distance, and many experts predict that they will return infected with the coronavirus.
For the 10th consecutive weekend, tens of thousands of people have gathered every Saturday night in Jerusalem calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resignation.
The protesters and the Chasidim use similar arguments to justify their actions. They don’t deny that the pandemic is a serious challenge. They don’t say that social distancing is unnecessary. They say that even in the midst of this pandemic, some things are more important. Protesters say that democracy is more important than maintaining social distancing rules. Breslov Chasidim say that the “Day of Judgment” is more important than maintaining social distancing rules. Both groups abide by an orthodoxy they deem superior and both see the priority of the other group as skewed.
How can a rational person prioritize a non-consequential protest over maintaining the public’s health? How can a sane person not understand that going to Uman is not as important as saving lives? Unless you see the protests or visiting Uman as ultimate commandments that trump most other practices, you can’t. This is inflexible Orthodoxy. And the result is an angry discourse between two viewpoints that can never meet on common ground.
The role of the government is to set the priorities for the entire country, but even a capable government (and Israel doesn’t have one these days) finds itself in a bind when it faces the stringency of orthodoxy. The protesters and the Chasidim feel like the Maccabees. An oppressive regime is trying to prevent them from committing a holy act and they must fight back. In the case of the protesters, the right-wing government is an obvious culprit trying to limit democracy. In the case of the Chasidim, the secular, civil government clearly doesn’t understand the significance of religious acts.
And so, these modern-day Maccabees raise their flags: black flags for protest, Nachman flags for Breslov. They raise their flags and fight for their orthodoxies. You can almost hear the virus laughing.
(JTA) — A car-ramming attack by a Palestinian driver lightly injured an Israeli soldier and a police officer in the West Bank on Wednesday morning.
The injured soldier shot the driver after he exited the car brandishing a knife and ran at the checkpoint, halting his progress, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The alleged assailant reportedly is in moderate condition.
The alleged terrorist attack took place at Tapuach Junction, near the city of Ariel, which has been the scene of many such attacks in recent years.
“We will not allow terror to raise its head and will fight the perpetrators and the people who send them,” Defense Minister Benny Gantz said in a statement. “The IDF and security forces will maintain their readiness across all fronts.”
The driver was identified as a student from the Nablus area named Mohammed Jabr al-Bitawi, Haaretz reported.
