We have far more that unites us than separates us. If we focus on this, there is no force either within or without our society that can defeat us.

On balance, Israeli society is extremely healthy.

Unemployment is at record lows. At a time of global recession, the Israeli economy is growing steadily.

Israeli Jewish women have the highest fertility rate in the Western world with an average of three children per woman. Education levels have risen dramatically across the board over the past decade with dozens of private colleges opening their doors to more and more sectors of the population.

Israel’s diverse Jewish population is becoming more integrated. Sephardic and Ashkenazi intermarriage has long been a norm. Secular Jews are becoming more religious. A new educational trend that received significant media attention in recent months involves secular parents who send their children to national religious schools to ensure that they receive strong educational grounding in Judaism.

And as secular Jews become more religious, both the national religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors are becoming increasingly integrated in nonreligious neighborhoods and institutions. Ultra-Orthodox conscription rates have increased seven-fold in the past four years. In 2010, 50 percent of ultra-Orthodox male highschool graduates were conscripted.

The IDF assesses that by 2015, the rate of conscription will rise to 65%.

While this is still below the general conscription rate of 75% among male 18-year-olds, the rapid rise in ultra- Orthodox military service is a revolutionary development for the sector.

With military service comes entrée to the job market. The trend towards employment integration was blazed by ultra-Orthodox women. Over the past decade, ultra-Orthodox women have matriculated en masse in vocational schools that have trained them in hi-tech and other marketable professions and so enabled them to raise their families out of poverty.

These ultra-Orthodox women, who are now being followed by their IDF veteran husbands, are part of a general trend that has seen women fully integrated in almost every sector of society and the economy. The fact that women make up the senior leadership echelons in both business and government is not a fluke. Rather it is a product of the largely egalitarian nature of Israeli society.

True, as is the case everywhere, Israeli women suffer from male chauvinism.

And like the rest of the world, Israel has its share of sexual abusers, rapists, and criminal and social misogynists. But imperfection does not detract from the fact that women in Israel are free, educated, empowered and advancing on all fronts.

As for the national religious community, its youth remain committed to serving as pioneers in strengthening Israel as a Jewish democracy. Not content to limit themselves to national religious communities in Judea and Samaria, more and more young national religious families are moving to poor towns and communities from Dimona to Ramle to Kiryat Shmona to strengthen their educational, economic and social underpinnings.

Modern Orthodox women are taking on expanded roles in religious councils, synagogues, religious courts and other bodies. Soldiers from the national religious sector remain overrepresented in all IDF combat units and in the officer corps.

Israel’s growing social cohesion and prosperity is all the more notable as we witness neighboring states aflame with rebellion and revolution, extremist Islamist forces voted to power from Morocco to Egypt and economic forecasts promising mass privation.

And in the Age of Obama, with cleavages between liberals and conservatives growing ever wider in America, and with the future of the European Union hanging in the balance as the euro zone teeters on the edge of an abyss, the fact that Israeli society is becoming increasingly fortified is simply extraordinary.

In light of these integrationist trends, the media circus in recent weeks that has portrayed Israeli society as frayed through and through has been startling. With women in Israel presented as underprivileged victims, national religious youth presented as terrorists and the ultra-Orthodox community presented as a gang of misogynist, violent crazies set to transform Israel – in the words of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – into another Iran, an average news consumer can be forgiven for wondering how he missed his country’s demise.

What explains this sudden flood of gloom and doom stories? Certainly it is true that in a highly competitive news environment, media coverage tends to over represent marginal social forces. Sensational stories make for banner headlines. And it is at the margins of society that a reporter is most likely to find sensational stories.

So it is that when reporters wish to push a socialist agenda, they descend on urban slums and talk to people hanging out on the street doing nothing. As a rule, these stories will not feature visits to vocational training schools that are educating poor people out of poverty.

Just as poor, uneducated single mothers in Lod can be depended on to blame their troubles on an insensitive government, so groups of ultra- Orthodox extremists in Beit Shemesh, whose own communities decry them, can be trusted to treat nonreligious women poorly.

None of this is to say that we should stand by and allow poor single moms and their children to go hungry or that we should accept abuse of women by ultra-Orthodox bullies. The former is an issue for social services. The latter is an issue for law enforcement bodies. And to the extent that these institutions are failing in their missions, they should be required to improve their performance.

But just the majority of single mothers, who are not impoverished, don’t deserve to be placed in the victim column, so, too, the majority of ultra-Orthodox Israelis do not deserve to have their reputation besmirched because of the bad behavior of a small, vocal and easily provoked minority.

ALL OF this brings us to the issue at hand. Stories highlighting the deviant behaviors of marginal social forces tend to be simplistic and misleading, and to serve identifiable political forces. And so, with our national discourse suddenly dominated by stories describing the demise of Israeli democracy, women’s rights and the rule of law at the hands of modern and ultra- Orthodox Jews, we need to consider who benefits from the stories.

It is notable that the seam lines being opened by all of the stories, which are again, about deviations from the norm of Israel’s social cohesion, all fall within the governing coalition. Stories of “Jewish terrorists” set the security hawks against the ideological hawks. They set the likes of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his supporters against the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and their representatives in the Likud, Israel Beiteinu, Habayit Hayehudi and other coalition parties.

Stories about ultra-Orthodox misogynists make it politically costly for the Likud and Israel Beiteinu to sit in the same government as ultra- Orthodox parties such as Shas and United Torah Judaism. They also serve to weaken Shas among its nonultra- Orthodox voters. The fact that the ultra-Orthodox bus lines were inaugurated with the support of the Kadima government in 2007 is beside the point. It is the Likud that is now being blamed for their existence.

The current media-supported outcries against the national religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors follow the pattern of last summer’s social justice protests in Tel Aviv. The purpose of those protests was to discredit the government in the eyes of working class voters and young people.

The current protests also follow in the footsteps of the protests of 1998 and 1999 that brought down Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first government. Those protests pitted his Russian immigrant coalition members against Shas. They pitted secular Israelis against his ultra-Orthodox coalition members. They alienated young voters from his leadership.

They set his socialist partners against his capitalist partners.

The cleavages wrought in Netanyahu’s coalition made members of his own party as well as his coalition partners fear the electoral cost of maintaining their membership in his government. And so one by one, they bolted his government until it finally fell.

Notably, many of the same forces – from the New Israel Fund to various political consultants who work for the Israeli Left to European NGOs – who were active in the protests in 1999 and in the social justice protests last summer are also playing a role in the current protests. The New Israel Fund raised NIS 200,000 in “emergency funds” to pay for buses to transport protesters to Beit Shemesh last week.

It also paid for two rallies in Jerusalem attacking religious bans on female vocalists earlier last month.

Last summer, Israel’s New Left movement led by leftist political consultant Eldad Yaniv took credit for organizing the anti-free market protests. Yaniv and his colleagues were assisted in conceptualizing the protests by US Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who was also the architect of the social protests in 1998-99.

Indications of how the political Left has been impacted by the current wave of demonstrations are mixed. A Shvakim Panorama poll from last week, which posited the existence of a new anti-religious party led by popular television personality Yair Lapid and a new anti-capitalist Sephardic party led by former Shas leader Arye Deri, indicated that the Left as a whole has been strengthened against the Right. While Kadima would lose most of its Knesset seats to Lapid’s party, it is Deri who would be the undoing of the Right.

The poll claimed that Deri, who since his release from prison has strengthened his bonafides as a secular- friendly political dove, would win seven mandates. Shas would drop from its current 11 seats to five. Deri’s rise would decrease the political Right in all its various forms from its current 67-seat majority in the 120 seat Knesset to a minority of 57.

The media have trumpeted this poll as the first harbinger of spring for Israel’s political Left. And certainly it provides some reason for celebration among leftist political forces. Like the protests in the late 1990s, and like last summer’s anti-capitalist protests, the current batch of anti-religious campaigns serves to turn Israeli against Israeli by feeding on and inflaming sectoral envies and insecurities. And given their success, we can certainly expect them to continue.

For the benefit of society as a whole, we must hope that the basic health and cohesion of Israeli society that has grown so miraculously over the past decade will prevail in the current contest. We have far more that unites us than separates us. If we focus on this, there is no force either within or without our society that can defeat us.

But if we give in to the forces of contention and chaos, we risk endangering everything we hold dear.



caroline@carolineglick.com

“There on the poplars – Aravim – we hung up our lyres (Psalms 137:2).” In view of the bitter experience of the exile, especially prior to Ezekiel’s revelations, there would have been ample reason to destroy their harps since they had nothing about which to sing and be happy. After the news of Ezekiel’s visions, and the guarantees of their future redemption, they hung the harps on the Aravim, the kind of trees whose very name has the dual meaning of guarantors and willows. This is why they did not hang them on any other type of tree.

The reason they did not destroy their musical instruments altogether was so that they would be able to play those instruments once the time for redemption would arrive (Romemot El, Rabbi Moshe Alshich).

Tools: Meta Prayer: Praying to Become a Better Davener

We have the idea of praying even when we don’t feel like praying, just as a marathon runner will practice running before the big race. We practice singing songs in response to redemption; we hang our musical instruments within reach, to be fully prepared for the proper song when the time arrives. We are praying for the privilege of singing the song of redemption.

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“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion (Psalms 137:1).” The placement of this Psalm immediately following the Hallel haGadol, Psalm 136, indicates that if Israel will merit it, it will be able to recite the former, if it will not merit it, it will have to recite this Psalm, lamenting what could have been and what should have been.

We are told in the Zohar that the exiles in Babylon were death like, as zombies, having been brought from a life of great comfort to the depths of deprivation. They refused to accept any attempts to comfort them, to offer them consolation.

This is why God revealed visions to the prophet Ezekiel on the Euphrates, showing him in God and His entourage, in order to convince the exiled Jews that they had not been abandoned by the Divine Presence, and that in fact, the Divine Presence was exiled alongside them, as well as the Angels. These acted as guarantors, the Aravim, of verse 2, that He Cool would free the Angels would also free the Jewish exiles in due course.

When Israel heard all this, it began to regain its composure. This is the background against which we read that the Jews, “sat alongside the rivers of Babylon,” meaning, they are they experienced some degree of relief having been told Ezekiel’s vision.

On the one hand, they rejoiced, but on the other hand, “we cried,” when they fought back to Zion. (Rabbi Moshe Alshich; Romemot El)

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“You made a water reservoir between the two walls, by the water of the Old Pool. But you did not look towards the One Who made it, nor did you consider the One Who formed it [Jerusalem] in the distant past” (Isaiah 22:11).

They would tear down their houses and take the stones in order to reinforce the walls (Eicha Rabah 24).

There were cracks in the walls; the inhabitants of Jerusalem were desperate to fill in the gaps and strengthen their perceived protection.

They dismantled their houses in order to save the walls.

They destroyed their homes in order to keep up the illusion that they had created.

They refused to look beyond what they had established as their security. God, as the One Who formed Jerusalem from the beginning of times, was waiting for them to turn to Him and seek His protection. Yet, as they were dragging the stones from their demolished homes to the cracks in the walls, they failed to see Him.

When in order to erect a wall, we are ready to take apart our internal structure, we must ask ourselves: what am I protecting? When we hide behind a barrier whose purpose is to shield us from the outside world, yet we are willing to compromise our integrity as long as we can maintain this barrier, we are echoing the actions of those who Isaiah is admonishing.

Although King Hezekiah also reinforced the walls, it was different because he trusted in God, whereas “you did not look towards the One Who made it” (Rashi).

Are we blindly building sandcastle fortifications, or are we shielding ourselves with the awareness and the vision that God is our Guardian?

The former will eventually cause us to sabotage what we hold dear, while the latter will protect, strengthen and enhance what is precious to us.

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(Kings II Chapter 25) “It happened in the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylonia, he and his entire army, came to wage war against Jerusalem and encamped near it, and built a siege tower around it.”

Jeremiah had been prophesying the arrival of a storm from Babylon for years. No one listened. “It could never happen to Jerusalem!” No one wanted to listen, so they threw the prophet into a pit and jail. Babylon’s armies had already visited Jerusalem. Zedekiah was king only because his brother Jehoiachin, was taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar.  Zedekiah was not his real name. The 21 year old Mattaniah  was renamed by the Babylonians ; they controlled everything, not only who was king, but even his name! And Jeremiah continued to warn the people how vulnerable they were, and how insecure their situation. But the people did not hear the prophet. They did not want to listen. “It could never happen to Jerusalem.” “It will never happen to me.”

The Babylonians were at the walls of the city and Jeremiah cried out to the people to listen to God’s message. Perhaps now they would listen to the man who spoke in God’s name. But the people did not pay attention to the prophet’s voice. They did not want to hear. They could have prevented the destruction of Jerusalem. They had ample opportunity to surrender to the Babylonians. But, they could not hear God’s voice in Jeremiah’s cries. They did not want to hear God’s message in their new circumstances, even as siege walls were being constructed around Jerusalem.  They could hear the hammers banging away at the walls that would spell their doom, but they did not listen. They were not deaf. They chose not to hear.

They may have chosen to shut out God’s voice, Jeremiah’s cries, the sound of Nebuchadnezzar’s soldiers marching, the noise of the construction and the loud and clear pronouncements of their political and military realities, but we can hear the sound of desperation and frustration in Jeremiah’s words.

We, the people of the Shema, “Hear O’ Israel”, so often choose not to hear. We shut out the warnings of Jeremiah. We ignored the warning signs of Hitler’s rise to power. We shut out the very clear message in Iran when Islamic radicals toppled the Shah. We, who repeatedly remind ourselves to hear and pay attention, simply slide into selective hearing. How can we hear the words of Shema as we should if we can so easily choose what not to hear? Either we hear the voices of God, the prophets and history, or we do not.

We remember the deafness of our ancestors in besieged Jerusalem and we “fast”! Would it not make more sense to dedicate the Tenth of Tevet to learning how to listen? Why do we fast?

(Zohar, Volume 2, 20b) Rabbi Eliezer would pray the following words when he would fast: “It is revealed and known before You, God, my Lord, Lord of my ancestors, that I offer all that my body is burning of itself as an offering to You. May it be Your desire that the smell that rises from my mouth as I fast be considered equal to the fragrance of the Burnt Offering as it burns on Your altar.”

Rabbi Eliezer’s prayer teaches us that we want God to pay attention to our fasting, just as He would pay attention to a sacrifice burning on His altar. We ask the Master of the Universe to pay attention, to hear us, to listen. We cannot accomplish anything with our fast if God does not take note of our feeble effort at fixing our mistakes. We cannot ask God to listen if we continue to shut our ears to Him. A fast is a prayer. A prayer must be heard. A prayer should begin a conversation. A conversation cannot develop if either party does not hear the other. Jeremiah expresses this idea in a powerful verse (14:12): “If they fast, I will not listen to their call.”

The fast of the Tenth of Tevet is a prayer; a prayer that can only be effective if we remember to listen for God’s voice.

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Learn & discover the Divine prophecies with Rabbi Simcha Weinberg from the holy Torah, Jewish Law, Mysticism, Kabbalah and Jewish Prophecies. The Foundation Stone™ is the ultimate resource for Jews, Judaism, Jewish Education, Jewish Spirituality & the holy Torah.