Playground better than a grave

Religious coercion has infiltrated our lives and now also seeks to dictate how we die

Yossi Beilin |Published: 08.29.07 , 14:04

There is a non-religious majority in Israel that wants to lead a normal life, and there is a religious minority that tries to dictate its way of life, and it has been going on like this for 60 years. Israel is one of few democracies in the world that has no constitution - because of the religious and strictly Orthodox. We are probably the only democracy in the world where matrimonial laws, which pertain to each and every one of us, are religious rules, where you can only marry within your religious community (for the Jewish majority - only with Orthodox rabbis).

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"Who is a Jew?" should be answered with national, not religious definitions. There is no public transportation on Saturday, and if you open your place of business on the weekly day of rest, you will be fined. The religious minority enters our plates (with various bans on pork products and on eating leavened bread in Passover); our beds (with its laws on marriage, divorce, yibum, halitza, "unfaithful wives," and mamzerut - bastards); and now they want to enter our graves too.

The currently ruling coalition, in its weakness, surrenders to all kinds of strictly Orthodox madness: it releases them from the duty to teach their children the state-dictated core subjects (like English and math); forces local authorities to finance their unofficial schools; extends our military service term by exempting them from service; and soon it will surrender to their surreal bill that attempts to legally deny the people who want the right to have their bodies cremated, making a manipulative use of the memory of the Holocaust.

Enough is enough! You are making our lives difficult and now you want to tell us how to die too? Those who believe in death rituals, tombs and graves, who feel that the only contact with the dead is paying an annual visit to their grave and placing flowers on their tomb, are welcome to live by their faith.

Those who feel, like I do, that all that is left after our passing is a memory in the hearts of those who loved us, that we leave behind the things we did, do not have to trouble their family with attending funerals, sitting in the first seven-day shiv'a, observing the 30-day mourning period, and morbid anniversaries, where the number of those who attends decreases every year anyway.

This affair has an environmental aspect as well. Israel's cemeteries are filling the land, requiring large spaces. There is increasing talk of burial in niches and flights. This land, however, needs open spaces and parks, and not more and more cemeteries. If I have to choose between a burial plot for me and a playground for my grandson, I choose the latter.

In my capacity as the head of the secular-pluralist lobby in the Knesset, the madness that surrounded the location of the crematorium, the splash it made in the strictly Orthodox media, the vandalism against the place, and the fire and brimstone outpouring from the mouths of the Shas ministers is driving me crazy.

As leader of Meretz-Yahad, a party that struggles for the freedom of and from worship, and as a private individual, I will not let yesterday's people tell us how to die. If they try to impose this too on us, our reaction will not be the silence of the lambs.