Burning down the house

We see it happening every few months. An amazing Jerusalem ritual; glorious haredi pyromania – burning down the house.

They are quite good at it, especially the residents of the Mea Shearim and Geula neighborhoods, aged 7 to 70, including – on the sidelines, of course, and separately – their modest wives.

In the spectrum of their reactions, burning down the house is the decisive answer; the first and second blow; the beginning and end of the dialogue; a shining negotiations session.

It starts with announcements posted on walls, urging the public to join. This week it was about the starving mother – whose son’s shocking photograph, all skin and bones, was published by Yedioth Ahronoth Thursday.

They say she “treated him with such great devotion that her hands swelled up.” The announcement was signed by the “Association for Curbing the Persecution of the Haredi Public,” a heart-breaking text pertaining to the terrible injustice done to the mother, the result of a blood libel concocted by the welfare department, which along with the medical establishment “experiments on humans.”

The Orthodox public – “a handful of radicals” as some of their functionaries claim – is well practiced. Within minutes, all the garbage in the neighborhood is gathered for the sake of the cause. The skilled youngsters – there is no replacement for experience acquired under fire – turn municipal garbage dumpsters into a glorious arsenal of weapons. A flammable combination of homemade garbage and public waste: Plastic bags, paper bags, cardboard boxes, Styrofoam cups, leftovers from breakfast-lunch-dinner, eggshells and rotten vegetables.

A little drop of fuel and it goes up in flames. The fire of God that blinds everyone.

While doing that, a moment after the police and firefighters and municipal inspectors arrive, we see a little fridge flying down and landing on top of a fire truck, along with leftovers from the Shabbat meal, glass bottles, stones, and fruit that withered in the heavy heat.

So much depression hides there. So much anger, fury, and self-righteous rage that burns anything in its course. Residents of the haredi state hit the streets time after time to desperately fight the Zionist state, by burning its green garbage dumpsters.

'Zionist regime’s persecution'

As it turns out, there is no shortage of reasons. For seven years now, since 2002, they have been setting the streets on fire every summer, ahead of the Jerusalem Pride Parade and during the event.

Meanwhile, they rushed to defend yeshiva student Israel Valas, “a good guy, a distinguished Torah student,” who shook his three-year-old son to death and was convicted in the Zionist court. They also fight anything they perceive as the violation of the status quo in the capital – the opening of a road (Bar-Ilan) or the opening of city parking lots on Shabbat (Safra and Karta.)

When these pretexts run their course, they invent new ones. If at first they burned garbage dumpsters because of the starving mother, later they burned them because city officials said they given them new ones until they calm down.

And so, for five days now, excited and overjoyed like children in a Lag BaOmer party, they dance around the fire. If there’s pain there, and there must be, it is difficult to identify it on the revelers’ faces. Hidden behind plumes of smoke, they prevent any attempt at dialogue; any possibility of reaching the mother’s other children to see whether any of them were also victims of abuse.

They also block, with their flames, the way to other distressed individuals: Victims of domestic violence, incest, and sexual harassment. They set the streets on fire as if those things never happened, and if they did happen, well, it’s as though they didn’t.

And all these maladies are merely the result of the hostile Zionist regime’s persecution, which seeks to falsely accuse young fathers, devoted mothers, righteous men and their sons of committing secular transgressions.

So what are they left with? Burn and dance; dance and burn. What great joy.