Common narrative on haredim is about 'lazy and immoral leeches'
Photo: Noam Moskovich
March of the penguins
Free hatred for ultra-Orthodox is poison. Or maybe better put, it's a parasite, a little worm in our hearts that we feed with our own spirit and energy
Tel Aviv is a liberal place. A portion of its citizens, the urban elite and the young people who hope to join their ranks, pride themselves on their tolerance and openness. They have been schooled in ethnology, anthropology, sociology, and firmly believe in the relativity of values. For them, the notion of hatred is anathema. They are even unwilling to admit the hatred of what is elsewhere called evil, and instead consider it either a misguided reaction to strife, or a misinterpretation of terms based on differing cultural values.
But one hatred still remains. It's not hidden or even rationalized. It's spoken about not in indoor murmurs, but in full voice, often on the air or in print. And it blends the passion of what the Jewish tradition calls a "free hatred" with contempt's impulse to ridicule, and, of course, a total rejection of understanding or sympathy.
Dramatic Changes
Associated Press
Demographers estimate about third of Jewish babies are born into ultra-Orthodox community. Relations between haredim, other Israelis have never been smooth, but some share a sense that things cannot continue as they are
This hatred is the hatred of Israel's "penguins," as the most common epithet goes, the ultra-religious, or haredim, in Hebrew. The story line is garbled and contradictory, as it so often is with hatred. While the term of abhorrence refers to one of the cutest, most harmless creatures in the world, the common narrative about the haredim is about "leeches" who are "violent," "lazy," and "immoral."
The proposed solutions are even more revealing. Some young, very educated people I know suggest they be sent to "work camps" or "gulags" for reeducation and rehabilitation, while others wouldn't mind seeing mass arrests. Almost no one suggests the common Western-democratic social cures of dialog, education, and integration -- the ones uniformly called for to cope with other marginal populations in Israel, like African refugees or Arabs.
Our hatreds speak more than we know. Those who hate the "penguins" will admit that the ultra-Orthodox are a population traumatized by exile and living in a former reality. But hating a group of their own people, can they admit the same thing about themselves? Whether their mouths are able to form those words is not important: Their hatred confesses their trauma.
Like the ultra-Orthodox, the secular are half a people. While their counterparts in Mea Shearim and Bnei Brak are all spirit and all religion, the secular are only nationality, only political. And the two groups have complementary problems: according to the secular, the ultra-Orthodox are fascists who are willing to accept nothing but their own way. According to the Orthodox, the secularists are decadents who have no way so accept everything.
There is some truth to each account. But the repetition of these two accounts does little to move the situation forward. What is more important is the creation of a common ground and a common language with which to speak, since at the moment the two groups are literally incommensurable, they speak in different tongues.
Seculars must make the first move
The ultra-Orthodox in Israel are growing rapidly. They number some 700,000 people, and their population is expected to double every 20 years. Relative to the factious secular population, they are politically and spiritually united. While secular Israelis might view their own intractability as a wall to hold back the erosion of their most important values, the truth is that the wall is crumbling, and, things as they are, the rising ultra-Orthodox will eventually just sweep over it.
For this reason alone, it should fall on the secular to make the first move. But this move has to be an internal one, beginning with an attempt to understand their attitudes towards the haredim.
The secular see the Orthodox as having stepped out of a former time, one of European submission, and they hate them in this respect because they hate the idea of their own victimhood. However, this is only a part of the case. They also hate to be judged, particularly by religious Jews. They can withstand the judgment of the Diaspora and the world, of the Arabs and the Europeans, but the judgments of the haredim seems to drive them to distraction.
This, I believe, is the source of the hatred for the ultra-Orthodox. For many secular people, it's a tool to delegitimize their would-be judges -- to say that no part of the judgment is correct because the entirety of ultra-Orthodox being is wrong.
But maybe they're not all wrong. Maybe they're sometimes right for the wrong reasons. Maybe in finding a small degree of truth in their lives we can find the degrees of truth in our own lives. Maybe in this, we can help them find a way into the present - and they can help us find the lost thread of the past.
This might strain reality, but either way, the free hatred for the ultra-Orthodox is a poison. Or maybe better put, it's a parasite, a little worm in our hearts that we feed with our own spirit and energy. It's time that we let it go.
Ashley Rindsberg is a 29-year-old writer who’s contributed to The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post and Ynet, in addition to recently publishing a book of short fiction, Tel Aviv Stories .
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