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Photo: Zoom 77
Anat Gov unimpressed with Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu
Photo: Zoom 77

Rabbis wanted

Religious leaders exposed as failures during current crisis

The Hebrew word “Rav” has two meanings. The first one is a noun - rabbi, a wise teacher. The second one is a verb – arguing, provoking, clashing.

 

 

Which one of the two meanings most accurately applies to former chief rabbis Avraham Shapira and Mordechai Eliyahu, who over the weekend ruled that religious soldiers must refuse to serve in Gush Katif roadblocks?

 

The same rabbis who through blatant irresponsibility cause the IDF to disintegrate and make every religious soldier appear automatically suspicious when it comes to disobeying military orders.

 

During the years of occupation, when the Left’s best went to protect the settlers, years of manning roadblocks and dealing with situations that contradict the values of equality and human dignity they were raised on, not even one Zionist leftist leader backed insubordination.

 

And now, those who see themselves as the spiritual leaders of the nation of Israel are exposed during crisis as small, petty, narrow-minded, and sectoral individuals. Indeed, they have dumped all spiritual Jewish values into history’s proverbial garbage can and are sanctifying only one value – a value that is physical, materialistic, possessive, almost pagan.

 

When one sees the haughty, rioting, cursing, spitting youth, the youngsters who puncture tires, uproot trees, kick and break ribs, and cheapen the memory of the Holocaust to the point of claiming that what the Germans did was not a uniquely brutal event but something that happens here too, one wonders – who educated them?

 

Who authorized this brutish behavior against security forces? Who stands in silence in the face of all this violence? What will happen with those youngsters after the pullout?

 

Who will provide them with the excitement they have grown accustomed to in the days after disengagement? Who will they be thought to hate? Who will they be taught to fight against?

 

‘Jews are good, gentiles are bad’

 

Those rabbis and settler rabbis, headed by Rabbi Dov Lior, who lauded Baruch Goldstein’s Hebron massacre, are the spiritual teachers of those youngsters.

 

They taught them to view the world in black and white. The Jews are good and the gentiles are bad. Right-wingers are patriots and left-wingers are bad news for the Jews.

 

No moderation, no courtesy. Indeed, the façade of pleasantness they displayed as long as the State was lying on its back and doing what they wished disappeared, and suddenly the monster reared its head.

 

These rabbis are the obstacle standing in the way of the desire to sympathize with the evacuees’ pain and the ability to actually feel that pain.

 

Yes, even though I support the disengagement and ending the occupation, I understand the difficulties faced by people whose physical and spiritual world has collapsed.

 

And yes, I want to hurt with them the pain of evacuation. Yet every time I finally feel a sense of solidarity and pain rising, a religious edict arrives and washes the pain away.

 

Every time I wish to initiate a move of solidarity with the difficult trauma these people are facing, there come the rabbis and make me realize this complexity is not their language and there is no point in arriving in Gush Katif and expressing sympathy, because I might not get out of there alive.

 

An inflation of rabbis is a largely unknown phenomenon in the Jewish people’s history. Yet these days, when we need more than anything a spiritual, moral, and particularly responsible authority that would help up successfully manage this crisis, and despite the fact we have so many rabbis here, there is not even one who attempts to conduct himself like a rabbi.

 

Playwright and publicist Anat Gov is an occasional contributor to Yedioth Ahronoth

פרסום ראשון: 07.19.05, 09:45
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