My good friend and colleague, Dr. Daniel Gordis, asked some excellent
questions in a letter addressed to the chairman of the Yesh Atid party, Yair
Lapid. Gordis identified Yesh Atid as one of the two parties he views as options
for his vote in the January 22 election and explained that he could not vote for
Lapid and Yesh Atid without answers to very specific questions.
As the
English-speaking candidate for Yesh Atid, I will answer those questions in
Lapid’s name.
Gordis asked, “Do you have a plan for the haredi time bomb?
They’re not going to the army – but what, instead, do you have in mind for them?
Some kind of national service? Do you have a plan for getting it passed?”
Our
answer is yes. Last spring, Lapid announced Yesh Atid’s “equal service for all”
plan to deal with the issue of haredim and national service. The plan was
authored with the input of military personnel and moderate haredi leaders.
Moderate haredim will embrace this plan and it will pass in the Knesset. The
plan is available in Hebrew, Russian, Amharic and English on the Yesh Atid
website, and Lapid and all Yesh Atid candidates present it daily. Voters can
study the plan and choose to either agree or disagree with it, but the plan is
clear – everyone serves the country.
Gordis also asked, “Are you saying
anything at all about the Jewish nature of the country?” The answer is that yes,
Lapid is. In a speech to haredim in Kiryat Ono, he said, “Secular Zionism
failed. It wanted to rely only on ourselves, but this could not justify our
being here. Our basis for being here is the Being that kept us alive for 2,000
years of exile – the God of Israel... The Six Day War showed us that things that
happen here are not happenstance. Even a person who does not observe
Torah and mitzvot recognizes that something deeper is going on
here... The Talmud contains thousands of years of wisdom and transforms
those who study it into better people and sharpens the mind.”
At the
press conference naming Rabbi Shai Piron, a religious Zionist rabbi, as the
party’s No. 2, Lapid said, “the reason we are here together as party leaders is
because the time has come for us to stop being tribes... The Torah says ‘because
we are men who are brothers.’” When Lapid announced the Yesh Atid list for
Knesset, he said, “We went out of our way to find people from different
backgrounds who bring different perspectives. Look at this list – this is
how the State of Israel should look.”
In presenting the Yesh Atid
security/political plan, Lapid emphasized, “Jerusalem will remain under Israeli
sovereignty and will not be divided. Jerusalem is not just a place; it is a
concept, it is the beating heart around which the new State of Israel was built.
The return to Zion was not to the towers of Azrieli but to the Tower of David,
and the heart of Jerusalem is the heart of Israel... The place where we are
standing now has national meaning and is deeply sentimental. In the hills and
settlements that I passed on the way here this morning, the prophet Elisha
brought the forces of the king of Aram after he smote them with blindness. This
is our history, this is our national ethos and these are the landscapes from
which grew the Jewish nation. But we must remember that our history also
includes the need to guard ourselves from destruction and that our national
ethos requires us to first and foremost look after the wholeness of the Jewish
people.”
Last week, in a speech to English-speakers in Tel Aviv, Lapid
said, “We must create a society in which we are nicer to each other. This is the
most basic of Jewish values... Zionism means that this is our only home
and we must work to make it a better place to live.”
Rabbi Piron made the
following remarks at the press conference referenced above: “It hurts me that in
the land where Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel taught about being a wondrous
nation, tikun olam [repairing the world] and being a light unto the nations, we
are dealing with polarization.”
Lapid and other party representatives
repeat these ideas daily in parlor meetings and speeches.
Gordis asks the
question that every voting parent must ask: whether Lapid has anything
interesting to say about education other than referring to “our sliding place in
multiple international rankings.”
At the unveiling of the Yesh Atid
education plan, which seeks to overhaul our education system, Lapid said, “We
must go back to vision and values because education is not just learning
material... Education is our chance to teach children who are talented in
science that their goal should not be making a quick escape to Silicon Valley
but to establish a hi-tech company in Israel and provide jobs to fellow
Israelis... Education has to be the mechanism through which we create unity... A
child cannot graduate from our schools without having seen a page of Talmud on
the one side, or thinking that secular people are abominations on the
other.”
Is this not speaking in lofty terms about goals in education?
Finally, Gordis asks whether Lapid is open to a “country with a robust Jewish
conversation at its core,” including issues of religious freedom.
Lapid
regularly talks openly about this issue and has maintained a very clear stance
on the topic in a speech to the Rabbinical Assembly in Atlanta on May
8.
Other Yesh Atid candidates speak regularly about this topic as well.
For example, Dr. Aliza Lavie, No. 7 on the Yesh Atid list, said the
following at the announcement of her candidacy: “I am joining Yair and Yesh Atid
because it is time to bring the issues I have been involved with to the center
of the political map and into the Israeli conversation – balancing Judaism and
democracy... Yesh Atid is committed to reopening dialogue about all the
important issues we have let fall to the side.”
It is my hope that these
facts answer the questions satisfactorily for Gordis and for readers, and that
this response helps set the record straight about Yair Lapid and Yesh
Atid.
The writer is an ordained rabbi, educator, author and community
activist in Beit Shemesh who is a candidate for the 19th Knesset with the Yesh
Atid party.
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