Many MKs applauded the groundbreaking inaugural speech of freshman MK
Dr. Ruth Calderon (Yesh Atid) on Tuesday, in which she delivered a Torah
lesson based on a tractate of the Talmud to bring a message of understanding and
tolerance.
Calderon, a lecturer in Talmud and founder of the egalitarian
Elul yeshiva in Jerusalem, started her speech by reading a homiletic extract
from the Talmud, noting that the Torah is “not the property of one movement or
another, but a gift received by every one of us,” and said that instead it
should be rediscovered and reappropriated to help construct a Hebrew culture in
Israel.
But her speech also received a deeply suspicious and wary
reaction from the popular haredi news website Kikar Hashabbat, which accused
Calderon and her Yesh Atid party of seeking to bring a “new enlightenment” to
the haredi world to integrate them into Israeli society.
“MK Calderon
stood on the speakers’ platform... and then the realization suddenly hit us; we
are seeing in a live broadcast the new enlightenment, the new forces that have
arisen and want to annihilate haredi society in its current form,” the website
wrote in an editorial.
“Haredi society finds itself facing a much more
complex threat [than the Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries], against
the demand from us to integrate into the secular Jewish society,” the article
continued.
The Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskala as it is known in Hebrew,
is a much-reviled period of history for the ultra- Orthodox community because of
the process of integration and assimilation into secular society that it
engendered for European Jewry, following the emancipation of Jews on the
continent with which it was concurrent.
The Kikar Hashabbat editorial
team wrote that unlike the first Enlightenment, Calderon and Yesh Atid do not
want to eradicate the Torah and turn the Jews into a nation of non- Jews, but
instead want “Talmud for all, and here is hidden the great danger,” the article
explained.
“The Yesh Atid bunch and the Enlightenment rabbis of the 19th
century [act] in similar ways. They take cover under the cloak of the rabbinate
– Rabbi Shai Piron [second on Yesh Atid’s list], Dov Lipman [another Yesh Atid
MK and haredi rabbi] and the ‘rabbanit’ Ruth Calderon are using our weapon – the
Talmud, gemara and arbiters of Jewish law – against us and at the same time
acting as a fig leaf.”
Despite its negative rhetoric, the editorial ends
on a contemplative and self-reflective note, asking whether haredi society
should push away secular society – which could send secular Jews toward “the
Reform Movement and the rest of the instant alternatives to authentic Judaism” –
or allow it in somewhat, which could be an opportunity “to try and include
opinions and approaches opposed to ours?”
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