God plays center stage in Shas election campaign

Shas has put out huge bus ads equating Moses - and critics say even God - with Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
shas poster 88.298 (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
shas poster 88.298
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
The election campaign may just be kicking off, but God is already playing center stage in at least one party's advertisements. Shas has put out huge bus advertisements equating Moses - and critics say even God - with the party's revered spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. "Who is on the Lord's side, come to me," the advertisement reads next to a large picture of Yosef. The quote, from Exodus 32:26, was spoken by Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments and found the nation worshipping the Golden Calf. The controversial ads, which appeared on city buses throughout Jerusalem this week, have already managed to rise the ire of non-Orthodox officials. "Now they are going all out and saying 'God is speaking to you: vote Shas,'" said Anat Hoffman, the head of Israel's Reform Movement, deploring the ads as both "idolatrous" and "non-Jewish." "God in their vocabulary is Ovadia Yosef." But a Shas spokesman denied there was anything sacrilegious in the ads, nor did they represent a desecration of God's name. "The situation in the country is almost bordering on saving a human life," Shas spokesman Roei Lachmanovits said Wednesday, defining the ad campaign as part of the "urgent" need "to move from darkness to light."