JUST OVER 40 years ago, when our country was barely out of adolescence, I made the spiritual leap out of the fleshpots of exile, to live in this-land-is-ours-God-gave-this-land-to-me. Of course, I missed the swimming pools and clean, clean beaches, the maids and sane drivers. But the “Hatikvah” moments – Look! The bus driver’s wearing a kippa! – and the sense of being part of the greatest miracle of the millennium were ample compensation.
Now, in my old age, epiphanies seem silly. Religious coercion has hit us too hard; every family seems to have ghastly stories of corrupt rabbis and implacable enemies in the religious authorities.And the cultish feeling is proliferating. A few nights ago, on a beautiful balmy Jerusalem evening, I had dinner on the pavement of trendy Emek Refaim Street. Brooke Shields served us, dressed in a ubiquitous long, swishing skirt. What I noticed about her, apart from her beauty and lack of English, was that she kissed the mezuzah every single time she passed through the doorway, even when balancing a tray of drinks. At one point we called her back to change our order; she’d hardly kissed her way through the door. She re-kissed the sacred space, letting her hand linger in the air for the inward-bound smooch. She confided that she even kisses the toilet doorpost each time she needs the little room, even though there is no mezuzah on the lintel of a loo. “I can’t manage without it,” she said, “It’s my lifestyle.”It recalled an ancient TV skit where Keren Mor kisses a mezuzah on leaving a room. Two steps away, she looks around furtively and backtracks for a more amorous encounter. She soon flattens herself against the doorpost, getting progressively heated, till she is well-nigh orgasmic with God’s signature of a Jewish home.Today Miri Regev would ban that episode or fire Mor. Welcome to the Jewish Nation-State.Is this what living in the middle of the Middle East does to us – makes half of us cultists, the other half antisemites? Jews have traditionally borne beacons of sanity and light: Helen Suzman, Albert Einstein, Betty Friedan. What’s happened to us here?I wish Bibi hadn’t disappeared out of my REM sleep; I wanted his vision of our future. Is it exclusively one of men in white shirts and women under wraps who support the Bennett-Shaked-Regev triumvirate? Helmed, forever and ever amen, by one eternal leader? Where secular, liberal, non-tzitzitwearing citizens are extinct, except maybe huddled on the last mixed-swimming beach in Tel Aviv? Israel: WTF? The writer lectures at Beit Berl College and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. peledpam@gmail.com