It is always with a feeling of trepidation that I turn on the television in the evening when Yom Kippur has ended to catch up on the news. News broadcasts in Israel stop at 4 pm., some two hours before the start of the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. In fact, everything stops. There are no flights in Israeli airspace and almost no traffic.
In my neighborhood – like most Jewish neighborhoods – the main sounds are of children taking the opportunity to ride bicycles on car-free roads and the sound of prayers and birdsong. It’s as close as you can get to the sound of silence in a big city like Jerusalem. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.
I know that globally there is no such thing as peace and quiet just because the Jewish state has closed down for the Day of Atonement. And since the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, no Israeli has ever felt completely secure on that most powerful of all the Days of Awe. But I wasn’t prepared for the images I saw on my screen on Monday night.
I saw acts of antisemitism. The prayers of Jews who had gathered together were drowned out by screamed abuse.
The tears of worshipers were not those intimately shed in prayer. They were tears of pain and fear.
This was Tel Aviv, 2023, and a different kind of battle was taking place.
Watching the footage, I felt sick. It wasn’t the result of the 25-hour fast. I was sickened.
A group of extremists, drunk with their own power and self-righteousness, had proven they would stop at nothing. If Yom Kippur isn’t holy to them, nothing is holy. There are no more sacred cows.
The “Protest Movement” for some has morphed into a new religion. And it has nothing to do with freedom and democracy. Freedom of worship is cherished throughout the democratic world, but the amorphous group of demonstrators who have crossed one red line after another has rules of its own.
For several years, Jews of all types have come together for outdoor prayers in central Tel Aviv sites, including its iconic Dizengoff Square. Never before has a group of protesters tried to throw the prayer books into the fountain. No one has threatened to set large dogs on the praying Jews.
These are the threats associated with rampaging Cossacks, but the self-professed freedom fighters thought nothing of screaming “demo-kra-tia” and “busha” (shame) in the faces of young women and old men and families whose panicked children couldn’t understand why their parents were being attacked.
Why was this Yom Kippur different from all others? Why was this year’s Kol Nidre prayers at the start of the holiday and this year’s Ne’ila at its conclusion like none before? Because of the “revolution.” The government’s proposed judicial reform – renamed by its opponents as the “regime overthrow” – has become the excuse for behavior never before considered acceptable. Behavior that isn’t acceptable.
These worshipers had sinned – not necessarily in the eyes of God, but in the eyes of self-appointed guardians of liberal values; people who consider themselves even more important.
It began when the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality – gearing up for next month’s municipal elections – announced that it would not allow for any partition separating men and women in any part of the public space.
The Rosh Yehudi organization, which annually organizes the prayers, contested the decision, which goes against Orthodox Jewish beliefs and practice. The city, in keeping with its own tradition, took the matter to the High Court, which ruled in favor of the municipality.
As a result, Rosh Yehudi leaders, having consulted their lawyers on how to interpret the ruling, decided to string up a line of flags to act as a partition. This met their need to mark an area where men and women wouldn’t be forced to intermingle during prayers while not creating a physical barrier.
The blue-and-white national flags should have served as a festive decoration, had this not been 2023, the Year of Polarization. Instead, they served as a string of red flags.
The protesters – who ostensibly place the rule of the High Court above all – decided to take the law into their own hands. Instead of relying on the police and municipal inspectors to determine whether or not the flags were in keeping with the court’s decision, the demonstrators turned into vigilantes, causing such a disruption that the prayers had to be abandoned. So much for the sanctity of the day.
Heaven forbid a compromise be found allowing the protesters and prayer-goers to live and let live.
Many on the Right noted that Tel Aviv’s vaunted secular values are subject to double standards: There had been no protests against gender-separated mass prayers of Muslims in the city’s beachfront Charles Clore Park on Eid al-Adha.
Just who was to blame this week depends, of course, on which side of the polarized society you stand. Opposition leader Yair Lapid declared that in previous years, “Whoever wanted to pray separately went to synagogue. Whoever wanted to pray together, prayed outside. No one tried to force their Judaism on others.
“This was until messianic and racist groups from the outside tried to force their Judaism on us. We don’t need instructions from anyone on how to be Jewish.”
Religious Zionist Party leader and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, on the other hand, said: “While millions of Jews in Israel prayed in synagogues and in public spaces, fasted, united, asked forgiveness, and connected to the roots of our culture, a handful of violent barn-burners backed by Yair Lapid lit a fire and disgraced the holy day.
“I have no doubt that the vast majority of the people, from the Left and the Right, shun them entirely. At the end of Yom Kippur, I call on all of us not to get dragged into these provocations and the continuation of hate and discord. We are Jews. We are brothers.”
A seriously dysfunctional family
Brothers (and sisters) we may be, but it is a seriously dysfunctional family.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir couldn’t resist jumping into the fray and announced he would hold a mass prayer-gathering in Tel Aviv on Thursday evening, later backing down in the face of a backlash from both sides of the political map. If there was a bright spot in all this, it was that there are still those willing to heed the warning of the dangers of extremism.
Who was the victim of the Yom Kippur melee? Again, it depends on whom you ask. The protesters are certain that they were the victims and that they had no choice but to fight another battle to save the state 50 years after the Yom Kippur War.
Others have the opposite view. The outdoor prayers started during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis and with the resurgence in coronavirus cases, there are many who prefer to pray in the open air rather than in the confines of crowded synagogues. There are also many people who don’t belong to a particular community or synagogue but who don’t want to skip prayers on the most important day of the Jewish year. The majority of Israelis consider themselves traditional, after all. Despite the hype about the partition, most of the makeshift prayer site was a mixed area, allowing families and friends to stay together and pray together.
In short, the prayers in years past have brought together the secular, traditional, and Orthodox; Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and mixed families. People who need to live together every day of the year. Even this year.
A colleague who was raised in an ultra-Orthodox home in Bnei Brak once recalled with wonder his first Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv after he had abandoned the haredi lifestyle. He jumped into his car intending to drive to the beach. A secular neighbor stopped him before he could get very far and told him that even in the “State of Tel Aviv” nobody drives on Yom Kippur.
It’s a custom rather than a law and I am sure that if ever there were an attempt to anchor it in legislation, it would backfire with people deliberately flouting it.
In the struggle for the nature of the state, attempts to shout down the sound of prayers with rhythmic chanting “demo-krat-ia” can only result in an unholy din. It is not a makeshift mechitza that is separating people.
When I turn on the TV on Saturday night, after celebrating the start of the Sukkot festival, may my prayers be answered. I pray to see people sitting together in their festive booths rather than protesters trying to bring the whole house down.
liat@jpost.com