A rant delayed

You may recall two related items from my birthday list that went as follows:

5.  I love spotting religious Jews in Tel Aviv.
6.  I love spotting secular Jews in Jerusalem, too.  Maybe more so. 

When I wrote those two things I was focused on the tensions in Jerusalem between the Haredi population and the city government that was trying to keep a parking lot open to accommodate secular tourists who want to visit the capital on Shabbat.

Personally, I have a big problem with Jews enforcing religious observance upon other Jews.  That having been said, I have an equally big problem with Jews in the only Jewish country in the world being forced to violate Jewish law (i.e. work on the sabbath, eat non-kosher food, etc.).

Clearly it is impossible to create a societal norm where no Jew will have to work on the sabbath if businesses are routinely open on that day. 

Yes, one can argue that it is a matter of free choice and employees can opt to work on shabbat or not according to their personal beliefs.  But we all know that in a free market economy, employers can bring pressures to bear on employees to work when they might otherwise not want to... and employees faced with a choice of adhering to religious law or meeting their family's financial needs may opt for the immediate reward rather than the eternal one.

Where it is less cut and dried is in matters that deal with the 'character' of particular neighborhoods and the right of religious and secular people to feel 'at home' in the neighborhoods where they live. 

This cuts to the heart of what I meant in those two lines above.  I firmly believe that while a strictly religious or non-religious neighborhood might seem desirable from the standpoint of avoiding conflict between people with diverging priorities... it is a recipe for national dis-chord.

You see, it is human nature for a person to be at home with whatever lifestyle choices one makes for him/herself.  However, this means that those who make different lifestyle choices are naturally going to be viewed in a negative way.  But if those 'different people' are friends, or even acquaintances that you see every day, it is harder to think ill of them than if they are strangers living in another neighborhood or town.

This goes back to one of my favorite analogies about driving:

Pretty much everyone thinks they are a good driver (or at least above average).  So as a result we all consider those who zip past us on the highway 'maniacs', and those in front of us impeding our progress are 'idiots'.  The same goes for politics and religion.  We are so completely sure of the choices we make in these areas, that we quite naturally view the choices made by others as suspect (often in the extreme).

So while there have always been communities in Israel that were exclusively religious or exclusively secular, the majority of urban and suburban neighborhoods were mixed to some extent... even if they may lean predominantly one way or the other.

But in the wake of the sabbath protests in Jerusalem over the opening of a tourist parking lot, there was also a recent news article that probably went largely un-noticed by most.  It was about the predominantly secular community of Ramat Aviv getting up in arms over the recent influx of religious Jews, and the perception that this would somehow force religious observance upon them and their children.

The contentions in this case are summed up in these quotes from the article:

Over the past few years, Chabad [Lubavitch] members have begun renovating public buildings and institutions in Ramat Aviv. A movie theater was converted into a kollel. Billionaire Lev Leviev, who is observant and owns the Ramat Aviv Mall, ensured it would be closed on Shabbat. And a center belonging to the Histadrut Labor Federation now functions as a Chabad kindergarten..

These changes have raised concern with the city's secular residents, with a single issue at the center of the debate: the character of the neighborhood.

The ultra-Orthodox "come with [a] purpose, they are well organized, and they have a target - the secular Israeli public," MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) tells The Jerusalem Post.

"I'm not against someone who is religious, as long as they don't force their practices on me," says Dani Borten, a superintendent at the Alliance High School in Ramat Aviv, speaking on his own behalf, not the school's. "Now, in the neighborhood, I can see tensions starting. If we don't do something, there will be problems."

 

Tel Aviv-Jaffa council member Tamar Zandberg (Meretz) says there is no demand in the neighborhood for the facilities that the haredi community has opened. "What they are doing is definitely part of a bigger purpose," she says.

In another time and place these accusations would have been accompanied by loaded phrases like 'block busting'  and 'those people'.  But from what I can gather, the primary concern among many secular residents of Ramat Aviv is that they and their children will be subject to pressures to become more religious (as if such a thing were possible). 

 

One example cited in the article is the practice of Lubavitch of setting up tables near the schools and shopping centers and encouraging passers by to put on Tefillin.

 

What they fail to recognize is that nobody is forcing people to put on tefillin, any more than secular kids handing out flyers for a club or non-kosher restaurant are forcing religious people to attend.  It may make some uncomfortable to be confronted with religious Jews encouraging religious observance... but how is that different from the influence that immodestly clad secular people have on religious communities?  Is a glimpse of a bare belly or a bit of cleavage going to force religious kids away from observance?  It shouldn't.

 

To be sure, the siren call of 'the other' cuts both ways in an open society.  People are constantly 'switching sides'... choosing to become more or less observant based on the things they experience in their daily lives.  Not only does the grass often seem greener in someone else's yard... but young adults are especially prone to changing paths in order to exert their independenc and/or piss off their parents. 

 

So yes, I could see why parents of both camps would be worried about the influence that might come from close proximity to 'the others'.

 

But one can't simultaneously complain about religious Jews sequestering themselves in ghettos where the secular folks are not welcome, and also complain when the Religious people come out of their ghettos and try to move into secular areas... bringing with them the basic educational and religious facilities they need in order to feel at home.

 

I have a lot more to say on the subject, but I'm curious to see how some of you feel about this topic.

 

[As always, I would caution everyone to be sensitive to the diversity of people who read this blog and who might want to participate in the discussion.]