He, my boss, obviously saw no hope for the Reform. And having on staff a senior editor who felt that way was not going to make him friends in Borough Park.
He and I engaged in a furious email shouting match that lasted about a week, following which I saw the writing on the wall, concluded our affairs in America and set out for a new life in Israel. So I should be thankful to the man—and, in hindsight, I would have been miserable working for Haredim.
When I began covering the Women of the Wall, which is, like it or not, kind of the flagship of the Reform insurgency in Israel, my initial take was sympathetic. Go back through the archives and you’ll see that my reports from a year ago were not just respectful, but I also belittled the extent of the damage they could possibly cause.
I no longer feel that way. I fear that the Women of the Wall may be symptomatic of a serious turn in the relationship between observant Jews and the state. And the fact that this is taking place at a time when a National Religious political party, Jewish Home, is a major player in a government that supports the eradication of Orthodoxy in Israel, is even more terrifying.
I had an exchange of comments with a reader named Dan Silagi (I admire readers who use their real name in online discussions—I do it as well) on my Sunday’s report, Women of the Wall Searching for Next ‘Struggle.’
In my article I cited the WOW complaints that the police separated them from their Haredi adversaries by “caging” them (behind simple barricades) and argued that a revolution is like a shark – if it stops struggling it dies. And so, if the courts are now permitting the WOW prayer, they must find someone against whom they can struggle, and a bunch of Haredim with signs 200 yards away just won’t do.
Dan Silagi wrote:
“Boohoo, Yori, I guess you’re disappointed that there weren’t massive demonstrations against WOW which you could blame on WOW rather than your Haredi buddies. In three months’ time, give or take a couple, I predict that the Women of the Wall praying, singing, and reading from the Torah will become routine. You and your newspaper will need to find another target at which to tilt your windmills.”
First, thanks to our reader Avraham Bronstein (another real name!) who commented:
“For the record, the phrase is ’tilting at windmills.'”
My own response was a great deal less technical (I bring it almost raw, with minor post-posting improvements):
Dan Silagi · I’m not sure what point you’re making. I also predict that the WOW will be singing and reading from the Torah and playing guitar on Shabbat and davening in mixed minyanim — I just think it’ll be another nail in the coffin of our legitimacy in the land of Israel.Our entire justification for having conquered the land from the former inhabitants, which we have done, is that it was God given to us. Otherwise, we’re just European colonialists who pushed out the indigenous people for no good reason other than the power of the gun.
If we believe that God gave us the land, we must ask, what is our relationship with God? Do we bring anything into the relationship, or is the Gift from God argument, essentially, an empty slogan we don’t really believe in?
If we believe in it, then we must accept that our relationship with God is through the commandments, more accurately through our adherence to His commandments — because that’s what He, in his eternal wisdom, told us.
So that our adherence to halacha and our right to the land are inseparable, and if we don’t adhere to halacha, we have no rights here.
Now, the most essential, most central, most crucial part of halacha is submitting to the yoke of our sages. In this case, there is one sage who is the state appointed administrator at the Kotel, and he laid down the law — only to be defied both by the WOW and by two lower courts. Incidentally — the high court still sides with the Rabbi of the Kotel.
So, Dan Silagi, while I agree that your predictions are true, I also say that they make you and your ilk nothing better than the British and French oppressors of the black tribes of Africa, and that you, as a secular European invader devoid of justification for your occupation, must at once relinquish authority over the land to its rightful Arab owners.
I know, it’s a bit rough, and I could have made a more subtle and nuanced connection between our right to the land and our halachic obligations — you don’t always get to be subtle in a talkback format. But I now have shed completely any sympathy I harbored in the past for the Women of the Wall. I now believe that they are but the vanguard of an all out attempt on the part of anti-halachic organizations to attack and weaken the religious aspect of Zionism.
They’ve already done away with secular Zionism ages ago.