Reviving dry bones

One of the famous prophetic events discussed is when God shows the prophet Yechezkel (Ezekiel) a valley of dry bones and asks the prophet if those bones could yet live. In the end God re-forms the bones into living men. There is some debate in the Talmud whether this incident happened or whether it was just a prophetic vision. Still it serves as a powerful metaphor that years of exile would not destroy the Jewish people.To some, the rebirth of the Jewish nation in 1948 was an example of dry bones being given new life. And according to an article, On Eve of Passover, Bread Stirs Deep Thoughts in Israel, by Ethan Bronner in the New York Times, more Israelis are taking the Jewish part of their identity more seriously.

Hametz is bread and other leavened products that many Jews do not eat for the eight days of Passover, which starts Saturday night. The Bible says that when God freed the Jews from enslavement in Egypt, they left in such a hurry that there was no time for their bread to rise, and to mark that circumstance, consuming leavened bread during the holiday is forbidden.The focus of the debate here is a ruling by a Jerusalem municipal judge overturning the convictions of four shops and restaurants for having sold pizzas and rolls during the holiday last year despite a law that many thought prohibited businesses from doing so. The judge said the law barred only the public display of hametz, not its sale inside shops.

While most debates about the painstakingly negotiated public role of religion in Israel line up along predictable lines of observant versus secular, this discussion has been different. And it speaks to a palpable anxiety over the need to define and defend the Jewish nature of the state, even as Israel’s 60th anniversary approaches next month.

In opinion articles and informal conversations, some nonreligious Israelis said that they liked the eight-day absence of hametz, and that it was a small but potent symbol of a unique collective identity.

I don’t agree with everything in the article, but Bronner gives a look at the non-religious religion that exists in Israel. This is decidedly different from the Jew-less Israeli who is the hero of Ha’aretz. Or of Shimon Peres. And it’s a (phony) formulation much beloved by Thomas Friedman. As he wrote ten years ago in “The Morning After”

On the morning after being defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s 1996 elections, the Labor Party leader, Shimon Peres, was asked what he thought happened. ”The Israelis lost,” said Mr. Peres. ”The Jews won.”What Mr. Peres was referring to was his notion that Israel had become divided between ”Israelis” and ”Jews.” The ”Israelis” tend to be secular, with their primary loyalty to Israel as a state and their own individual and material advancement. They see Israel’s future as being in the peace process and in greater and greater integration with the region and the world at large. The Israelis, though, come in two varieties: the dovish, liberal Israelis (49 percent) and the conservative, security-hawk Israelis (25.5 percent). The dovish Israelis pretty much liked Oslo as it was, and voted for Peres; the security-hawk Israelis wanted a better Oslo, and voted for Bibi to make it happen.

The ”Jews”(25.5 percent), by contrast, come from the traditional and Orthodox communities, the West Bank settlements and the religious-Zionist movements. They are devoted to a traditional conception of Judaism and see the Israeli state as a means to fulfill Judaism’s commandments, not as an end itself. The Jews are skeptical of integration, which they equate with assimilation, and they see Israel as fated to perpetually struggle with its non-Jewish neighbors. They were threatened by Oslo and voted for Bibi in hopes that he would kill it.

In some precincts to be Israeli without the baggage of being Jewish is celebrated. But I think that it’s relegated to a certain strata of the “enlightened.” I also think it’s damaging as Jonathan Rosenblum writes:

Nothing better captures the Palestinian game plan than a story that I have told before, related by Palestinian legislator Selah Temari. While imprisoned in an Israeli jail for security offenses, Temari came to the conclusion that Israel was far too powerful to ever destroy. He decided that when he got out of jail he would devote himself to tending his own olive tree and abandon the struggle against Israel. He even began to study Jewish history to gain insight into the perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of so much adversity.Then one night he was looking through the bars of his cell, and he saw his Jewish jailer eating a pita. “How could you be eating bread?” he asked. “Don’t you know it is Pesach?” The jailer answered him: “Do you really expect me not to eat bread, because of something that happened 3,300 years ago?”

That night, records Temari, he twisted and turned all night. By the morning, he reached the conclusion that the Palestinians could expel the Jews. A people that had lost its sense of connection to its past and to the Land could be defeated.

Fortunately, those who deny their Jewishness are a relatively small minority of Israelis. Who better to illustrate this than Dry Bones cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen. In two sharp recent cartoons, Kirschen mocked the Jerusalem court ruling. As he writes.

I am a secular Jew and I live in a non-religious suburb of Tel Aviv and I am outraged at this attempt to assault our culture and to wreck the Jewishness of the Jewish State. It is precisely the “public display” of leavened bread which I find most offensive.

It is heartening to read that it isn’t just religious Israelis who wish to live in a Jewish state. As Bronner reports and Kirschen protests, the Jewishness of Israel is important to quite a large proportion of the Israeli public, no matter what the out of touch elites wish to believe.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.