The Rutted Road To Unity

Compromise over controversial Jerusalem street — scene of battles over Shabbat traffic — is a powerful metaphor.

Israeli police and haredi youth clash on Rechov Bar Ilan over the issue of Shabbat traffic. The street became a flashpoint of religious-secular tensions in the late 1990s and again in 2003. getty images

by Sarah Shapiro
Special To The Jewish Week

For years after making aliyah, I kept re-experiencing the new immigrant’s classic response to his first ride on an Egged bus. I couldn’t get over the fact that except for the occasional Arab, everyone on board was probably Jewish. Aryan-looking blondes and black-eyed Sephardim, chasidim in 19th-century Polish garb, modest Ethiopians in their white robes, zaftig Russians, delicately boned Yemenites ... all the blank, abstracted faces gazing out at Jerusalem like tired bus passengers everywhere. Is this what Jews look like? Sometimes they’d inspire me to such inner heights of idealistic joy — these are my relatives! — that I’d miss my stop, sitting there exulting in our racial and cultural diversity.

In this modern democracy in our ancient land, I was finally taking

part in something larger than myself: the biblical ideal of a united Jewish nation.
Three decades rushed by. Our oneness — a fleeting reality glimpsed by un-cynical olim in ecstatic moments of innocence — has played hide and seek with us through the years. Whenever the threat to our survival was clearly external — as for example, during the 1990 Gulf War — our unity was thrilling. When one sector blamed the other — as occurred throughout the Oslo era — the society split in half politically. And when a supposedly religious man murdered Yitzchak Rabin in the name of God, “left vs. right” hardened into “secular vs. religious.”
The ideal endures in our minds, as it has through the millennia. But its actualization is a work in progress.

The war that summer in the late 1990s was a weekly affair, erupting on schedule every Shabbos afternoon. The issue at hand was whether the Jerusalem municipality should ban Saturday traffic along Rechov Bar Ilan, one of the capital’s major cross-town arteries.
Bar Ilan, whose name would henceforth signify not only a physical route connecting disparate sections of the capital but the fault line running through Israel’s heart (and mine) is a utilitarian six-lane thoroughfare. It traverses various commercial, industrial and residential areas, among which are several large religious neighborhoods, and on Shabbos, as the Middle Eastern heat lifts on Jerusalem’s early evening breeze, children come out to play, and families go out strolling along the avenue.

I recall standing in my kitchen by the open window (this was not only before the intifada era; it was also before we’d installed air-conditioning) chopping up cucumbers for the last meal of the day and acidly muttering a running commentary to myself, as the telltale sounds of another anti-traffic demonstration reached my ears.
Stupid idiots.
Stupid!
Idiots!

My eloquent remarks were addressed to the street combatants a few blocks away: macho Israeli males from three sectors of society: the fervently pro-Shabbos contingent (chasidic teenagers); the devoutly anti-Shabbos contingent (left-wing counter-demonstrators) and, last but not least, in their brutal supporting role: the anti-demonstration contingent (the police.)

I felt scornfully superior to all of them, but was powerless to prevent their feud from invading the sanctuary of our Shabbos, week after week. Their anger towards each other became my anger at them, for involving me in their toxic mêlée. Preparing salad with the thundering clippity-clip of helicopters circling overhead, and the electronically trumpeted orders resounding over police bullhorns, I could see in my mind’s eye the policemen strutting through the crowd, indiscriminately swinging their clubs, and policemen on horseback, rearing up to intimidate the crowd. Is that what Jews look like?

Sometimes the air would be pierced by the spiraling mosquito-like whine of an ambulance siren, and rumble with the guttural shouts of “Shabbos! Shabbos!” (the same shouts which had once scared my octogenarian mother during a visit here from California, when her taxi driver got lost on the way to our apartment, late one Friday afternoon, and turned onto Bar Ilan.) My ears would discern the roar of motorcycles: the Meretz Party counter-demonstrators zipping up and down the avenue to convey their opposition to closing the road. From having been a passerby on occasion, I could visualize their smug smiles of satisfaction under the torrent of cries raining down upon them; it wasn’t every day they could be screamed at by indignant haredim. They’d be exulting in this in-your-face insult to Judaism’s central hallmark, proudly declaring their jailbreak from religion to those guys with long curling payes and long black coats.
And in spite of the fact that I’m Orthodox, or precisely because of it, it was the guys with long curling payes and long black coats whose behavior disturbed me most of all. If increasing Shabbos observance was their goal, their expertise left something to be desired. Adolescents out for some excitement on the long, hot afternoons, indulging in this dangerously divisive outlet for juvenile boredom, did they not see the large notices plastered all over the surrounding area — written and signed by rabbinical authorities across the Orthodox spectrum — ordering a stop to the demonstrations? How dare they!

A British neighbor of mine was mildly curious, that summer, why I took it so hard. Like everyone else I knew, she disapproved of the demonstrations but it didn’t bother her the way it did me, and not only because she had air-conditioning and could shut the windows.

The obvious explanation eventually dawned upon me: she was frum-from-birth, and didn’t have friends and relatives on the other side of the religious/secular divide, neither here nor in London. While I agonized over the international chillul Hashem, imagining how the story would play on NPR (my mother’s main news source), my neighbor worried about the haredi teenagers on the fringe and saw the Meretz demonstrators as unfortunate tinokot shenishbu, the Torah term for Jews deprived of their spiritual inheritance. Having never inhabited the conceptual universe of non-believers, she didn’t particularly care if some Jews consider religion the stuff of fairy tales, or Torah as a compendium of ethical teachings worthy of preservation, but in a sort of Readers Digest Condensed version.

Unlike me, my neighbor didn’t have one son in yeshiva and another in Lebanon, and thus wasn’t personally involved in this major flashpoint of religious/secular conflict. The secular Israeli public views fulltime Torah study as a ruse to escape from military service. The haredi public views the IDF as inimical to religious observance. In one realm, our spiritual survival is at stake; in the other, our physical survival.
In my mind, the two are intertwined. One son was learning Torah, the other in active combat, fighting our real enemies. Neither was suited in any way whatsoever for the other’s life, and both were indispensable to our survival.
So ... for my neighbor, the macrocosm of Israeli society did not reflect the microcosm of her life.

One evening that summer, the author and teacher Rebbetzin Tzipporah Heller gave a class in a neighbor’s apartment.
“We’re supposed to feel achdus [unity] with Klal Yisrael,” she began, “but sometimes whole groups of individuals are wrong. How can you feel achdus? You start to hate someone because of your expectations. You hate because of your unwillingness to accept the differences of personality between one human being and another. But even in a confrontation between an absolute wrong and an absolute right, you don’t have to demonize the other person.”

I asked Rebbetzin Heller how I could feel achdus with the young men on Bar Ilan whose behavior causes chillul Hashem around the world. And how could I not demonize those people driving up and down the street, going out of their way to desecrate Shabbos and hinder other Jews’ observance?

“If you want to deal with people without demonizing them,” she replied, “you have to start out with a fundamental understanding that there are human beings who are different from you. We generally fail to fully appreciate the fact that people manifest wide variations of personality and perspective. So when looking at the various groups involved in the Bar Ilan struggle, first you have to grasp, and it’s not easy, that just as you yourself will interpret reality according to your own unique standpoint, so will they. Then it becomes a matter of perceiving and responding to what you can identify with in the other person, even if you disagree absolutely with his position. Those young haredim go out there, in part, on the same impulse that motivates males in other cultures to root for their team at football games. It gives them a chance to play good team, bad team. These kids are rooting for Shabbos. This is what we share with them. Yet the nature of their conviction brings about an inability to comprehend someone on the other side. Their personalities and backgrounds are such that they see other human beings in black and white, which by the same token makes it difficult to persuasively convey their perspective.

“As for the counter-demonstrators,” she went on, “if you’re interested in diminishing your own animosity, bear in mind that there are probably more pleasant ways to spend Saturday afternoon than driving up and down Rechov Bar Ilan. They could all be at the beach.”
“I disagree,” someone interjected. “Publicly insulting the Torah seems to give them pleasure.”

“Yes,” said Rebbetzin Heller, “that’s probably true. But this inner process of diminishing one’s own hatred is a matter of finding the point of common ground, of the concealed virtue. It isn’t a matter of condoning their anti-Torah philosophy, or of harboring tolerance towards their activism against Shabbos observance. It’s not a matter of having a liberal attitude toward those who do everything possible to hinder Yidddishkeit in Eretz Yisrael. What is involved is a mental shift, an enlargement of our perspective, by which we can acknowledge that on some level, it takes a certain idealism for their greatest pleasure during their weekend leisure time to consist of devoting themselves passionately to an ideal, even if that ideal is animosity towards Judaism and observant Jews. Can you see this? That’s why it’s often the people most fiercely opposed to truth who end up being committed to it most profoundly. And in case you don’t believe it’s really possible to feel achdus with someone whose beliefs are utterly opposed to your own, I’ll tell you a story:

“When Labor ran the country, they promised the community of Efrat that they’d be able to expand the settlement onto one of the adjacent hills. When the Arabs objected, the government retracted the permit, and the people of Efrat decided to lay claim to the land by going out to the hill and refusing to leave. It was a rough period. A lot of people were arrested; the soldiers were forcibly dragging people down off the hills. People were getting badly hurt.

“Someone I know who lives there participated in the demonstration. There she was, sitting on the rocky ground with her dignified bearing, in elegant suit and hat, when a soldier approached, under orders to get her down off the hill. Somehow, he balked. Something stopped him from using force. So he said, ‘Geveret [Madam], you’ll have to come with me now.’ And she said, ‘I’m not sure I should.’
“The soldier kind of smiled. ‘Oh really? You’re not sure you should?’
“She nodded.

“ ‘Well, take it from me, get down off this hill this minute or I’m going to have to use force. So if you’d just be so kind...’
“ ‘I’m really not sure I should.’
“The soldier stood there amazed for a moment. Then he said, ‘Look, how about you think it over a few minutes, decide what to do, then I’m coming back here and you and I are walking down this hill together. Understand?’
“The soldier went off, took care of some of the others, then returned. ‘So!’ he exclaimed. ‘I trust you’ve arrived at a decision?’
“‘Yes.’ The woman was speaking quietly. ‘I’ve thought about it.’
“ ‘Good! So off we go!’

    “‘What I’ve decided,’ she said, ‘is that I didn’t come as far as I have, and sacrifice all that I did, in order to walk willingly down this hill.’
“He seemed to take this in. ‘And you’re sure this is the right decision?’
“ ‘No, I’m not. But I want to ask you something.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘Are you sure you’re right?’
“The soldier stood there a moment, silent. Then he said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he turned and walked away.”

Rebbetzin Heller continued: “There’s a sequel to this story. That Shabbos morning, the soldiers who had carried out the evacuation were still stationed on the hill. A group of residents asked the officer in charge if the soldiers could leave their posts long enough to come into their homes for the meal. He refused. But the day was long and the soldiers got hungry. What happened was that the officer relented and all those soldiers, who had evacuated the hill the day before, ate and sang Shabbos songs together with the people of Efrat.”

It’s springtime in Eretz Israel. This past Shabbos, I stood by my open window (we have air-conditioning now, but the Middle Eastern heat has yet to arrive) making salad for the last meal of the day.
Long gone are the bullhorns, the helicopters and the motorcycles roaring. What happened, finally, is that when demonstrations re-erupted in 2003, the powers that be — religious and non-religious — forged a compromise: at certain hours of the day, traffic on Bar Ilan is forbidden, and at certain hours, permitted.
Sounds simple? Don’t underestimate the beauty of the achievement. To make that small shift from demonizing your fellow Jew to respecting him is to travel farther than the distance between New York and Jerusalem. It’s one of the reasons I never want to leave this place. Here in our own tiny land, we’re forced to make room for each other in the only unlimited space available, our minds and hearts.
Sarah Shapiro is the author, most recently, of the book is “Wish I Were Here” (Artscroll).

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization