For all these reasons, to be a secular Israeli in 2009 is a demoralizing and demoralized affair. We are tired: tired of the Palestinians, tired of the bombs, tired of U.N. and EU condemnations, tired of having so much of our daily to buy guns and missiles, tired of the army reserves, tired of being hated, tired of going to bed and waking up to reports of kids -- Jewish kids, Palestinian kids -- watching their parents die or dying in their parents’ arms. We are tired of our lives and tired of ourselves.
For two communities in crisis, riots like those that set Jerusalem aflame last week are a welcome relief. Many ultra-Orthodox find in their city’s secular government -- its social services, police, and mayor -- an external source of their malaise. Locating the cause of their suffering outside their own unsustainable way of life, and attributing it to the malevolence of Jewish Cossacks or Jewish Nazis, ultra-Orthodox leaders defer reflection about the real causes of their distress.
Something similar accounts for the harsh and totalizing reaction that so many secular Israelis have had to the past week’s events, finding all ultra-Orthodox guilty, first of heartless acceptance of child abuse, and then of wild hooliganism, adding up to a cultural identity of primitive and traitorous barbarism. For such a view of the ultra-Orthodox does wonders for the self-image of secular Israelis. Now more than before, we need the ultra-Orthodox torching bus shelters and shattering computers. These sorts of ultra-Orthodox, and they alone, serve as a token of the continued relevance of the secular Zionist program, at a time when this claim to relevance is no longer evident, certainly in Europe and the United States, but also increasingly within the borders of Israel itself. Nir Barkat, a mayor with little charisma who has failed to distinguish himself in his first year in office, appears principled and virtuous only when he is staring down a rabble of rabbis.
The riots will pass. As I write, the child remains under constant attention at Hadassah hospital, where he has gained one third again of his body weight. Under court order, his mother was released from jail to house arrest, and will receive immediate psychiatric care. Both will drop from the headlines.
Still, it won’t be long before new headlines come, in the ultra-Orthodox press screaming of cruel and godless authorities goosestepping into Meah Shearim to brutishly break up yiddershe families, and in the secular press of religious zombies slavishly following their rabbis’ orders to torture their kids into mindless obedience. These headlines will come, and rocks will be thrown and trash bins will be set ablaze, because ultra-Orthodox and secular Israelis are locked in a macabre pas de deux that serves each group as it tries to negotiate its own depressing reality. For ultra-Orthodox and secular Israelis, decrying loudly the vicious vice of the other is one of the few ways each can still locate virtue in themselves.
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