I strongly urge you to read this piece by the terrific Shmarya Rosenberg of the blog FailedMessiah. Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel are doing terrible things to women—beating them for sitting in the “wrong section” of officially section-less buses, breaking into their homes and beating them for suspicion of seeing married men—and getting away scot-free because the religious and political establishments do not want to touch these issues with a long stick.
This hyper-segregation has now spilled over into Israel’s system of public transport. The ultra-Orthodox are demanding – and getting – separate seating on public buses. And, even though compliance with this segregation is supposed to be voluntary, increasingly the ultra-Orthodox choose to act as if it were mandatory, and as if they have the legal right to use coercion and brute force to achieve it. …
But most often, violence works. Rabbis are not willing to confront it, and so they tailor their public rulings to placate thugs. They remain silent as women are beaten and harassed, sometimes condemning in private what they fear to confront publicly.
These “modesty patrols” are not sent by the Taliban in Afghanistan. They’re sent by lawless, vigilante ultra-Orthodox Jews who know that they can get their way and enforce their own perverted variant of “Torah-true” law through intimidation and violence.
And, of course, it’s not just women—it’s also the homosexuals (and worse!):
When the target is homosexuals, however, ultra-Orthodox rabbis have been in the forefront of inciting violence. Israel’s chief rabbis called homosexuals “the lowest of people” during the violence-filled run-up to Jerusalem’s 2006 Gay Pride parade, and leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis signed a notice calling gays an “evil mob seeking to defile the holy city of Jerusalem.”
Yeshiva heads sent their students to the streets to riot. They burned the contents of the large city-owned plastic trash dumpsters – and they burned the dumpsters themselves. The fumes and smoke sent scores of ultra-Orthodox elderly and children to hospitals with breathing and cardiac trouble. Even so, the riots and the dumpster-burning continued night after night. Weak and defenseless victims of the acrid smoke became collateral damage in a holy war fought by unruly mobs to defend the “purity” of Jerusalem. It was as if these victims were viewed by the mobs as sacrifices offered to appease the angry, vengeful, ultra-Orthodox God – the God of “modesty patrols” and segregated buses; a God of ultra-Orthodox invention, not of history.
Again, let me point out that this is not Afghanistan under the Taliban: this is Israel under a theoretically democratic government. The myths that non-Israeli modern Jews are being fed about Israel—that it’s an enlightened society where all Jews live in harmony, where ancient and modern ways of life are blended seamlessly, where secular coexists with religious—are just that: myths. These rabbis, especially those at the top of the religious establishment, should be ashamed of themselves. What they represent, as Shmarya so eloquently points out, is not toleration but fundamentalism, not love for their fellow human beings but disgusting gynophobia and homophobia.
The fast day of Tisha B’Av is coming up on Sunday, in commemoration of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Talmud teaches that the Temple was destroyed because of sin’at hinam, baseless hatred. People who engage in the kind of hatred running amok among the Israeli ultra-Orthodox would argue that their hatred is not baseless, since they target people violating “Torah law” and “Torah-true Judaism”. Yet it’s really these people who carry this baseless hatred within their hearts: hatred of women, homosexuals, and anyone else who doesn’t wear the same kind of black hat that they do—simply on the basis of their perversion of Jewish law and Jewish values and morals.
This is anti-Semitism, pure and simple—except this time the anti-Semites are ourselves.