Stability through polarization - Religion - Articles about Israel

Israel is a country that is filled with questions, doubts, and problems which cause a great deal of instability in people's lives. They never know if they're going to be at work tomorrow or fighting at the front.

For this reason, and for other reasons, Israel has a need for having certain things be stable. It's important for people to know just where they are and who they are, which leads to a polarization. It leads to a person knowing exactly who he is.

In so doing, he excludes others. This exclusion makes life easier for him. It makes it easier for him to identify himself, but it certainly does not add much to unity.

This is bad because Jewish unity, or the lack of Jewish unity, was the cause for the destruction of the Temple many centuries ago, and it should serve as a warning for a need for unity. However, this need for unity conflicts with individuality and conflicts with a need to have an easy solution and an easy answer to some of the major problems that face people today. It's much easier to say that a person knows who he is and can identify with his position.

Unfortunately, this knowledge of who he is means that other people are not in his sphere of influence. They are also not part of his clique. That means that if somebody is religious, he may exclude somebody from his social group who is not religious. This is unfortunate and it causes problems, but it would not solve the problem if the person would become religious. He would have to wear the same type of head covering - kippah - as the friend does. Even if he has the same kippah, he might be excluded because he might not wear a hat and a jacket. If he would change to the right hat and jacket, then he might be told that he needs a kapoteh in order to be included. If he does have the kapoteh, then he might be told that he still can't be accepted until he learns in the "right" yeshiva. Even after he learns in the "right" yeshiva, then he would still be excluded because he might be a Misnaged and that means that his friend, a Chassid, would not accept him as an equal with him.

This polarization does have the problem of affecting and damaging and hurting Jewish unity throughout the country. It is a problem that does need to be related to and people from some Western countries which are more open in nature find this to be distressing.

It really isn't that distressing. It may be understandable in a country which faces as many problems as Israel and is handling as many problems as it possibly can at the time. The need to handle missiles landing in a region does take priority over this social issue. That doesn't make the social issue any less important. It just means that the priority of saving people's lives comes before it.

With the solution of some of the more burning issues when they are solved and it does not look like they are getting solved very quickly or quickly enough for our taste, then we should be able to handle some of these issues also, these social issues to deal with the fact that people should be more accepting of others.

There is of course a concept of pluralism in which supposedly everybody is accepted as equals. That is not the case of course. Pluralism means that the people are expected to all be the same as the people who started the movement which is a type of Conservative Jewish movement, and they want everybody to join their movement. It is not a movement which accepts everybody. It is not a movement which wants fairness for all people. Instead of that it is a movement of people who have their own way of thinking and they want others to join their way of thinking.

It's not an improvement over the existing situation, although certainly if you would read their literature you would think that their solution is the right one.

Many people are in that situation, many organizations and movements are in that situation. They claim to foster unity, as long as everybody joins their way of doing things then they will have their unity or their concept of unity.

Yes, there is work ahead of the Jewish nation. We have a lot of work to do. We've come out of a destructive Holocaust which has destroyed more than a third of our entire nation. We've tried to build a country despite wars and hostility. We've tried to foster immigration from around the world. We've tried to do many, many things. We've accomplished a lot over the past several decades.

And we have a lot more to go, and this is one of the major items that must be on the agenda.

We're not through solving all of our problems yet. We still have many more to go and this is definitely way up there on the list.

It's not forgotten. It's not neglected. And it's certainly not rejected. We do understand the importance of handling and correcting htis problem.

It may not be corrected as fast you would like, but we're going to do it as fast as we possibly can.

Where do you want to go now?