This series of articles has demonstrated that it is not difficult to be religious in Israel.
Nonetheless, observant Jews continue to complain about non-existent problems.
Why is that the case? Is it because we have been driven out of so many countries throughout history? Does this lead us to expect, or even "know", that we will be driven out of Israel as well? Is it our continuing, and possibly justifiable, obsession with the Holocaust? Does this cause us to be convinced of a supposedly incontrovertible fact - that we will be destroyed? Does this necessarily cause us to be prophets of doom, looking for the manner in which we will be annihilated?
Perhaps. However, this absurd and continuing preoccupation is demoralizing. It demonstrates a weakness in our collective character, and it raises questions about our loyalty to our real ideals.
Take the supposed religious-secular conflict in Israel as an example.
Different people see things in different ways. You see a conflict; I see a conversation. Jews have always been blessed with strong and vocal opinions. So is the writer of this article. However, we must maintain every opinion in its proper proportion.
Let us look at some historical conflicts of opinion among Jews.
In Biblical days, a group of 3.5 million Jews - the equivalent of more than half of Israel's current Jewish population - were investigating the possibility of making aliyah. They had been walking through the desert for about forty years, and they were tired and dusty. Throughout their walk they were pestered by nudniks like Korach and various stragglers. Nothing was good enough for these people. They had previously been slaves for 210 years, and they were away from home for another two centuries before that.
I already see the raised eyebrows about the numbers cited. Any biblical maven knows that there is a gross error in this article. No, they shout gleefully in unison, your figures are wrong. The rest of your article is also probably wrong. Only 600,000 Jews wanted to make aliyah then. We know our Bible.
That's what happens when you write an article for Jews with strong and vocal opinions.
Well, 600,000 is indeed an important number. It represents the number of Jews in Israel at the founding of the State in 1948. It also represents a very specific category of Jews who had left Egypt and walked through the desert - males between the ages of 20 and 60. Extrapolating from that figure, experts arrived at a total of between 3 and 4 million Jews in the Sinai Desert.
These dusty nomads were looking for a homeland. They needed a place to live. But Israel? Not a chance. Maybe it's not good there. They didn't know about Uganda, which was just a forty-year left turn from Egypt. Then, as well as now, Jews felt that it would be better to die in the desert than to try Israel. Israel was not a viable alternative. Strange people, those Jews.
Those old-time wanderers had been exiled from a foreign country where they had been slaves. They were now drifting toward their new home, but they already complained about it. Yes, these Jews didn't know what they wanted, but they knew what they wanted to reject.
Had they lived today, they may would have written learned treatises about religious-secular strife in Israel. They would have been thrilled to find, create, or hallucinate any possible thread of conflict.
Even if it does not exist.
Dear readers, please forget the television news, just for a moment. Ignore the third-hand reports.
Do you know anybody who has seen, heard, or experienced any real religious conflicts?
No?
Neither have I.
And I live here.
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