JERUSALEM, Aug. 19 (UPI) -- Dear Friends: I look at the pictures of the looting from the settlement of Nisanit, which has already begun, and I know that the coming weeks will be too difficult to bear. The demolition of the houses and the communities built in the Katif region in the past 36 years, the expected clash with the Israel Defense Forces and the celebrations of the Palestinians -- all these are a sure recipe for a terrible heartbreak.
This heartbreak will no doubt give rise to a great desire to lay the blame for this collective disaster on somebody. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has already been chosen as the obvious target for the feverish hatred among many of us, who speak of him as of the Roman general Titus, but born of the Jews. However, a keener observer of reality may raise the possibility that this disaster was also of our own making.
In the years following the Yom Kippur War we came to believe, with true sincerity
, that we were the flag-bearers of the Jewish people. After all, we had not forgotten the Torah of Israel and its values; we knew from whence we came and where we were going; we had more humility, we were imbued with faith.
The Yom Kippur War had not badly shaken our world of beliefs, as it did with the leading strata of Israeli society up until then. Just the opposite. That war actually strengthened us. The more mature among us discerned a leadership and ideological vacuum, the need for a new ideal to "uplift the people's spirit" -- then at an ebb in wake of the war's tragedy -- and charged toward the new and exciting goal: settling Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Thus the great internal disengagement of religious Zionism began.
This disengagement had many and varied aspects: On the one hand, it strengthened our branch of Israeli society in a truly amazing fashion. We built extraordinary communities and large families. Our people grew strong and became part of all facets of society: academia, the media, the army and politics.
The economic situation of many of us improved unrecognizably. Our various educational networks, the state-religious and the national-haredi schools
, became more powerful, both because of the fact that they were given more money than the regular state schools, and because many of us give education the highest priority and devote our lives to it.
On the other hand, this internal disengagement exacted a high price from the national and sectarian levels: the establishment of communities with a clearly religious nature and separate religious neighborhoods in the cities, with all their beauty and internal splendor, led to a sharp sense of distance between those who lived in them and broad sections of society.
The ideology of Merkaz Harav Yeshiva was strengthened in these places, which saw the settlement of all of the land of Israel, here and now, as the central front of the Jewish people in this generation. Other goals were added, including strengthening the religious-Zionist institutions, fostering a culture of modesty, fighting a bitter battle against the permissive values of the liberal-modern world, strengthening the IDF by means of directing young religious youth to command positions, mainly in the infantry, by means of pre-army academies.
All this was done consciously by the leadership out of an internal sense that "our people" were worthy of replacing the old and corrupt elites in power, who lacked the true values, the values that we held.
The combination of an internal sense of power, of knowing the way, and the hatred we felt from the old elites who fought against our dream of settling the entire land caused many of us to stop dealing with the weighty questions on our doorstep. For example: What would we do with three and a half million Palestinians lacking civil rights?
Very few among us related to this weighty question with the proper seriousness. This, perhaps, is the main reason that the helm of power has still not come close to being in religious-Zionist hands.
On the other hand, the seclusion, combined with a deep internal sense of being in the right without asking for or needing external confirmation
, caused a deep blindness in many of us.
We feel that the Israeli world outside our communities is gradually losing its contours. Corruption in government is intolerable; endless commercialization and leisure culture is destroying every good thing; the state education system is in terrible shape; the media is not how we would like it to be, and the list goes on.
The question, therefore, is which is the egg and which the chicken? Did we not cause, by our very isolation, some of the above things to happen? Did we not have a decisive hand in the fact that the entire Israeli agenda for the last 30 years has focused only on the issue of the land of Israel and the communities we built? And how else can the demand of the religious residents of Gush Katif - to be separated from the secular in the site for the evacuees in Nitzan -- be understood?
If we were less cut off and more humble; if we didn't have an immediate answer to all the hard questions; if we had the guts to look straight at our people, at the real people who live here, and stop preaching to them about the amazing things going on in our own world -- we might have noticed the fact that we have here, in our Israel, an ocean of problems in which we have taken absolutely no interest. If our rabbis had been less preoccupied with the internal discussions among themselves and others like themselves and had emerged to try and understand the real situation of Israeli society, perhaps today we would not be facing the tragedy on our doorstep.
Embarrassing, as it is to admit, we fell in love with ourselves. We have strong communities, good schools and devoted teachers. We have a path, we have a destiny. We know how things should progress, and if events don't move the way we think they should, we will volunteer to show reality the way.
Dear friends, this is so difficult for me to write: We were wrong, and we misled our society. On the way to redeeming the land of our forefathers, we forgot our people. We looked out for our children and ourselves very well
, and we forgot so many children of other people.
We tried to give new life to the Torah of Israel so it would suit the tasks of this generation, but the generation of rabbis that were born to us disappointed. Our Torah is not relevant to the real situation of the great majority of the Jewish people in this generation. Its language is cut off and its thoughts not directed to the simple and basic and existential troubles of our society.
The terrible truth is that this generation of rabbis created a fictitious agenda for us, one that scorns the issues of the simple Israeli man struggling to earn a livelihood, his identity and his dignity in a country still in its early stages of consolidation.
While we were busy with the land of Israel and settling and fostering our ostensibly ideological identity
, so isolated from those of other people, awful things took place. There are a million and a half impoverished people in Israeli society, and the overwhelming majority of them are not among our ranks.
We looked out for ourselves, did we not? The beautiful settlements we built, the huge and ostentatious houses in so many of them, we thought this was something we deserved by right. While our schools flourished - and we made sure our children received more and more hours of schooling - there was no one to look out for the other children.
We strengthened our own small and prestigious state religious schools and national haredi schools and neglected, even when we held the Education Ministry portfolio, all the other school systems. We acted like any self-interested sector, not as a worthy leadership.
We have no interest in the rights of workers, which are gradually being eroded - not of Jewish workers and certainly not of foreign workers; we have nothing to say about Israel being a world leader in the trading of women, and we of course have nothing to say about the Palestinian issue.
Except for a very few in our society, we don't even notice their existence. The Palestinians are invisible. They are a phenomenon of nature. We only see them when they strike at us.
And to all this it must be added that the institution closest to us, the one our people still control, the rabbinical courts, function like the legal system of a third world country and we do almost nothing to change this disgrace.
The behavior of so many of us in the last few months shows that we have lost our wits. The hysterical demonstrations, the tacit consent to sending children to block roads and clash with security forces, all this attests to a deep sense of insult -- as if society had betrayed us, the best of its sons.
And yes
, many of us are indeed the best of its sons; but we betrayed society first. Innocently. Out of genuine idealism. But also out of arrogance. We disengaged first.
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(Bambi Sheleg is the editor of Eretz Acheret. This essay originally appeared in Ma'ariv and was reprinted by the Jerusalem Post with permission. Distributed by the Common Ground News Service.
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(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
