The Need for Many Dialogues

Before Yom Kippur I wrote about how the across-the-board consensus of issues of war and peace in Israel has made a unity government with no chareidi representation a distinct possibility. In any event, the current political constellation does not augur well for the power of the chareidi parties. And that means that we must learn to engage our fellow Israeli Jews in dialogue rather than rely on political leverage to protect the chareidi community.

A few days after writing those words, I ran into an accountant friend of mine at a shalom zachor. He related, without any prompting from me, a conversation he had recently had with a secular Israeli Jew. The latter told him that he and his friends live in fear that the chareidi population will one day take over the country and then expel secular Jews or make life untenable for them.

Then the secular Israeli asked my friend, “Is there anyone in your community who is interested in our fears? Is there anyone interested in dialogue with us?” My friend did not have an answer.

Now, I could have supplied him with hundreds of chareidi Jews who have long been involved in precisely such a dialogue and who could have allayed the fears of this and other secular Jews. Well over 10,000 chareidi Jews are involved on a regular basis in learning Torah with secular Jews, usually in one-on-one frameworks. Those meetings inevitably touch from time to time on the types of issues raised by the secular Jew with my friend, and in some of the frameworks the type of dialogue the secular Jew sought is one of the explicit goals of the program.