Extricating Ourselves from the Catch-22

Kana’us is not a subject to which I planned to return so soon after Mishpacha’s symposium on the subject. Unfortunately the Channel 2 video about a seven-year-old girl in Ramat Beit Shemesh Naama Margoliot who was spit at on her way to school and the resultant worldwide publicity given to attacks on students of the national religious Beit Orot school by zealots living nearby leave me little choice.

The Channel 2 documentary introduced by Yair Lapid (yes Tommy’s son) quickly went viral. The 13-minute film opens with Naama relating how she was spit at because her elbow-length school shirt was not deemed modest enough. We then see her mother walking her to school and Naama whimpering piteously when her mother suggests she try walking part of the way alone.  Next the TV interviewer asks a man with long peyos whether it is permitted to spit at girls whose dress is insufficiently modest in his eyes. He answers that it is adding as an odd justification “We are healthy people.”

Let’s forget for a moment about the terrible damage done to the image of Torah and Torah Jews and focus on nothing but the self-interest of the chareidi community in Israel. The video was explicitly used by Lapid to suggest that the secular struggle against the chareidim has entered into a new stage. “Is this what we can expect in the rest of the country?” he asks at the end of introduction. The issue the propagandists are saying is no longer one of the oppression of chareidi women not even one of whether chareidim contribute too little and take too much from the general society. The issue now they say is one of chareidim attempting to dictate chareidi mores to the rest of the country and turn Israel into another Iran.

To buttress that claim the film shows a shopping center in Beit Shemesh on which construction has come to a standstill because of zealot threats. The film ends with the interviewer asking the “healthy” man with the peyos what will be the end of this turmoil. He replies triumphantly “The state will finally be chareidi — a chareidi state whether you want it or not.”