Dear Uri,



The Magistrates’ Court ruled that entering yeshivot which are open in order to place pamphlets out is considered trespassing. What is interesting in this whole story is that the Charedi are panicked by Daat Emet and use all means to prevent their students from hearing words of sense, truth, and wisdom. They do not stop at anything — beatings, curses, slander, and even appealing to the authorities whom they deprecate day and night.

Their entire goal and purpose is to obey the Torah and commandments, and everything else (including a state and a home for the Jews) is worthless in their eyes, at best, and is considered despicable, at worst. See, for example, the words of Rabbi Zeiskind Shachor to Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, demanding that the Bilu movement be thrown out of Gedera in 1887: “Most of the Bilu people were students of secular high schools in Russia and say that there is no G-d nor king. They are apostates and violate the Sabbath, and it would be better for the land of our fathers to be home to crocodiles and ostriches than for it to be the hiding place of these lawless ones. One sin by these people would be sufficient to destroy and demolish the entire world” (“Letters from the History of the Chibbat Zion Movement”). Because of this totalistic world view, it is the way of the religious not to reject any means to achieve their “lofty” goal.” That is why Eliezer Ben Yehuda (the father of modern Hebrew) “merited” the anger of the Charedim, who wrote articles against him and went to the Ottoman rulers with the claim that Eliezer Ben Yehuda was inciting the public to rebel against the government; because of their claims he was incarcerated for a year.

This teaches you that the fight between the two streams of Judaism — the enlightened and the Orthodox — is still raging on, full force.

But the enlightened stream is weakening in its battle, and the Orthodox public is exploiting this weakness for all it’s worth.



Sincerely,



Daat Emet