"On a pure and morning at the wonderful beginning of May, we stood alongside the red women, in their brave display of slaves, all daughters of a king on King David Boulevard in Tel Aviv. They waved their white captives, and the citizens of the free and liberal State of Israel with Israeli flags to dozens..."
This disturbing text was read as part of the "poets' protest" on the steps of the rabbinate in Tel Aviv. Why do I find it disturbing? After all, the protest against the legal reform (of which the poets' protest is a part) is perfectly legitimate (as long as it does not block roads in the middle of a working day, with an absurd demand to stop negotiations for a compromise at the president's residence). What bothers me is the fact that artists, who are supposed to be sensitive to style and subtext, choose to toe the line with the most vulgar and offensive expression of the protest - the slave performance.
The representation of the slaves suffers from so much blindness that it is difficult to decide where to begin: at its core, it is intended to warn us about the fate of women in the halachic state that was not here before Aharon Barak and will not be here even after Yariv Levin, because a huge majority of the Israeli public, left and right, opposes it. The infantile premise of the slave exhibit is, of course, that the secular woman is free and liberated, while the religious woman is a slave, and within the framework of the imaginary halachic state, all women will be obliged to be religious – that is, to be slaves to their husbands and rabbis.
I have a daughter who, a year after her discharge from the IDF, has already established a successful small business. Clearly, it owes this achievement to Western Israeli democracy much more than to Judaism. It is clear that we all want to preserve Israel as a liberal democracy, and it is also clear that the religious establishment has much more to go when it comes to the status of women. But that doesn't mean Western culture should bow as deeply as our poets do. Western individualism also has some serious side effects – the erosion of family status and the decline in the birth rate, for example, are causing the rise of Islam in Europe – and as a backlash to the rise of nationalism there.
In Israel, on the other hand, many religious women represent an option that has the best of both worlds: they maintain a traditional world that preserves family and community values on the one hand, and realize themselves as individuals with all their might in the world of work on the other. Is there greater arrogance, ignorance and pointlessness than labeling intelligent and influential religious women, such as Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, Dean of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion, as "slaves"? Is it with this superficial vulgarity that poets are supposed to collaborate with such joy?
Perhaps the members of the "poets' protest" should return to the words of a poem by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi that he wrote:
Time slaves Slave slaves are -
The servant of God is alone and free:
Therefore, in asking every human being for his part, "Parts of the Lord!" said my soul.
Not everyone has to say, "Parts of God!" The modern poet is allowed to be secular to the bone. But when fashion makes you glorify a performance that defames, objectifies and humiliates the best women who live here, it's worth checking to see if you haven't become part of the "slaves of time" yourself.
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