Several restaurant owners and chefs in Tel Aviv announced that they would open their restaurants on the evening of the 9th of Av, as part of the protest. This fanatical secular step leads me to think that the one who is really to blame for the rift in the nation is Yosef Haim Brenner, whose memory is blessed.
Brenner was one of the founders of Israeli secularism. Although he was murdered long before the establishment of the State of Israel, in the pogroms of 1921, the kind of secularism that Brenner preached won – a victory of which it is highly doubtful that he himself would have been proud – and this victory paved the way for the loss of a common ethos thousands of years old.
Brenner was a zealous Epicurean who believed that the gods died and that religions should die with them. Here's how he puts it: "Don't we know that the gods died, all the gods died? Yes, they died for us, they died forever, and with them their laws, their orders and their practical commandments."
The "death of God" in the modern era assigned Brenner and his contemporaries a task on a rabbinic scale: the Sages designed Judaism to survive in an era without sovereignty and a Temple. Brenner's generation was supposed to shape Judaism in an age when there was no God. But Brenner scorned dealing with the "Jewish question." He believed that Zionism would already naturally produce free Judaism: "All the actions of the Jews within their environment and for the purpose of their existence, that is Judaism. The main thing is to ask the Jews first – the end of Judaism to come. If there are Jews, they work their jobs and live their own lives, there will already be some kind of Judaism. Or whatever it is, Judaism will call it"...
But Brenner also had doubts about the justness of this idea. He was concerned, for example, by the total abolition of Zionist Judaism in the face of Marxism: "I sit and reflect: Yes, Karl [Marx] is true and his teachings are true... However... Mendeli sells books to whom will he give?" – that is, Brenner did not want to see Jewish culture completely dismissed in the face of ideas coming from the East (then) or the West (today). He just couldn't believe it could happen:
"We, the living Jews, whether we are tormented on Yom Kippur or whether we eat meat with milk, whether we hold to the morality of the Old Testament, whether we are faithful students of the Epicurean in our worldview, we never cease to feel ourselves as Jews... Our Hebrew literature, although its branches are few, has many roots. The roots of this literature - we must not forget!"
It's funny to say that about a man so faithless and sober, but Brenner was naïve. He thought that the Jewish bookcase was etched into our DNA and would forever charge our lives with meaning. He was wrong. Those who aspired to the existence of a "free Judaism" had to try to shape it: with or without God, something in Judaism works. Something about it keeps the institution of the family, for example, better than what we see in Europe, which is struggling with a low birth rate. Something about it treats the environment better than what we see in America, which floods the world with empty Amazon packaging.
What of this will the secular guard, and how? How do we create a tradition for the new, Godless Judaism? Brenner left all this to chance, and three generations later, it is doubtful whether what is happening on our streets can be called "brotherly hatred," because the brothers at least have a common family story.
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