"Kristallnacht 2023," a sign shouted, "We'll kick you out of here," "Get out of here," "Missionaries," the demonstrators shrieked. The director of Jewish Head, Israel Zeira, whose greatest sin in the eyes of the demonstrators is organizing a closing prayer in Dizengoff Square, was evacuated by police and security guards for fear of being harmed by an incited mob, which appeared to come out of Yair Golan's process identification speech. September 2023, Tishrei <>, Otto Weininger can happily turn in his grave. In Tel Aviv there was a strictly anti-Semitic demonstration.
Three weeks earlier, as the school year began, a snowflake vendor stood on the stage of the first Hebrew high school in the Land of Israel, the Herzliya Gymnasium, and called for refusal. The high school where Eliyahu Golomb and Gabi Ashkenazi were educated, Nativa Ben Yehuda and Moshe Sharett, Abba Ahimeir and Luba Eliav, the high school where the great Zionist writer Yosef Haim Brenner taught, celebrated a post-Zionist text that preached rejectionism. And the entire cast of the beautiful and the brave applauded the principal of the school, the martyr Mr. Ze'ev Degani, who resigned and recanted.
The demonstration against Israel Zeira, who heads the "Jewish Head" organization// Photo: Jewish Head
"On the fourth of the Sabbath, the tenth of the month of Menachem Av, in 1841 after the destruction of the Temple, in the 12th year of the Zionist Church, the cornerstone of the building of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jaffa was laid." Thus they announced the building of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jaffa, which would be called the Gymnasium "Herzliya". The date chosen for the construction of the cornerstone was actually the tenth of the month of Menachem Av. The day when, according to tradition, the Temple was destroyed. The day when, according to the Midrash, the Messiah was also born and will be born. For the founders of the gymnasium, the symbolic date was meant to clarify how destruction and redemption intertwine.
Tel Aviv is not the first secular city, it is the first Hebrew city. Its heart is bounded by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the Hebrew language revivalist, to the west, and Shlomo Ibn Gvirol and Yehuda Halevi, giants of Hebrew culture, to the east. Bialik, the national poet and honorary resident of Tel Aviv, who was not religious, said of Shabbat: "Without Shabbat we are a despicable and despicable nation, not even a nation. The value of Shabbat must be elevated within us, here and everywhere, and especially in the eyes of the younger generation; And no - wilt profanity. We will not have a revival."
On his deathbed, A.D. Gordon wrote the article (which he did not finish) "To Our Account with Religion (From Reflections on Yom Kippur)". But before that, a few words about Aaron David Gordon. He was a thinker, a pioneer, a farmer, a guide, a conscience and a compass for the members of the Second and Third Aliyah. A kind of "Ahad Ha'am" with black nails from work. At the age of 48, he immigrated to Israel, and in his body and actions became a symbol of the revolution of the Second Aliyah.
Work, according to Gordon, is the proper way to the revival of the individual, and it is what will bring about the revival of the Jewish nation. "At work we will be healed and at work we will be healed." In his view, the somewhat auto-anti-Semitic, the "exile parasitism" and the disconnect from productive labor were the main scourge and root of all evil among the Jewish people, and therefore he sought to connect the people to manual labor and farming.
Until he immigrated to Israel, he kept Torah and mitzvot, and from the moment he immigrated to Eretz Israel, he began to observe mitzvot in a unique way. He kept the Sabbath, celebrated the holidays, but stopped praying. "The hoe became Gordon, Talit and Tefillin," defined Prof. Samuel Hugo Bergman.
"I ask myself and consider whether there is anyone else to ask: What are we, those who do not observe religion, what do we have on Yom Kippur?" begins Gordon, "The people had a special day for soul-searching with themselves as a people and with their sons as people, for the critique of the reckoning of life, for a complete addiction to the supreme demands of the human spirit... And I ask: What are we, those who do not observe religion, what do we have today? Is this day not a thing for us but a thing of the past, an ancient relic? Don't we, members of the generation of opinion, with their skyrocketing thinking, have the feeling that penetrates all literature and worlds – do we not need such a day, and specifically in a national way?
"And if this day ceases to be what it is and returns to being a simple day like all days, won't it be a great national and human loss, a decline that is not followed by an aliyah for the people of Israel and for all of us, members of this nation? The question, in fact, extends to all the festivals and to religion in general as the vital expression of our national spirit, of our national psyche - what do we have all this? What is religion to us? Are we done with religion? Have we started and finished? Have we asked ourselves, what is religion, the religiosity for the human soul? In particular, what is the religion of Israel, the creation of our national spirit for the Jewish soul? Have we asked and inquired, as such a one-of-a-kind thing should be asked and clarified? And when the walls fell, when we got to know the whole world up close, when we got to know man and his life up close, we saw that the tradition and acceptance of our ancestors no longer corresponded to what grew and lived in our minds and souls. But have we examined and checked extensively... What is really obsolete and no longer appropriate?
"By the power of religion we existed throughout our long exile, and not only did we exist – by its power we suffered, we suffered many great times, and by its power we lived, even lived many great times. Is it possible, something that the mind tolerates, that such a force is entirely decayed from the delusions of imagination and spiritual follies of an ignorant soul, without having any elementary nucleus that exists? Has it been sufficiently examined and weighed, is it sufficiently established in logic and in the human psyche the accepted opinion that by losing the foundation of blind faith, the foundation of religion has also been lost?..."
Other Gordon
It was the Gordon of yesteryear, but today there is another Gordon.
One of the candidates for Tel Aviv City Council, Roy Gordon of Brothers in Arms, came up on my radio show about two weeks ago and was outraged when I said that opposing the closing prayer in Dizengoff Square is secular extremism. "There is no such thing," he protested.
The 20th century, the most secular century in history, claimed the lives of hundreds of millions of people who were killed, murdered, exterminated, buried alive in the name of secular extremism. I dare assert that in the derby between the religious extremism of all time and the relatively young secular extremism, there is a clear winner.
Brothers in Arms press conference, photo: Eitan Elhadez/TPS
The 20th century fulfilled Nietzsche's warning. Radical secular ideologies, Nazism and Communism, God-substitutes that the secular Enlightenment eliminated, brought about the bloodiest century in history. Without God as the supreme moral imperative, humanity turned out to be bloodthirsty and sadistic.
So just to mention, there was a very civilized and enlightened nation that forced people in pajamas to play works by Wagner and Schubert while their naked compatriots were sent to shower in Zyklon B. The descendants of Goethe, Kant, Hegel, slaughtered a feeble people with the smell of salted fish from the shabby beard.
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