Here is a beautiful story that has accompanied me for years, about the late Tommy Lapid, Yair's father, who will be distinguished for a long life:
Tommy "celebrated" his bar mitzvah in the Budapest ghetto. Since it was impossible under those conditions to hold a proper ceremony and celebration, Tommy's mother smashed her perfume bottle on the floor of the room where the family was huddled, so that something in the atmosphere would be festive after all.
Decades later, at the Bar Mitzvah ceremony of one of his grandchildren, which is celebrated in the State of Israel by the majority of the people, Grandpa Tommy took the stage to congratulate the happy groom. Tommy talked about his bar mitzvah and smashed a perfume bottle in memory of his mother.
The poet and actor Avraham Halfi, whose memory is blessed, was no less Tel Aviv than the demonstrators who attacked worshippers in Dizengoff Square on Yom Kippur. If anything, on the contrary, Khalfi belongs to the generation of pioneers who laid the foundation for Tel Aviv to become the vibrant and open capital of Israeli culture. But this huge artist and creator, who is so identified with Tel Aviv's cultural life, knew how to be moved by the contra that Tel Aviv gives Budapest.
His Tel Aviv autumn was a "Jewish autumn," and his excitement at the ability of autumn, in one city in the world, to finally be Jewish too, he expressed in the wonderful song composed by Yoni Rechter and performed by Arik Einstein, which opens with the words: "A Jewish autumn in the land of my forefathers sends me Ramzi Elul."
Tel Aviv will not be Tel Aviv if it does not allow a gay pride parade or free religious worship for all its residents, including segregated Muslim prayer in Charles Clore Park. But one day a year she is allowed, even obligated, to take on the Jewish autumn of Halfie.
I didn't vote for Yair Lapid, but the leader of the opposition is a state position, so Lapid is also my opposition leader. When the opposition leads one of the longest and most charged protests in the history of the country, and for the first time drags the army into the political debate, I need my opposition leader.
After Yom Kippur 5724, when the holiest Jewish moment of the year, the closing prayer, was pushed out of the public space by a handful of demonstrators, I also need Tommy's son with the family memory of a Jewish ceremony pushed into the dark. Unfortunately, he didn't show up.
I once heard Lapid say that the worst thing Netanyahu has done is legalize Kahanism by bringing Ben-Gvir into the government. I agree that Ben-Gvir should have stayed with Rabin's Cadillac emblem in hand, outside of any Israeli government, and I also hope that he will not fulfill his intention to pray in Arabic in a square in Tel Aviv. Prayer is not a political battering tool.
But Lapid is not handsome, demanding, and handsome sustains. He does not stand up to the handful of extremists in his camp, whose blatant anti-Judaism is clear to me does not represent the majority of Kaplan demonstrators. Lapid is afraid of them, so he joins them and normalizes them, just as Netanyahu did to Ben-Gvir.
Culturally, we saw on this sad Yom Kippur how much Avraham Halfi missed Tel Aviv. Politically, we have seen how much Israel lacks a courageous opposition leader.
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