One of the most memorable events of my childhood occurred on Simchat Torah:
I stood in line with everyone else to get the bag of sweets from Rabbi Zelig's hands. When it was my turn, I took the bag and left, but then I met my cousin Michali crying because she didn't get a bag of candy. She was too small to stand in line, so I gave her mine and innocently stood in line again to get another bag. When I got to the front of the line, Zelig recognized me and burst out shouting: 'You already got it! Aren't you ashamed to come and ask again?' and I reddened and teared and stuttered something about her cousin, but it didn't really help me. I walked away in disgrace, and as was the custom in those days, my mother still scolded me why I had to be such a great tzaddik, which increased the trauma much more, of course, and this is how I remember it painfully to this day.
I say this because when they started talking this week about the budget allocated for distributing sweets to children on Simchat Torah, the first thing that came to my mind was the picture of me crying near the synagogue fence after I kidnapped both Zelig and my mother, which shows that this custom has been an integral part of the Simchat Torah experience for more than 45 years, the age of my trauma.
Without checking, I can assume that in the past, too, some budgets for religious and community services were allocated for exactly such purposes, but this year the custom is to court such clauses and turn them into indictments, which is why it too has become so. One extremist commentator went so far as to call it "bribery to children."
And this is an excellent opportunity to say something: In my opinion, government budgets that make their way not to one of the five famous memes are superfluous. In the country I will establish, bags for Simchat Torah will not be budgeted for children, no national theater and national broadcasting authority will be budgeted, and lectures in the periphery will not be budgeted, not even when I am the lecturer. All this is a distant dream. The state is not mine, and in the existing state there are cultural and welfare budgets and there are transfer funds and there is a Ministry of Environment and a Ministry of Religious Services. In this framework, state funds are transferred to needs that appear to be the needs of a particular sector.
The argument that the government favors a particular sector makes no sense: it is the duty of every government to ensure that the distribution is as wide as possible, and it is clear to any reasonable person that the character of a particular coalition will probably derive a certain preference for its supporters, and the character of another coalition will derive the opposite
The thing is that any transfer money is money for the needs of a particular sector; Not every citizen enjoys every show, and not every sector has the same needs.
Therefore, the argument that the government favors a particular sector makes no sense: it is the duty of every government to ensure that the spread is as wide as possible, and it is clear to any reasonable person that the character of a particular coalition will probably derive a certain preference for its supporters, and the character of another coalition will derive the opposite.
So if it's that simple, where does the criticism come from? This brings us back to the main engine of these crazy days: the lack of self-awareness. For too many people, theater budgets are "everyone" budgets and Simchat Torah candy budgets are sectoral budgets. So that's it – it's not. They will eat humble and swear. May they rejoice in Simchat Torah and give honor to the Torah.
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