The laws of education for violence

An entire world lies behind the statement by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef that we should pray for the death of the "Ishmaelite-Palestinians" and, above all, for the death of Palestinian Authority President Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas ). Over 52 percent of the excited children who marched off to first grade this week and are defined in Israel as Jews were sent to ultra-Orthodox and religious schools where boys and girls are separated. Even the minority among those defined as Jews who went to a non-religious first grade are subject to a system in which the religious chief scientist expresses reactionary opinions on matters of science and religion, and as in the affair of the Im Tirtzu movement, and the weak objections of Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar only exacerbate the situation. At the same time, the number-two person in the ministry, the head of the Pedagogic Secretariat, is busy censoring non-religious textbooks, replacing civics lessons with "Judaism" and chooses to send his children to religious schools.

What will we teach in this religious autonomy which, with government funding, is gradually swallowing up the majority of Israeli children and constructing their world view? The words of Rabbi Yosef senior, and even more the hypocritical investigation of the book "The King's Torah" (Torat Hamelekh) which deals with "Laws of life and death between Israel and the nations" provide an important part of the answer. Not only is the government reacting with silent assent to the rebellion of rabbis Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef (the son of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ), who refused to be questioned about their support for the book, in effect the education that most of the children defined as Jews will receive in first grade is close to the spirit of this book.

The authors of "The laws of killing Gentiles" did not invent a thing, and the government-financed education received by most first-graders continues a very specific halakhic (relating to Jewish law ) and kabbalist outlook. Unfortunately, according to the Orthodox interpretation of halakha, the commandment "Thou shalt not murder" does, in fact, apply to Jews only. Anyone who kills a non-Jew (the murder of a Gentile is not called "murder" ), according to halakha and Maimonides, is not supposed to be punished by human beings. The act is not permitted, but there is no punishment. For desecrating the Shabbat and "consensual sex with a married woman" the punishment is death. There is no real punishment for killing a non-Jew.

Rabbi Yehuda Halevi maintained that there are four levels in nature: inanimate, vegetable, animal, speaker. The speaker is the talking animal, the Gentile. Above them is the fifth and highest level, the Jew, the only one defined as a human being and human rights exist for him alone.

"The laws of killing Gentiles" is characterized by a practical discussion of the obligation of the individual in our time to carry out the edict that "the best among the Gentiles should be killed." But in principle the problem has existed in the Orthodox canon for many years. And this is what the children learn in the language of the Talmud: "You are called man and the nations of the world are not called man;" and in Maimonides: "Someone who sees a non-Jew drowning should not save him."

The historical background to these things is clear. The long, harsh persecutions experienced by the Jews provoked many reactions. Many of them transferred Jewish culture to symbolic and metaphorical worlds, others tried to create life at any price. But a central reaction was to take revenge in a written, downplayed and unrealistic way to the racist persecutions in the real world.

The downplayed texts could be called "the writings of a weak and battered child to his pillow." Like a child who suffers from his friends' abuse, who can "take revenge" only by whispering at night to his pillow that his "friends" are not human beings and about the horrible punishments awaiting them, in the same way many of Israel's great minds created writings of revenge - concealed and unrealistic in their time - in which non-Jews are described as inferior and Satanic "non-humans." Non-humans whom one is permitted to harm. But in a context in which no Jew was able to harm a non-Jew, the practical significance of the words was a dead letter.

When Judaism returned to the stage of concrete history and to political sovereignty, it was supposed to shelve the underground writings of the revenge literature and to concentrate on universal and humanist morality, both Jewish and non-Jewish. That was the main effort before the Holocaust and in the early days of Zionism, although even moderate Orthodoxy did not bring about a halakhic revolution, which became crucial with the dramatic change in the balance of power.

And so at present the absolute majority of the established Orthodox world is going in an opposite direction. Most Israeli rabbis, and the government in their wake, are following the path of Rabbi Lior and turning what was written as a cry of pain for the pillow into a violent call for action. A call with a gun attached.

The scorn for the law on the part of inciting rabbis must be stopped, and they must stand trial. But there is no real meaning to that without upheaval in the world of education that is financed and subsidized in Israel, and which by implication preaches precisely those things.

Even a peace process, which may attempt to achieve somewhat more than the creation of the necessary diplomatic conditions for an attack against Iran, will not save a nation most of whose first-graders are abandoned to such violent racism.