Opinion & Comment
Anti-Religion is the Ultra-Fanatic Religion
by M. Shotland

What likewise interests us is the basis for remarks made by various people who normally do not see undermining and degrading those loyal to the Torah as their aim in life. They sincerely fear that the authority of what they call law will be torn up by the roots, and that it will lose the esteem that (they think) it deserves because of the Torah- observant's publicly-expressed contempt for it in their criticism of the judicial activism of the Israeli Supreme Court.

When we hear this familiar line about submitting to the authority of the State's judicial system emanating from people who ordinarily despise any authority at all, we must take some time out and study it carefully. Our need to analyze their stand is intensified when we realize that the judicial system itself is consistently trying to shatter numerous accepted axioms, beginning with hitherto forbidden sexual relations and ending with promoting "mercy killing," as they term it.

Anyone who thinks about the evolution of social values in the "enlightened" society during the last fifty years easily senses the progressive erosion in their perceptions of what is permitted and what is prohibited. This lately took an extreme turn when a political party was founded with the declared goal of legalizing the use of mild narcotics. These "learned" politicians claim that you cannot define as a violation of the law something that many people need (they say). We assume that these people too are part of "enlightened" Israeli society.

The obvious question arises: Why do they need any system at all of law and order? What good are manmade values that constantly change?

How these people act in real life is even worse than the level of values they officially want legislated. From childhood on, those who have departed from observing Toras Hashem are educated to permissiveness. They are exposed to endless amounts of filth, and the inevitable result is that they allow themselves to partake of whatever appeals to them.

We are proud of the fact that we are so far from this that we would not even write about the particulars of the type and amount of permissiveness currently popular among the masses. It is, however, enough that we cite one Israeli newspaper headline that caught our attention last month: "81 Million Shekalim of Damages Caused by Vandalism in Schools During 1998." It should be noted that this sum includes only the damages to installations belonging to local authorities such as schools, and not to the property of individuals. Furthermore, although these statistics display only one specific area of hefkeirus, they imply what is happening in other areas, where the results even reach bloodshed. "A person swallows his fellow alive" (Ovos 3:2) nowadays even with "the fear of the government" in place.

It is therefore beyond our comprehension how these people have the nerve to claim that the survival or fall of their system of "law and order" is dependent upon what the chareidim say. Those who follow the Torah are careful not to do anything that might even make people mistakenly think they are participating in such permissiveness.

The way of worshiping Baal Pe'or (Bamidbar 25) was the most disgraceful imaginable. It is well known that HaRav Chaim Shmuelevitz zt'l, the rosh yeshiva of Mirrer Yeshiva in Yerushalayim, once asked how such a shameful act could even be considered worship. He answers that this idol was unique in that its entire essence was to show that nothing at all in the world should inhibit man. Those who desired total hefkeirus created an idol whose entire worship was through acts of disgrace. Actually, R' Chaim stresses, of all ways of idol worship this is the only one that has remained in our day: the shattering of all restraints.

"They called the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods" (Bamidbar 25:2) -- see Rashi who explains exactly how they worshiped Baal Pe'or. We see that besides the shameful act that they did before Baal Pe'or in worship of it, they sacrificed to it, bowed to it, and even tried to coax others to bow to it.

Since the worship of this idol was, as mentioned before, to disgrace it, why should those who believed in it sacrifice and bow to it? This difficulty is amazingly similar to the difficulties we asked above about the contemporary non- religious and their weird observance of presumably sacred principles while simultaneously engaging in every existing act of permissiveness.

It seems to me that there is no one answer to these questions. Nonetheless we can conclude from them that it is apparent in general that a person has a need to worship something. Even those who champion smashing all moral and religious restraints cannot just do so without wrapping their deed up in some sort of subjugation or acceptance of some creed or ideology.

All of the most heretical movements in history had a religious cult attached to them, with characters and statues that the masses were induced to worship. This started from Baal Pe'or and ended with Communism, whose fall necessitated smashing many statutes that were placed in city centers to glorify the philosophers and practitioners of this ideology. Even those who worshiped Baal Pe'or needed to invest their idol with some importance, or else their disgracing it was worthless, since the bursting of all restrains could not endure alone without making at least that into a specific value.

It seems that it is in this light that we should see the weird behavior of today's secular priests. It explains why secularism, although degrading anything holy, desperately needs some sort of a framework that will award it legitimization for its ideologies. Although worthless, their beliefs are staunchly supported, so as to justify their outlook in life.

In addition, this is the rationalization behind the High Court's delving into matters not strictly under its jurisdiction, topics that are generally not permitted to be judged. Unless they engage in these other areas, the judges remain mere arbitrators and cannot supply the ideological aura that enlightened society so needs for the 1999 worship of Baal Pe'or. That is the intention of the court's intrusions into other topics and of its "constitutional clarifications" about permissiveness. It is in this way that we should understand the zealous ceremony of declaring the High Court's vital significance that we have lately witnessed.

In connection to this I remember a discussion that a friend of mine once related to me. A secular Jew had asked him: "Why don't you chareidim celebrate Israel Independence Day along with us? Even if you don't consider Israel's existence important, why do you object to celebrating a holiday that most of your brethren anyway celebrate?" (I will add what Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, once remarked in this spirit, "Israel Independence Day will not be a real holiday until people in Meah Shearim wear shtrimelach on it.")

My friend answered him wittily: "The whole year we are chareidim and observe our yomim tovim, while you are secular Jews and profane them. Why can't you let us feel, just this one time in the year, how it is to be a secular Jew?"

We too tell those who attack us so ferociously: It seems that you need some sort of ideological framework to legitimize smashing all restraints. Let us be like secular Jews as far as your new religion is concerned, since there is no religion more fanatic than yours.