This short essay, the weekly Sunday column of the noted author Chaim Walder in Yated Ne'eman, caused an uproar all over the Israeli media this week. Responding to calls to the chareidi community to search our souls as why everyone hates us, Rabbi Walder has some very sharp remarks. After the uproar, he was interviewed and said that he saw no reason to apologize or retract his remarks. Here is our translation of his original column.
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Of late, more and more people have been suggesting to us, chareidim, that we make a self-reckoning, a soul search or cheshbon hanefesh.
"Why do they hate us so? Why do they despise us? Why in all of their surveys, have the chareidim become an object of loathing? And why did Yair Lapid receive so many votes?" Journalist Nachum Barnea, who was one of the first to call upon the chareidim to make a cheshbon hanefesh, demanded to know, "...why the general public is prepared to accept economic strictures upon themselves so long as the chareidim are smitten even more?"
Let us decide, for a start (and perhaps a specific law should even be passed to that effect), that a call for a soul searching must originate with one who has a pure Jewish soul. It must not stem from someone who wishes to undermine the purity of soul and chareidi wholesomeness and ingenuousness, and certainly not from one who belongs to the decadent public dealing with severe disciplinary problems in a corrupt educational system, lacking boundaries and suffering from shocking violence and meaninglessness. Therefore, anyone who wishes to lambaste the chareidim, the most refined and exemplary community not only in this country but in the entire world, or suggest that we make such a reckoning -- is advised to please first go find his own friends, his children and his friends' children...
Now we can deal with the issue itself. Where does it originate, this exaggerated call for a cheshbon hanefesh? And from none other than people who despise us unaccountably and unreservedly?
If we can get down to the psychological roots of this phenomenon, we will discover that underlying this `concern' and desire for soul searching there hide suppressed guilt feelings regarding their hatred for us and the notions that crop up in their heads about what they would like to see happen to us -- ideas which are partially expressed verbally in closed meetings, and a small portion of which leaks out to the media.
The moment that they turn us into `the guilty,' the moment that we are the ones who must make a reckoning, that is when their hatred becomes more justified and therefore all the more legitimate. It makes them feel more comfortable with themselves.
If we proceed further in delving into this phenomenon we will find that it actually has much in common with anti-Semitism.
The gentiles have, of course, always hated us because they hated us, without rhyme or reason.
But when the gentiles sought to actually harm us, they needed a pretext for their actions vis-a-vis other nations and for themselves and their families as well.
Here is where the concept of cheshbon hanefesh comes in. So-called intelligent people have invented throughout the ages, terrible accusations against the Jews, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which depicted Jews as pulling all the strings and controlling the world. Lapid Jr. alluded to this in his remarks to MK Rabbi Gafni, "The State of Israel has finished taking orders from you." As if the chareidim ever issued orders!
The general idea behind this line is: We don't really hate them but we have no choice. We must act against them because they are trying to take control over us. They are endangering us and we must defend ourselves. And if this defense includes a line of offense or even a harsh blow, it is merely the force of necessity. What can we do?
At this point, we will quote (with minor changes) the speech of a very famous person without yet revealing who it was. It was delivered many, many years ago:
"We will have to solve the Jewish problem. There is enough space in the world to live, but we must abandon the idea that the Creator chose the Jews, which gives them a mandate to be parasites feeding upon the bodies of productive citizens.
"Jews must adapt themselves to real, productive work, like other citizens, for if not, they will eventually, sooner or later, be confronted by an unimaginable crisis.
"If control by Jewish money will continue in our country or beyond it, it will lead to a civil war whose outcome will be: not a Jewish victory but the annihilation of all Jews throughout the country."
This, then, is one of the speeches of the demagogue Hitler ym"sh right before the outbreak of WWII.
Hitler had already prepared the groundwork for the genocide of Jewry by disseminating his hate propaganda presenting Jews as parasites sucking non-Jewish blood, which justified in advance their persecution.
I want to make it clear: Nothing, of course, can be compared to the Holocaust, and it should be clear that the intent of our haters of religion is not to physically annihilate the chareidim. But they definitely harbor malevolent intentions regarding anything connected to our quality of life, our ability to conduct a normal life and they are looking for ways to deny us elementary rights like government allowances, reductions in city taxes, negative income taxes, food for children, after school curriculums, day care centers, education, and they are even talking about denying us the right to vote and to leave the country. A dictatorship par excellence.
We cannot help but repeatedly quote Yair Lapid's own words. We invite you to draw your own analogy.
This is what Lapid wrote two years ago in his popular weekly column in the newspaper with the largest circulation:
"Forget about ideology, forget about the fact that I can't fathom why you aren't bothered by the fact that you are living at my expense. But I am at the point where I can't pay for it any more. Finito. The money is all gone. No more. Not only don't I have from what to give to your children but I do not even have enough for my own. Can you imagine how that makes me feel?!"
At the end, he delivers a threat which, however you look at it, is very similar to the speech we quoted previously.
"We must find a way out, my friend, or else it will end up badly. To quote what it says in Taanis 23: `O chavruta, o mituta: Friendship or death."
So now, what do you say? How different is this from the summary statement above?
I am sure that even at that time, there were those wise guys who called upon the Jews to make a soul reckoning as to how and why they reached such a state where an entire nation was swept up into a world war which would exact a heavy toll on itself, as long as the Jews would suffer as well.
