To Define and to Defend

It’s been almost a month since it happened; and yet it is taking time to process its events. The images, interaction, and memories remain clear; and yet demand clarity.

I was on the bus home from school. It was a long day and it was late in the evening and we were approaching Mea Shearim, the Haredi neighborhood of Jerusalem. And then we stopped moving. I peered out the window, as I began to smell smoke, and noticed the garbage bins in the distance: they were set on fire and placed along the main road of the neighborhood, and thus there was only one very narrow lane for traffic.

The streets were mobbed with men and young children dressed in black and white and earlocks and velvet hats and bekeshas. The kids were disturbing traffic; they were taking smaller garbage bins and throwing them in front of the passing cars; they were shouting; they were causing me to feel as though I was a stranger in a foreign city with foreign people.

I was stunned. Traffic was stopped. People began murmuring on the bus. No one knew what was going on.

And so I got off the bus. I approached a haredi woman standing on the sidewalk. She was married and relatively young—perhaps late twenties.

What’s going on here?

I’m not sure of the exact details. Apparently, a young boy died in a car accident and the government won’t let them bury him. They want to perform an autopsy. A tragedy. A tragedy. Unbelievable. Can you imagine if you had died and they wouldn’t let you be buried?

She spoke passionately. She was staring at the fire and the words floated out of her mouth, sounding a bit premeditated.

I remained standing with her. I was intrigued and emotional and frustrated and I shared those sentiments with her. I insisted that while I can empathize with her pain, such a means of action will provide no solution.

She was convinced otherwise: this is the only way that the government changes things; we go out and protest and this is how things change. I am very proud of them; this is the right thing to be done.

Passer-byers stood and watched. People noticed us. People watched us. People, I assume, wondered.

I though, could not accept her arguments. I asserted that such action—while on a local level may provide solutions—foster greater splintering within the Jewish community; this is surely no conduit to empathy and understanding. The innocent onlooker—the outsider—experiences distance and frustration and disunity.

And she had a quick response: I’m not looking for unity. There’s not chance of that and that’s not what I daven for. I daven that one day the chiloynim will come back. And that’s all I can do until everyone comes back.

And no, she’s not going out there. She’s not trying to bring them back. Because—like she said—she doesn’t want any contact with them unless the chiloynim come to them. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with them. Her kids see them driving on Shabbat and scream goy goy. And they think that the woman without a head covering is a goya or an arab. How can she teach them otherwise?

Her words were bewildering. I was shocked—in the truest sense of the word: the abrupt and simple manner with which she disregarded all attempts of unity was painful.

It is difficult to fathom any united effort if, as she claimed, there is no incentive to reach unity; the absence of a common goal precludes any common action-- of which I strongly believe.

Eventually, perhaps frustrated, the woman mentioned that her kids were waiting for her at home and that she was worried that someone would walk by and record our conversation and she walked off.

I too, though, walked off frustrated: I was frustrated at her harsh and insensitive words; I was frustrated at my inability to empathize with her; I was frustrated with the paradoxical reality I attempt to decipher; I was frustrated that I felt like a foreigner; and I was frustrated with the abruptness of the conversation’s ending.

And yet, amongst the inundation of despair I embraced this intimate moment. For me it was a unique moment which provided the haredi woman a forum to define herself and defend herself against the other. I appreciated the encounter as an attempt at dialogue—a means of expression, of understanding. Appreciation, I think, is integral to the development of a solution.

While I do recognize that this woman’s words represent her alone and that she was, perhaps, an extreme representation of the community, I remain slightly despaired and yet forever hopeful.

Martin Buber has a powerful book entitled On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity. He writes elegantly and poignantly. And, perhaps, herein lies a viable approach to the solution of this conflict.

Here’s what I read:

“A time of genuine religious conversations is beginning—not those so-called fictitious conversations here none regarded and addressed his partner in reality, but genuine dialogues, speech from certainty to certainty, but also from one open-hearted person to another open-hearted person. Only then will genuine common life appear (47).

Genuine conversation, and therefore every actual fulfillment of relations between men, means acceptance of otherness. When two men inform one another of their basically different views about an object, each aiming to convince the other of the rightness of his own way of looking at the matter, everything depends so far as human life is concerned, on whether each thinks of the other as the one he is, whether each, that is, with all his desire to influence the other, nevertheless unreservedly accepts and confirms him in his being (65).”

I like to think of this approach as my guidance. I like to hope that this model will transfer from the ideal to the realistic.

The next step is the general implementation of such a motive; the next stage is genuine education. And, as always, the question remains: is it possible?