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verdict in matters of a person’s
status should one of the two
Catholics concerned not obey.
In other words, believe it or
not, Catholics who are Israeli
citizens have to behave in their
private lives vis-a-vis the law
more Catholically than Italians
in Italy, the home country of
mother church.
That does not go for Catho
lics alone, but for now twelve
recognized creeds in the coun
try including, of course, the
Jews. This leads to a state of
affairs for instance, where the
Israeli army has only kosher
food; where El Al, our airline
has nothing but kosher food
for any passengers; when a
woman like Golda Meir can be
come Prime - Minister of the
country, but she will not be ac
cepted as a witness in an ordin
ary rabbinical case because
Talmudic law will not accept
a woman as a fully fledged
witness but secular foreign
service, of course, will.
We have, in other words,
from the Jewish point of view,
a dual system of law and in fact
a dual system of Judges. For
the personal status system we
have rabbis and Dayonim—
again for weddings, divorces,
adoptions and what have you,
and also the worldly secular
system of judges you have in
the states. Since there are some
cases of overlapping, now and
then, friction of course is inevi
table. But you must not forget
that the Bible, which has pinch
hit for so many worldly things
for such a long time, is only
now gradually shrinking back
into its primordial dimensions
as the basis of religion, rather
than substituting as judges,
army, government and presi
dent, as it had to do for eigh
teen centuries.
Let me go to the charge of
atheism. We have in Israel, pr
shall we say we had in Israel in
the early years of statehood,
when we were three or four
years old, something I would
call a violent swing away from
religion. At times synagogues
were empty and rabbis were
held up for ridicule by young
Jews in the Jewish state. There
sprang up such a. thing as a
Canaanite movement of sabras
in Israel who said they are not
even Jews any more nor do
they want to be. What they
would like to be is Canaanites
the pre-Jewish inhabitants of
Israel, whose ties of blood
unite them with the Arabs and
other Semitic peoples, and “to
hell with all that baloney about
being one Jewish people of five
continents with diaspora Jewry
included.”
It was a time when young
Hebrew writers wanted to try
the impossible, to debiblicize
the Hebrew language, and in
stead of writing in biblical con
cepts, at least of Israeli life,
they figured that Steinbeck
and Hemingway would be
more to their taste and more
to the liking of their pens.
Hardly anything could be
more unnatural, but perhaps
we ought to explain this swing
away from religion.
The only way we could ex
plain it, now that we are get
ting out of this phase, is by
understanding the dilemma of
our teachers. You see, our
teachers in Israel have one
problem which still is far from
solved and that is—how does
one teach a young generation
of Israelis the Hitler genocide?
How does one transform mass
murder into a subject of his
torical study? It’s alright for
professors but how do you do
that for teenagers? How do you
win
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