By now most GetReligion readers are likely aware of the fatal crushing of 45 Jewish pilgrims during a religious festival at Mount Meron in Israel’s north at the end of April. It’s been called one of the worst, if not the worst, civilian tragedy in Israel’s history.
(Sadly, the Meron tragedy has been superseded in the news by the serious explosion of Israeli-Palestinian violence this week. But as sad as this is — and as a Jew and a Zionist I find it almost debilitatingly sad —that’s not the subject of this post, so let’s return to Meron.)
For those in need of a refresher, here’s an early Times of Israel news story on the Meron catastrophe.
The sudden and dramatic loss of more than four dozen lives is, of course, a national trauma for a relatively small country such as Israel, which is not much larger than New Jersey. As has been noted elsewhere, “numbers numb.”
Among the dead were six Americans. Other victims came from Canada and Argentina. The youngest of the dead was a boy of nine. Some 150 others were injured.
Beyond the deaths themselves, the Meron incident surfaced major — and intricately interwoven — political and religious implications for Israel. That’s not an unusual mashup in Israel, where the divide between religion and state is near impossible to discern.
For journalists, the tragedy also underscores a Journalism 101 reality of the craft. Which is that the most interesting public commentators are often those closest to the story, such as varied eyewitnesses and longstanding, articulate members or observers of whatever groups are germane to the story.
I’ll say more about this below. First, some pertinent background.
The Meron tragedy took place on the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer. Because this is generally considered a minor holiday by most Jews, it’s largely ignored by the theologically liberal in Israel and elsewhere.
However it’s a big deal for traditionalist Jews for reasons explained in the Wikipedia link embedded in the preceding paragraph (please take a moment to read at least some of the entry).
That goes double for the Haredim, the Hebrew term for ultra-Orthodox Jews. (Haredim is plural; Haredi is the singular form, though in common usage it often refers to the collective as well.)
Given the Haredim’s controversial standing in Israel — they constitute just 12% of the population but wield greatly outsized political and religious influence — angry recriminations quickly surfaced in the mainstream Israeli and international press. These broke down along two main lines of questioning.
Why did the government of politically beleaguered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allow the pilgrimage to take place so soon after the nation’s coronavirus plague was brought under control? (The Meron pilgrimage was cancelled last year because of the pandemic.)
Was it because of his reliance on Haredi political parties to keep him in power?
Also, why did the Haredi leadership that controls the Meron site allow an estimated 100,000 people to participate after being warned repeatedly over the years that the location could not safely accommodate so large a crowd?
Was it because of their widespread distain for Israel’s secular authorities, often to the point of rejecting the very concept of nationalist secular Zionism (as opposed to biblical promises of Israel’s religious restoration with the coming of a promised Messiah)?
Elite media were, as you’d expect, all over those angles. Much of the daily coverage — which tended toward analysis and opinion pieces after the first day’s breaking stories — was quite good. Here are just two examples.
Click here for a solid New York Times explainer. Click here for an opinion column penned for the Washington Post by a well-regarded American Israeli historian and journalist.
Quality journalists should be able to cover communities to which they have no direct connection. Foreign correspondents and religion writers do that all the time.
But as I said above, expert articulate observers with close ties are often more interesting because of their greater awareness of conflicting subsurface currents. This is especially the case with opinion and analysis columns.
In this case, for me that means Haredi, or at least traditionally Orthodox, writers who emphasized the religious angle above the political one (though as I noted above, in Israel the two are never fully separate).
I might note here that this is also an argument for diversifying newsroom staffs, as well as having a religion expert or two in the newsroom.
Here are a few examples of what I mean.
This piece by the editor of Mishpacha, an international, English-language weekly aimed at Orthodox readers (its name translates as “family”), is representative of several stories I saw written by those I’ll label Haredi apologists.
The editor, Eytan Kobre, argued that placing blame for the tragedy is less important than recognizing God’s inscrutable role in everything, the good and the seemingly bad. (Readers unfamiliar with the Hebrew and Yiddish terms that Haredi commentators often include in their English writing may have some difficulty understanding this piece. Give it a shot anyway as it’s flavor should still be discernible and is indicative of much Orthodox Jewish thinking.)
Easier to read is this jargon-free piece by the media celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, TV personality, author of the bestseller “Kosher Sex,” entertainer Michael Jackson’s onetime “spiritual advisor” and 2012 failed Republican congressional candidate.
Boteach’s essay, published in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, angrily went after his fellow religionists who sought, however obliquely, to downplay or even excuse Haredi officials’ responsibility for the Meron tragedy.
Finally, take a look at this piece from The Jewish Press, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Orthodox newspaper.
The writer — a consistent critic of what he views as self-destructive Haredi insularity that brings his community into conflict, sometimes tragically, such as Meron, with the Israeli mainstream — said:
This is a communal flaw with a historical cause. For a community that has been molded by hundreds of years of living as a persecuted minority, never having to think beyond the spiritual and physical needs of one’s own tiny community, it’s very difficult to change one’s mindset. In yeshivah I was taught – and this is an exact quote – that “the Zionists want to create a new type of Jew, but we believe that that the old type of Jew was good enough!”
That is a badly mistaken perspective. A changing world – even just in terms of a vastly growing religious community – requires us to change too.
Together, the pieces I’ve cited here show the Haredi community’s inner struggle as it strives to hold on to its values and traditions in a rapidly changing world, one that many Haredim see as antithetical to all they hold dear.
Consider this a crash course in the intricacies of ultra-Orthodoxy, who because of their aforementioned outsized political and religious power will continue to loom large over Israel’s near future.