It used to be that whenever I made fun of the Charedim (the one’s in Israel who start riots when the parking lot is open on shabbos or that want the women to sit in back of the bus) I would get all types of screaming from the nosebleeds. Those folks who happen to stumble upon my blog that day to find me jabbing at their own kind and get all up in arms over it. I would get called a chillul Hashem and Antisemitic on a regular basis by folks who took what I was saying to be serious. Sure, I get called those things once in a while, but nowadays it’s rarely because of poking fun at the Charedim. You see, in the past 5 years or so the Charedim have developed into a more violent and fanatical group than ever and with pretty much everyone in the world tuning into it cross many mediums.
Sure, I can turn a bunch of Charedim burning dumpsters in their own neighborhoods into a joke, but in the grand scheme of things it matters because anything that puts a rift in between Jews should matter to us. Rifts will always exist for sure, but when the rifts go beyond the pale of Torah and Halacha, they matter even more. It’s as if the yeshivish community and the gedolim silently support the ideological rifts that are expanding in Israel. Like, it’s better to support violent Charedim than to take the side of anyone secular or modernishe chas v’shalom. In many ways it reminds me of how hard it is to get a Muslim cleric to denounce some sort of violence against Israel.
I have no idea what the solution is, but it doesn’t seem that the frum community is aware of how big a deal the situation in Israel is. I’m not there, but you can pretty much go to any media channel, right wing or left wing and see that the situation in going to get out of hand.
Find charedi riots on 4torah.com
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