… has decided to follow events in the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh closely. After an August 4 cover story about the religious bullies there, TNR has already written an update.
Contemporary Beit Shemesh is, for UD‘s money, one of the flashiest of flash points in ye olde can liberal democracy survive? tale.
Recall Judith Shklar arguing that cruelty is the worst illiberal vice because it creates fear in everyone around it.
[By] designating cruelty as the chief vice, the summum malum, that liberalism must avoid, Shklar was calling attention to the accompanying sentiments of fear, degradation, and humiliation that would ultimately make a liberal polity impossible.
The women of Beit Shemesh move fearfully in the public sphere because of the degrading, humiliating cruelty of the fanatic haredim among them. These women live in an authoritarian, not democratic, city, because violently cruel haredim there hate democracy and commit themselves to acts of destruction against it every day.
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The New Republic writers note one hopeful development:
A piece by Sam Sokol in the Jerusalem Post suggested that the moderate wing of the Beit Shemesh Haredi community [has come to see] the [most recent haredi] rioting as a kind of tipping point, begging their more Orthodox neighbors to disavow violence once and for all. According to Sokol, in the wake of last week’s violence, “posters stating ‘Enough Bullying’ were plastered on street corners of the haredi neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh by activists of the Tov Party, which, going into municipal elections, claims to represent what are being called ‘new haredim.’”
Evidently the posters decried the silence of Haredi leadership after incidents of anti-women violence in the town. The new posters announced that the extremists had “controlled the public thoroughfares and we were quiet. They insulted and embarrassed people in buses and we were quiet…. They brought a bad name to our town and desecrated God’s name, and we were quiet…. The time has come to stop the bullying and show responsibility for our city [and] to show responsibility for our community.”
Really all we can hope for when cruelty becomes systematic enough to kill democracy is that the intense disgust which the behavior generates in most people will, as it apparently has for some among the haredi population of Beit Shemesh, catalyze action.
August 7th, 2013 at 2:06AM
Hello Margaret and thanks for posting such a thoughtful and nuanced article about my town. The posters protesting the behavior of haredi extremists remind me of something my husband saw a few years ago. The Haredim in Ramat Beit Shemesh had rioted (what about, I don’t remember) and over-turned trash cans and uprooted trees. The next day Yochanan drove through the neighborhood in the early hours of the morning. He saw a number of local women, still in their bathrobes, trying to replant the trees.
We are in the midst of elections in Beit Shemesh now, and we are hopeful that a non-Haredi mayor will be elected and return Beit Shemesh to a friendly and pluralistic community.
I’ll keep you posted.
Janet
August 7th, 2013 at 2:12AM
janet: Thank you! I’m lucky to know someone right there… Do keep me posted. M
August 7th, 2013 at 5:49AM
Is 2;12 am a late night or an early morning? J
August 7th, 2013 at 7:15AM
Let’s just say I have interrupted sleep patterns…