Been a while

As I hadn't been out of the house in two months, I forgot what it's like out there. Beit Shemesh often appears in lists of the 10 or so Charedi cities in Israel. In reality, most of the city isn't Charedi. There are Charedi neighborhoods, some quite large. But so are the Chiloni and Modern Orthodox/Dati Leumi ones. There are huge swaths of town that are utterly non-religious: the malls by the train station for example. I went there today. 

It could be Tel Aviv. The typical man wears a t-shirt or polo-shirt, no yarmulke, a shaved head, and no tzitzis. The typical woman is in pants, head uncovered, bare arms. Everyone taps obsessively into their smart phones and many of them smoke. They don't smile. They shout at each other. Most of the men strut around like army captains. There is nary a trace of religion, just a few scattered people who look and carry themselves the same way as the others but with tiny yarmulkas on top of shaved heads, or, in the case of the handful of women, utterly immodest clothing along with a brightly colored head scarf that covers half the head. But even they are few and far between.

There are 5 large apartment buildings across from the mall. The patios are built one on top of each other so that putting a sukkah there is impossible. They clearly were not built for religious people.
It is incredible to think that this is Eretz Yisroel, the place from which we were booted for a few short-comings in mitzvah observance. Those short-comings did not include violations by the masses in Sabbath observance, kashrus, the laws of family purity, and basic belief in God. The people who got booted from the land two thousand years ago would look with incomparably more astonishment at the non-religious people in Israeli society than I do.

And this is Beit Shemesh, a city that regularly appears on the list of Charedi cities.

There are a few other Charedi enclaves in Israel. Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Modi'in Illit, Beitar Illit, Kiryat Ye'arim (Telz-Stone), Ashdod, Rekhasim, Safed, and El'ad.

Telz-Stone has just 6,000 people. Ashdod, a large city of 220,000 has a religious neighborhood, but the bulk of the city is utterly non-religious. It takes a lot of driving to find the religious part. Rekhasim, near Haifa, has 12,000 people and a Charedi majority. Elad has 50,000, the majority Charedi. Modi'in Illit has 70,000, the great majority Charedi, almost it seems often that few of the store workers are. Bene Brak has 200,000, the great majority but not all Charedi despite what you have heard. Beitar Illit has 50,000, basically Charedi. Safed has just 35,000 people but only a portion are Charedi. Jerusalem has huge Charedi neighborhoods but most of the city is not Charedi.

That's it, in a country of 5-6 million Jews. Drive from one of these cities to the other and you pass non-religious town after town, moshav after moshav, city after city. Kilometers and kilometers of sin. 85% of the Jews in the land are not Charedi. I dare say they and the Arabs occupy well more than 90% of the land as the Charedi areas are more densely populated.

It's not like in America where you have Orthodox Jewish enclaves and thousands of churches between them. Here it's non-religious people for the most part and if some observe some traditions they ignore far more than they keep. It's a land of sin.

This is Zionism. It amazes me that any person who calls himself Torah observant can be excited about the State of Israel. If you have any love of God, Torah, people, or land, you have to be pretty close to breaking down into tears if you venture out of the house. The State is such an abomination. I dare say it is the worst thing to ever happen to the Jewish people, except maybe for the dispersal of the Ten Tribes and the destruction of the First Temple. It is far worse than the Chet HaEgel.

You can't go by the small group of bonafide scholars who were excited about the state early on. And it is only a handful of men. They had high hopes. What would they say now as 4.5 million Jews violate Shabbos every week in the Holy Land?

And it's not as if some are religious and some not but we are all brothers. The hostility the leaps off the faces of the non-religious to the religious is very hard to take. The myth is that it's the other way around. Look, I don't care for the mitzvah violation but I don't glare at people. If anything I smile and want to encourage them. But that's not how they look at me. They hate us. They are fed so much propaganda about the Charedim, so many lies. If you want to know more about that, just open up the Times of Israel any day of the week. I think actually the blood libels of old Europe don't even compare to this. The quantity and intensity of propaganda and hatred is immense. One feels it. It is unmistakable. This is Zionism. It is the opposite of Judaism.