The following is a transcript of Episode 157 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, and we’re recording on Monday, October 2nd, 2023. And Moadim L’Simcha. Today, as we’re recording, it’s the middle of Sukkot, and still we’re going to talk about something that happened last week during Yom Kippur.

So, you know, I’m aware that I, like everyone else, oftentimes form my opinions in response to an event or a story on the basis of instinct. We have moral and ideological compasses that are developed over time, and we have battle tested political loyalties, so that often, when we encounter a story, we know what we think about it, right away. And then we do the justification work, which sometimes happens quickly, sometimes more slowly. The justification work that makes us sure that we’re not left with any cognitive dissonance. 

I don’t think we have to feel bad about any of that. Either the ability to form quick opinions, or the fact that we’re oftentimes justifying those opinions later. But it is good that we’re honest with ourselves as it’s happening. Once in a while, though, I encounter a story and I’m genuinely not sure what to think. 

I suppose that, in some ways, moments like that are gifts, even if they’re confusing. They’re moments for us to refine our skills at moral and intellectual discernment, to try to excavate our values and our commitments, to hold those commitments against the fact pattern that emerges, and then to come to an assertive rather than instinctive conclusion about what we think about the whole thing.

So this is what happened to me last week when I emerged from the euphoria that was the conclusion of Yom Kippur and read about what had happened in Tel Aviv the same day. Here’s the short fact pattern. It was reported by the New York Times and elsewhere. A group called Rosh Yehudi, which seeks to encourage religious practice among secular Israelis, arranged for a public outdoor prayer service on Yom Kippur in Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv in the heart of secular Israel.

This has happened for a few years now, though back in 2020, when it started, the need to pray outside was more existential and existed for different reasons than it does now. With the rise of gender segregation in public places in Israel, which is an agenda of the ultra Orthodox community, the Tel Aviv municipality had granted permission to the group to organize the services, but it forbade formal gender segregation at the services, which is a decision then upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court.

In turn, this group erected a makeshift gender barrier made up of Israeli flags, which seems to have earned the tacit approval of the police. In response, the service was disrupted by protesters, creating a visual that at once connected the dots between the larger protest movement and social turmoil in Israel and this particular story, but also created terrible optics amidst the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

There’s a lot more to say to flesh out other dimensions of the story, and I encourage you to read a couple of different news sites to try to build out the rest of the fact pattern. I felt sick upon hearing the story, and I felt, as I still do, that many different aspects of it were bad. But a sick feeling is not the same as a clear opinion.

Here’s how I’ve been trying to break down how I think about it, trying to ferret out what I really believe, and then try to apply it to this case. So I can tell you that I really believe in the tenets of liberal democracy, and I believe that Israel is capable of being a Jewish state that adheres to the principle of liberal democracy. So if I take those tenets of liberal democracy one by one, I find myself a little bit stuck because some of those tenets lead to one conclusion and some of those tenets lead to another. 

For instance, a belief in liberal democracy and liberal values, moreover, might translate into a deep critique of any form of gender segregation in public spaces. In fact, you might even go further and insist that liberal democracy requires of us to carefully police the difference between the public square and the private sphere for sites of religious expression, and therefore, based on those commitments, I would conclude that the real failure here was on the part of this religious group and the imperfect endorsement that they basically received from public officials, and that therefore, the protesters were in the right to shut them down.

But liberal democracy might also lead me to believe in religious pluralism, and in the moral, epistemological, and practical commitments, in trying to make possible multiple faith and practice claims to coexist at once. This would suggest that I would find the protests against a religious service anathema, in spite of my own allergy to this particular form of prayer and its choice of venue.

Or, if you want to go even further, theorists of liberal democracy would also argue that what makes for vibrant democracy is precisely the non-violent, substantive clash of ideas and identities in public. Not just at the ballot, but in the public square. To insist that religious expression remains sequestered in the private sphere is to distrust that a vibrant society can find ways to non violently engage with difference. By this argument, a liberal Democrat perhaps would want not fewer such religious services in public, but more different models competing with each other. 

And I’m not playing out these arguments to be coy. I’ll just put this more simply. I think this story, which I found ugly, is something of a crucible for liberal Zionists. I guess it’s not good, and it’s not clear why. I wanted today’s episode to be both about this story, but also maybe an exercise in thinking. How people like us, if you’re all like me and my guests, confront a story that tests our sensibilities and our values, to explore how we work through it, how we ultimately decide to take a position.

And I guess in this particular case, what it’s going to mean for a contested ideological position like liberal Zionism to advocate for itself amidst a messy marketplace of ideas that is the state of Israel right now. I’ve invited two of my regular and favorite thought partners to work through this with me. Both of whom I knew, I know were both very affected by the story. I guess both of them published thought pieces about it, and both of them, I think, like me, have been struggling to articulate what they feel about all dimensions of it. 

Yossi Klein Halevi is an acclaimed journalist and author, a regular guest here on Identity Crisis, and co host of another Hartman podcast, For Heaven’s Sake. Masua Sagiv is a law professor at Berkeley, where she’s also the Hartman West Coast scholar in residence and also co-host of a Hartman podcast, Perfect Jewish Parents. We’re going to link to both of their articles about Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv in the show notes. Both Yossi and Masua have also been spending a lot of time outside of Israel lately, and I’m sure there’s a piece of that distance that, like mine, it’s also motivating some of their own complex feelings about this Israeli moment.

So I wanna start by asking you both to give me your first reactions before you figured out what you thought about this, and before you figured out what you were gonna write and publicly say about it. I wanna just get a little bit into the, you came out of Yom Kippur, you read the story on the news and what it, what it sounded like to you and what it felt like.

Yossi, why don’t I start with you. 

Yossi: Well, earlier, Yehuda, you were describing a process which is common, I think, to many people where we form an opinion and then we look for the, as you put it for the, the evidence to substantiate the opinion. The truth is that for me, at least in this case, it worked in the opposite way. When I heard about the incident, my emotional reaction, and I think that’s what you’re asking, right, before one begins to formulate the rational response. 

Emotionally, I was with the protesters. I felt that the status quo has been destroyed by this government. And there’s a need to renegotiate the terms of the relationship. And war has been declared against Tel Aviv and what Tel Aviv represents, and Tel Aviv was was returning fire. And I felt that this was an act of self defense. There is a growing tendency on the part of the group that we call Chardalim, Charedi Leumi, this convergence of ultra-nationalists and ultra-Orthodox, which I think is the most dangerous force in Israel, and was behind this prayer group, and there’s a growing tendency to occupy more and more of the public space, and to change the nature of the secular presence. 

So I, my, my initial emotional response, which is not where I ended up in. But initially I felt this was an act of legitimate self defense. 

Yehuda: And that, I guess, aligns, Yossi with, you have for months now been at the barricades in Israeli society in ways that you haven’t been on domestic turmoil in the past. So perhaps it’s consistent that if you’re already at the barricades, you’re going to kind of immediately say, okay, listen, I’m with the protesters to begin with.

So that means at Kaplan Street on Saturday night or in front of the president’s house in Jerusalem on Saturday night or against Roshi Yehudi at Dizengoff Square in Yom Kippur. 

Yossi: I think that’s a really important insight because part of the emotional response was to protect my camp. My camp is under fire now. And this is the time to close ranks. And that was the initial response of the protest leaders as well. They ended up backtracking. But initially, this is close ranks. And don’t give this government,  any victory, justified or not.

Yehuda: Great. I want to come back to that a little bit later, the difference between what we might call camp thinking versus movement thinking, because I think they’re not the same.

Um, and I think it’s a big issue right now in Israel around the whole notion of a democratic consensus. Is it a camp or is it a movement? And there’s a huge difference in terms of its size, whether it’s a camp or a movement. Let’s come back to that. 

Masua, I’ll turn to you because I think you probably being in Berkeley read about this last, post-Yom Kippur. So I’m curious what your reaction was upon hearing the story. 

Masua: I think that almost ironically, I think I was one of the first person who actually heard about that in real time because I’m 10 hours behind Israel. I had in the Erev Chag, before, the day before Yom Kippur started, I got even in the morning, I got videos from a secular Tel Avivi friend, look what’s going onin the streets. I was like in the midst of preparing for Yom Kippur and I and I got these videos and then I got into Twitter and the feeling was so odd because I felt like it’s not chag for me, but it is chag there. And I’m looking at stuff that are happening in real time.

And I entered Yom Kippur feeling very, with such a heavy heart, and it was also the gap between my experience and the people surrounding me, that no one knew about it. And everyone were very, you know, in, in the atmosphere of the holy day, I was not there. I was, I was heartbroken. And so I had, I had these, these feelings throughout the day.

And I think I, I, I’m going to echo Yossi. I was very, I, I couldn’t rationalize anything in the first 24 hours. I couldn’t think logically in the in the first 24 hours. It was just emotions. And I’m going to echo Yossi also in the in the direction of the emotions. My emotions were very, how dare they?

Yehuda: About the prayer service?

Masua: About the prayer service and not about and not about the protesters. And again, as you said, that’s not where I ended up in. But that was the first instinct for me. Absolutely. 

Yehuda: So I will say I came out a little bit opposite in that until it was clear to me what the organization was that was organizing these prayer services, and having had multiple years of pandemic where an outdoor prayer service is not a political act, it’s actually a way for people to, it’s a political act in the sense that you’re not forcing people to be inside the building. There’s been a real shift around prayer and public spaces as a less coercive activity than we might have imagined it. 

It kind of seemed to me, my initial instinct was really? They’re going after davening? They’re going after services? And I’m like, oh, but these guys are actually trying to agitate in the public square. And then I, I was still left with a bitter taste of protests taking place during Yom Kippur services. So maybe now, let’s continue in that direction. 

So what, if you started there, Masua, in terms of your place on the battlefield, and then we’ll come to you, Yossi, as well, what tilted your own thinking? Are you as ambivalent as I was in this opening today? Or do you have a clearer sense of who’s at fault in the story? And therefore, what should have happened as a result?

Masua: I saw a good post that when one of the many, many posts that I’ve seen throughout the last few days, somewhere, someone wrote, everyone are right and we all lost.

And I think it’s really, it’s really true. Who’s to blame? There are a lot of people to blame. I think initially, I think that one of the reasons maybe that Yossi and I reacted the way we did is because it was, everyone could see it coming. Every single person could see it coming. I mean, the court decision and this organization, Roshi Yehudi, five minutes before Yom Kippur saying, okay, we will abide by the court’s decision, but then five minutes after Yom Kippur, deliberately not abiding.

I think it was, it was very clear, but at the end, when I realized, and maybe I should have realized that before, but when I realized that people actually came there to pray and also, I would hate to live in a place where citizens need to enforce court decisions, even if I think the police is wrong, even if I think, I mean, I understand all sides.

I can give you justifications for almost everyone aside from these activists. The thing is that activists do not represent all of the camp, right? All of the people. It’s like we say about the politicians, right? We need to make the separation between the politicians and the people. I think that here it’s also the case that we need to make the separation.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, you wind up in a strange place of that old joke about the rabbi, of you’re right, you’re right, and you’re right too, which feels unredeemed, right? The fact that a lot of people can be wrong and a lot of positions are basically justified leaves us in a place of the likelihood that incidents like this will happen and continue to happen.

Masua: I think that part of the problem is that we went into a swirl that everything is determined based on whether it’s legal or not. And these kinds of things, and maybe I’ll allude to later to what you said in your introduction, these kinds of things, we have two ways to regulate the relationship between us and specifically relationship between religion and secular or liberalism and illiberal practices.

We can do it through law, or we can do it through solidarity, respect. Now, obviously, in regular years and in COVID years, it was perceived as beautiful. And let’s respect them, even though it actually comes in conflict with my own beliefs as well. 

But then this year, we have no room for respect or solidarity. Everything is shattered. So you can be disappointed but you can’t expect people, you know, to fence themselves. 

Yehuda: To simply abide by that norm just because we decide collectively that we want to be a part of it. Okay. So Yos, let me shift to you in terms of your own evolution in your thinking. You indicated that your initial instinct was on the camp of the protest movement, but that as you’ve thought about it more, you’re not quite so sure.

So I’m curious both about the thought process, but also kind of where you landed with respect to the story. 

Yossi: Just to pick up on Masuah’s last point, one further reaction that I had initially was, why has this never happened before? Why suddenly now? And so who is to blame?

The blame is obviously on the side of the government, which has pushed secularists into a corner. And I still believe that that’s true. I still believe that primary blame does belong to the government, but that doesn’t absolve those who actually broke up the prayer service of responsibility.

What happened to me is not so much a thought process, but an evolution of my emotional response. I very much appreciated listening to the way you were unpacking this earlier in your introduction, Yehuda. But my response mechanism didn’t move in that direction. I wasn’t thinking in terms of values and philosophical principles. 

The first thought after the initial emotional response was still more emotional than a thought process, which is what’s good for Israel. And then it was obvious to me that this is a disaster. And then I had a moment of looking at myself with horror, actually, and thinking, where has this polarization taken us? Where’s it taken me? I’m at the point now where I’m justifying breaking up a prayer service on Yom Kippur. And, yes, it was a politicized prayer service. It was a demonstrative prayer service. 

That’s true, but demonstrative prayer is still prayer, and we do that all the time. That’s, it’s very Jewish to use prayer for political purposes. Women of the Wall do it. Look, I grew up in the Soviet Jewry protest movement, which in some ways began the tradition of taking Torah scrolls into the streets. You know, we would circle the Soviet U.N. mission seven times. We had a Jericho march, you know, circling the Iron Curtain with shofars and people wearing prayer shawls and carrying Torah scrolls.

And I, of course, grew up thinking this is a totally legitimate use of Jewish prayer. In fact, it’s an essential use of Jewish prayer. You know, it’s not only my side that has the right to use prayer for political purposes. Now, then we come into the question of, okay, we’re in a war to save the Supreme Court. We’re in a war to save democracy. The other side is using prayer as a weapon to undermine the authority of the courts. And so I was veering back, you know, and it was the struggle. And it’s still a struggle as, as I’m speaking, I realized it’s not emotionally resolved for me. 

Yehuda: Well, look, even if you made the argument that prayer is always in some ways political, or at least that it’s oftentimes leveraged for politics, well, yeah, okay, fine. So it’s legitimate, in that sense, that this group is doing an activity that is using prayer to advance a political objective. But that, more than anything, justifies the protest against it. I mean, 

Yossi: Yes, because that’s also a demonstrative anti prayer. 

Yehuda: Correct. Correct. So it kind of becomes a little bit of a question, this is an Elana Stein Hain question that she thinks about a lot, which is, when is prayer about sincerity or when is it about ritual? I’m kind of screwing up her dichotomy a little bit, but ritual imagines that I’m doing something where I’m self-conscious about what I’m trying to do, versus, sincerity is, I just want to daven. I just want to pray. 

So obviously the group like this is a little bit more on the ritual side than the sincerity side. If they just wanted to daven, they could do that in private. They clearly do want to do it in public. They want also that the move around gender is a public demonstration. But once you start davening, you’re davening. And so it’s a little bit hard to figure out when does this, when does the fact that somebody is doing something to do it in public. get to hold that status of being a political demonstration? In which case, then you have a demonstration, I have a counter demonstration.

Or when do we allow, okay. You started off that way, but now you’re ultimately engaged in a religious act. And I start to wonder, am I, as a Jew, supposed to be on the side of shouting down people when they’re middle of prayer? That’s where it starts to feel a little bit yucky. Exactly right. Yes. 

Masua: Can we talk for a second, though, for a second about secular Israeli liberals rituals? Because we tend to only assume that the actual prayers and services of observant people are rituals.

But in Israel, Yom Kippur is very much also a secular Israeli place and space of rituals. And I think that, even though I completely acknowledge your last points, I want to also acknowledge that the ritual of Tel Aviv and Yom Kippur was disturbed by this prayer protest.

And I know of many shattered secular people in Tel Aviv, that their Yom Kippur was highly disturbed, and the fact that they see separation in front of their eyes. And by the way, police officers that tell people, you know, go to the woman’s section, go to the man’s section, so it is kind of an enforced separation, was a real assault on their values and on their culture of Yom Kippur. 

Again, we tend, and this is partly, Israel liberals to blame for it. But we tend to say, Judaism is only theirs, right? The observers in Israel. It’s their ceremony, it’s their services, either attend as they prescribe it or respect it. Stay away, it’s not yours. But the other competing approach would be to say, you know what, we also have our own character of Yom Kippur, our own way of practicing Judaism. And this was actually almost violently disturbed, which doesn’t necessarily excuse the result, okay? Or the acts.

Yehuda: Yeah, no. So in other words, what you’re saying is, beyond the liberal argument, this is an illiberal argument, which is to say, I’m entitled to having my secular Judaism reflected in my Yom Kippur observance, which includes not having the sights of my secular life disrupted and destroyed by other people who insist that Yom Kippur has to be observed a particular way.

So like our colleague Ronit Heyd, who’s proudly a secular Jew, had a TikTok actually about this, Erev Yom Kippur, where she said, just because I’m secular doesn’t mean Yom Kippur doesn’t matter to me. It just doesn’t look like Yom Kippur. So what do I do in Yom Kippur? I go down into the valley where I live in Ein Kerem, and I engage with nature, and I think reflectively, and I do this.

And I guess I would impose on that, therefore, by analogy to your point, Masua, if a group of people colonized the Valley in Ein Kerem and turned it into, took over the Church of John the Baptist and turned it into a gender divided synagogue, it’s not merely of a liberal violation of the public square, it’s also the depriving of the capacity of Jews who want to have a different experience or possibly, perhaps not a religious experience, but a significant cultural experience from being able to do Yom Kippur the way that they wanted to do it.

Yossi, you wanted to come in on this. 

Yossi: Yeah, I think we need to be mindful of the context in which this happened this particular year, because in previous years, this prayer service was happening in the streets with the mechitzah, with the gender barrier, and Tel Avivis didn’t feel that this was an intrusion or disruption of their Yom Kippur.

What was always so striking about Yom Kippur and Tel Aviv was precisely the sense of live and let live. And so the fact that this suddenly became an intolerable disruption of a secular Yom Kippur is only because of the context, the wider political context in which it happened. 

I also, listening to all of us speak, it occurred to me that all three of us come out of the Orthodox world. And this does not sound like an Orthodox conversation. Even if you identify as I do, as post-Orthodox, but I have very deep emotional roots in Orthodoxy and the idea that I would ever come to the point where I would even be having this conversation, where it would make sense to me, that an orthodox service would be disrupted on Yom Kippur. 

So I just want to put that out there because, because I, it says something about the extremity of this moment and, where we’ve all been driven on whatever your position is. The polarization is just so profound that it’s, it’s hard to recognize ourselves.

Yehuda: Look, I mean, I’ll give you a really difficult analogy that I’ve been thinking about. So there was a, a slogan that emerged in, you know, right around the time of the disengagement from Gaza, a slogan used by critics of the disengagement, which was “Yehudi lo migaresh Yehudi,” a Jew does not banish a Jew. And it didn’t, you don’t need the end of the sentence, the implied sentence from Jewish land. That’s the implied end of the sentence. Jews don’t evict Jews. 

So first of all, I always hated that phrase because first of all, every day of the week, the police are evicting people, right? That’s part of their job. Second of all, it’s not a Jew is not evicting another Jew. It’s the army. The army is doing the bidding of the Jewish state and the cost of, excuse me, the cost of having a Jewish army is that the Jewish army has to do things that mostly are in the interest of the state of Israel and sometimes at the cost of some of the citizens.

But for a lot of people, that phrase had tremendous emotional resonance as though to say I understand that sometimes you have to engage in dirty work, but there’s something grotesque about what it is that you’re doing, where an Israeli army soldier is pulling somebody out of their house. This is a decent analogy to this moment right now, because I never liked that phrase, and I still don’t love it. Can Jews not shout down a prayer service in public square if it’s a political act, and I’m doing it as a political act as well? By that logic, I should still detest that phrase, but you know, but the minute I said it, I saw both of you smile of like, you know, I think maybe one or one or both of you might have used that phrase at times.

Yossi: And that slogan applies to this particular incident. It does not apply to evicting settlers from Gaza when the government has taken a political decision and the army is carrying it out. You’re right. But in this particular case, and there was a certain vigilante quality about this as well. It felt like a mob.

No, a, Jews do not disrupt other Jews in prayer, and especially not on Yom Kippur, and especially as a mob. Yeah, I think, I think that’s a good slogan, even though it’s not very catchy. 

Yehuda: What about for you, Masua? Is this analogy old?

Masua: I was probably, I was probably on the side of the people who said this slogan. In 2005 before the disengagement, because I was against the disengagement at the time. Side note, I always tend to find myself in the losing, in the losing camp politically, which is, which is interesting. So if you want to know who’s going to win next, ask me and then do the opposite. 

Yossi: That’s very bad news, given that we’re in the same camp. 

Masua: I know. I apologize, Yossi. I know.

Yehuda: It’s what happens is this is like, the minute a person realizes that that’s their political identity, it’s like a funnel into a professional life at the Hartman Institute. 

Masua: Yeah, that’s, 

Yossi: A fast-track career. 

Yehuda: That’s right. 

Masua: I just want to say that for us, and you mentioned this before, Yossi, but for us as people for, you know, for 30 years, we have been talking about the rights of women to pray at the Kotel according to their custom. And it doesn’t matter if they hurt the feelings of other people in the Kotel who’s actually a formal prayer site and a formal national holy site. 

So it does sting a lot to realize again that my instinct was to justify the Tel Aviv protesters who stopped the prayer, even though what I want to do is move beyond the sting. And think what it means to my political opponents. What does it, should it change my view on my political opponents? Should it change the way that we try to persuade other people? Should it change the way that our voices sounded in the public sphere? 

Although, to be fair. Five minutes after our instincts justify the protesters, we were also honest enough to say, you know, we, we are having this whole communication, which I didn’t see in the past 30 years with the opponents of Women of the Wall, but I think it’s important to notice that this and maybe, take a moment to think about what it means.

Yehuda: Well, this, I mean, I did see this argument start to emerge from folks on the right center right of like, look, those lefties are so inconsistent because they’re screaming down prayer in Dizengoff Square that they don’t like, but they’re mad when Women of the Wall or other egalitarian services get screamed down at the Kotel.

So Yossi has resolved that with his consistency. Ultimately, if you get to a place of Jews don’t scream down other Jews at prayer, then you’re willing to say it doesn’t matter here or there. Haredi behavior for three decades at the Kotel is unacceptable, and liberal behavior one time in Dizengoff Square is also unacceptable.

But it’s kind of a strange analogy, the analogy being, what Women of the Wall and other egalitarian groups have basically conceded is that the Kotel is a Jewish religious space. They’ve not said it’s public square of Israeli society where we are doing religious services. They’re saying it’s a religious space.

So once it’s the religious space of the Jewish people, they’re arguing that there should be multiple avenues for the religious space of the Jewish people. But it has yet to be determined that Dizengoff Square is a pre-synagogue, the way that the Kotel is. That’s not what it is. So it doesn’t seem to me like there’s something like fundamentally weak about the argument because in order to make the argument of right-wing groups should be allowed to pray in Dizengoff Square the same way left-wing groups should be allowed to pray at the Kotel is to pretend as though the Kotel and Dizengoff Square are the same thing.

That feels like you’ve already lost the argument out the door. Shouldn’t there be some legitimate state interest in saying this is a place where we want to foster pluralistic prayer, and this is a place where we have to be much more careful about allowing for the erosion of the public square through religious services?

Yossi: Okay, well, here’s where we come back to the emotional dimension. Because, in the end, it’s really not about whether Dizengoff and the Kotel are equivalent spaces. It’s about the integrity of Jewish prayer and how one relates to the right of different groups to pray. And so that’s one piece of it.

Another piece, and this takes us in the opposite direction, is the role of the court here. The court has upheld the right, as far as I recall, of Women of the Wall to pray. And it upheld the right of the Tel Aviv municipality to ban a prayer service with a mechitzah in a public space in Tel Aviv.

And so in the context of the war against the courts, I don’t think we can neglect that dimension, the upholding the integrity of the court, which is really what the demonstrators, their better instincts were to uphold the authority of the court. I’m sure there were some among the demonstrators who were just enraged at the presence of Orthodox Jews in a public space praying with a mechitza. But if you bring in the question of the courts in the context of the current war over the authority of the courts, it complicates it. And points us back in favor of those who disrupted the prayer service. 

Masua: There’s also, I think, a question of, and this is such a delicate question. Say that you are on the verge of becoming not a democracy anymore. When is the moment? We know that, you know, there’s a moment until which you condemn civil, it’s not really disobeying, it’s taking the law into their own hands, but at some point, you know, that it’s also necessary to take the law into people’s own hands. 

I don’t think, by the way, that this was this moment, but I do think that in the consciousness of people or the mindset of people, it’s always lingering, and people are under 10 months of extreme stress. And it’s always lingering. When is the moment where I have to take actions? Because if I won’t take actions myself, it would be too late. And if we have the police on site that are saying, this is not a mechitza or this does not, this does not interfere with the court’s decision, then people are, it’s an instant, a decision that you have to take in an instant.

Is it time? Is it time now to take law into my own hands? And by the way, civil disobedience comes with a willingness to pay a price, and to be punished afterwards. That’s one. And the second, I just want to note that coming from a feminist perspective, it’s not that simple for me to differentiate between public and private, because a lot of times, for decades, it was easy to say we are going to keep our keep our public completely liberal.

And then all of the all of the gender oppression, really, took place in the private. And when we define our state as a Jewish state, I think it’s not that simple to say, well, in private, everything’s okay, or not everything, but a lot of things are okay. And I think that t’s not that bad that we’ve taken out these questions into the public square.

Yehuda: Right, so let’s take for granted that, contrary to the viewpoint that is sometimes argued by people who oppose the protest movement in Israel who say, well, there were democratically held elections. So protesting is an anti-democratic activity. Well, that is foolishness. We know that protest is part of democratic culture. And civil disobedience, frankly, is part of democratic culture. Police are there to enforce laws. Laws are not always just. It’s the role and responsibility of citizens to disobey, I would say, parenthetically, non-violently, right, in order to bring about a repair of our society, and the only thing that makes this case a test case is that it has this weird variable of prayer that’s thrown right into the middle because it gets to that notion of like, well, is this legitimate political action, or has it crossed over to a different threshold, which is shutting down Jews doing an authentic thing.

So I’ll give you another kind of variable, or like, this is almost like a Talmudic argument. You know how like Talmudic arguments, one person takes this position, and the other person takes this position, and they keep throwing test cases out to see, are you really consistent about your position? 

So when we were arguing about this in our sukkah, one person around the table said, it’s one day a year. I’m with you on the protests. I’m with you on these things. It’s one day a year. Would it have been a big deal, even with the invasion of Dizengoff Square, what’s the big deal to just say it’s Yom Kippur one day a year? So I argued back, okay, let’s say on my street in the Bronx, on one day a year, Easter, there was an insistence that my street be taken over by a public performance of a passion play, a crucifixion story, an expectation that anyone who walks down the street is supposed to take the Eucharist.

It would feel not just invasive, but coercive. So there’s a, that means that there’s another variable here, which is that it’s not just about religion. It’s about vulnerability. Part of the reason I think both of you initially started with that instinct of supporting the protest is because you believe that your way of life in Israel is more generally under threat, so anytime that anyone’s trying to push the envelope about things that you care about, you feel it’s legitimate to basically push back against it. So what’s that vulnerability about?

Yossi: In the end, Yehuda, I come, I come down on the side of the person in your Sukkah who said one day a year, Yom Kippur. And it’s an emotional argument. It’s not, I mean, certainly about principles, but it’s a different set of principles than philosophical principles. Again, I’m horrified at my initial reaction of justifying and circling the wagons. And it’s a reminder of the corrupting power of ideology, of any ideology.

If you take it too far, this is my camp and I’m going to defend my camp at all costs. And that’s a position that, that has always been anathema for me. At least since I gave up my ideological persona as a teenager. But since then, I’ve always, kept away from, from that dogmatic place. And this past year is bringing me perilously close back to it. 

And that’s for me, that’s what my Yom Kippur experience was in relation to this. It was a warning for me personally, just be careful. Don’t go too far. Even if you’re right, even if your camp is right, and yes, I don’t believe there are two equal sides, I don’t believe that nuance is what’s called for at this moment. One camp is trying to save democracy, another camp is trying to destroy it. Still, even in that struggle, be careful. Don’t go too far and this was this was the warning. 

Yehuda: What about you, Masua, in terms of your vulnerability here?

Masua: I agree completely, Yossi, with what you said, and you know, I take it personally to evaluate myself and my reactions, but at the] same time I wanna I want to go back to what I said before. It’s one day a year, not just for observant people. It’s one day a year for Jewish people. Period. So it’s one day of your, I, I read a post by, again, a secular Tel Avivi woman who said, I’ve been waiting for this Yom Kippur for so long. I’ve been waiting for the feeling of solidarity in the streets. I’ve been waiting for, one day of break, because it was such a difficult year.

It’s not just us who took who took ownership on Judaism that waited for this one day a year. And for them also, it’s only one day a year for secular Israelis as well. And this one day of the year for them was destroyed. And definitely, I think it’s a sign of a vulnerability, because a people or a group that feel secure in their values and their lifestyle, one day a year won’t do anything, won’t harm it. 

But if you’re feeling that this is just a last in a chain of of assaults, and there’s also something to say about, there is a dynamics of I don’t know how to say it, chumras?

Yehuda: Stringencies?

Masua: Stringencies, in Israeli Orthodoxy, that every inch you give is becoming the new norm. So they have a good reason to feel vulnerable. It’s not far-fetched. 

Yehuda: Mm-hmm. So even what you’re essentially saying is, even if I don’t think ultimately this was the right way to behave, you at least want us to understand and empathize with the vulnerability that’s driving why someone would feel as though this was a real invasion of their public space.

Let me ask you one last and really hard question. I, you know, I went into this Yom Kippur really afflicted by the fact that here in the American Jewish community, I think there was virtually zero talk of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, going into Yom Kippur. I found that striking. There was very little, by the way, in 2017 about the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War, but that was largely because it was four months or five months into Trump. American Jewish politics were totally located in the fight against Trumpism in America. There was no attention span for 50 years since ’67. 

In this case, very clearly, the reason why there was no attention span for it was because there’s a perception right now that Israel’s primary threats are on the inside as opposed to being on the outside. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel really interesting analogies about the failures of leadership between 73 and now at the, at the highest point of government, the unwillingness to see the danger, the enemy at the gates, whether it’s on the inside or the outside. 

What frightens me, though, deeply is the story of 1973 for Israel, then, I believe it’s most catastrophic war in terms of loss of life, was that it yielded at least for two generations, some of the patriotic pull that held a society together. In fact, there’s some people who argue that it’s only because the 73 veterans are still around right now, that Israel is holding together as one society. Those people hold immense sway at building some sense that the majority of Israelis are on the same side.

And that the symbol of this moment in Yom Kippur was, nope. There is no mainstream anymore. There is no shared consensus because even if you might have argued over the past year that the protest movement brought back some sense of Israeli consensus, that pretty much got shattered with this protest because even the protesters had to deal with their own ambivalence around it.

So I can’t help but feel this deep fear that even at a milestone moment of thinking about what a major movement of Israelis would look like, this Yom Kippur’s primary image and symbol was our inability or incapacity to create any sense of consensus. So that’s a little bit bleak. I guess I’m curious whether you think that there is some possible Israeli consensus that could emerge and can get rebuilt.

And iif it is possible, where’s it going to come from?

Yossi: You know, this was probably the single moment in the last year. And I’m going back now to the Yom Kippur incident, where I ended up feeling empathy with both sides. It’s the only time I can think of in the last year. And I came very close, for a fleeting moment, to understanding those who say, you know there are extremists on both sides. And we have to, we have to just save this country from both sides. 

And I think that that is a deeply flawed position in the context of what’s been happening in Israel over the last year. But ironically, I do think that there’s some hope to be had from that position because where my hope is, that large numbers of Likud voters are going to come to the conclusion that, you know, we hate what happened on Yom Kippur. It’s a desecration. But it’s happening because this government has created an atmosphere of polarization and maybe we need to find some more centrist I think the, politically, I think that the big winner of Yom Kippur will, in the long term, turn out to be Benny Gantz, because he actually is taking that wishy-washy position that I personally can’t stand, but really has the potential to siphon off large numbers of Likud voters.

And if that’s the outcome, I don’t mind people dismissing me as an extremist, if it’s going to lead former Likud voters to repudiate the Likud. Do you follow what I’m saying?

Yehuda: In other words, some combination of empathy as sourced by individuals, of the ability to say, I understand your position and your position, and not in the wishy-washy way of saying that’s, therefore, I don’t have an opinion about this, but what that does is it actually locates the responsibility with leaders to be the kinds of leaders who actually take responsibility for a society as opposed to allowing it to fall into these kind of territorial encampments that are going to war against each other.

I think that’s what you ultimately want. 

Yossi: Yeah, but I think that’s a much better way of putting it than I did. I was speaking in a much more utilitarian, political, direction. And I prefer your formulation. 

Yehuda: Deal. Masua, what about you? 

Masua: Yossi, I think you might be a bit too optimistic about Likud voters, but I’m gonna try to up that and be too optimistic about Israeli liberals.

I think that I might be more hopeful in this moment than in a lot of other moments in the past 10 months. And this is because you mentioned Benny Gatz, I’m going to mention Yair Lapid. Lapid, right after Yom Kippur, posted a very combative, Twitter? X? Post on X, about taking responsibility and taking ownership on our Judaism. That we don’t owe anyone anything and we’re, and this is ours as much as it is yours. 

And I have been seeing signs in the past few days for Israeli liberals to do exactly that. Last Thursday, there was a public egalitarian prayer protest in Habima square where the minority were, you know, people like us, kippa-wearers, liberals, and the majority of a few hundreds were secular people. And there are also a lot of initiatives around Tel Aviv for egalitarian and secular sukkahs, for egalitarian Hakafot on Simchat Torah, a lot of initiatives I’ve been seeing every single day, more and more initiatives of taking ownership about Judaism and speaking in the language of Judaism rather than just speaking in the language of liberalism. 

And I have a friend, a very secular, very Tel Avivi friend, I mentioned a few of them today, but she was at the protest at Habima on Tel Aviv. And she was very moved. She said it was an amazing moment. We spoke a bit about the fact that my hope for this moment is for Israeli liberals to take ownership on Judaism and to compete, to compete for the Jewishness of Israel. 

And she said, you know, I think you might be too optimistic. And then a few hours later, she sent me a text. And she said, you know, if a year ago you would have told me that we are going to reclaim the flag that I am going to be protesting every single week with the flag of Israel, I would have told you, you’re insane. So you know what? Maybe. 

Yehuda: I mean, in some ways, if some of the key lessons were of 1973 were about a sense of collective responsibility, a sense of vigilance about what the real threats facing Israel are, and a sense of responsibility by its leaders to be above the fray politically because of Israel’s big challenges, then maybe that plus a dose of the empathy, that both of you are talking about, may be cause for some at least useful optimism.

Thank you both, Yossi Klein Halevi and Masua Sagiv, for coming on today and for thinking out loud with me. I hope that you and our listeners left maybe not more resolved about how to think about a moment like this, but maybe some more tools were useful for how we think about things in these moments.

Identity Crisis is produced by M Louis Gordon and executive produced by Maital Friedman, with assistance from Miri Miller, Sarina Shohet, Talia Harris, and Tessa Zitter. This episode was edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC. And our music is provided by Socalled. 

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