Israeli Judge rules against prohibition of chametz during Pesach

[Gruzinit]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/middleeast/18israel.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

On Eve of Passover, Bread Stirs Deep Thoughts in Israel
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Israel’s public debate shifted this week from Hamas to hametz. But it remained no less heated.

Hametz is bread and other leavened products that many Jews do not eat for the eight days of Passover, which starts Saturday night. The Bible says that when God freed the Jews from enslavement in Egypt, they left in such a hurry that there was no time for their bread to rise, and to mark that circumstance, consuming leavened bread during the holiday is forbidden.

The focus of the debate here is a ruling by a Jerusalem municipal judge overturning the convictions of four shops and restaurants for having sold pizzas and rolls during the holiday last year despite a law that many thought prohibited businesses from doing so. The judge said the law barred only the public display of hametz, not its sale inside shops.

While most debates about the painstakingly negotiated public role of religion in Israel line up along predictable lines of observant versus secular, this discussion has been different. And it speaks to a palpable anxiety over the need to define and defend the Jewish nature of the state, even as Israel’s 60th anniversary approaches next month.

In opinion articles and informal conversations, some nonreligious Israelis said that they liked the eight-day absence of hametz, and that it was a small but potent symbol of a unique collective identity.

The most prominent advocate of this point of view was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a thoroughly secular woman, who wrote in the newspaper Maariv that she regretted the judge’s decision.

“Ostensibly, the ban on the public display or sale of bread on Passover is a minor and marginal issue, but I believe that this is not the case,” she wrote. “In my view, this prohibition is part of the substantive question of how we wish to characterize our identity in the national home for the Jewish people.”

Many agreed with her and contended, as she did, that since Israel’s Palestinian negotiating partners and their supporters rejected defining Israel as “a Jewish state,” it was more important than ever to do so.

“The further we allow ourselves to go from Jewish tradition, the easier it will be for those who reject our legitimacy as a Jewish state,” said Sharona Mazalian, who lives outside Tel Aviv, works for a secular, conservative legislator and wants hametz banned during Passover. “We call ourselves a Jewish, democratic state. But the less Jewish we are the easier it will be for others to say, ‘Why not just be a democratic state for Jews and Arabs to live in together?’ ”

Amnon Rubinstein, a secular and liberal former minister of education and a former dean of Tel Aviv University’s law school, said the Jerusalem judge was right in her ruling because the intent of the law was to avoid offending religious sensibilities by publicly displaying hametz, not to end the sale of hametz entirely.

But he noted: “There is this mood now that we must remain Jewish somehow, some way. Tzipi Livni represents that — a secular hankering for Jewish ambience.”

That seems especially true at Passover. In recent polls, 65 to 70 percent of Israeli Jews say they will avoid hametz next week, although most are not generally religiously observant.

There is something especially meaningful about Passover in Israel. As Liat Collins, a columnist, wrote in The Jerusalem Post, Passover, the festival of freedom, “represents everything we are proud of: survival against the odds; national identity; and a return to the Promised Land. All the things for which we have been admired — and reviled — over thousands of years.”

But just as many Israeli Jews seek a Jewish feeling from Israel’s public life — they like the way the country slows down on Friday afternoon for Sabbath, the way it follows the Jewish calendar — they resent the fact that religiously defined parties are the ones setting the agenda.

After the judge handed down her decision, several Orthodox parties declared it a calamity and vowed to pass a law barring all sales of hametz during Passover. When the cabinet declined to take up the issue, the Shas Party threatened a governmental crisis but backed down, saying it would take its case to Parliament.

Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University here, said: “What I see going on is a sense of a search for Jewish identity, which I really appreciate. But I think it is wrong to do so through the legal system.”

He said his model for Jewish public expression was the way Israel marked Yom Kippur, when, through unwritten convention, no one drives. “There is no law about driving on Yom Kippur, yet everyone respects it,” he said.

But Yair Sheleg, an observant Jew who writes for the newspaper Haaretz, made the opposite case in a recent column that supported banning the display and sale of hametz during Passover.

He said a society should use its laws regarding public space to help shape its core values, “and in this regard prohibiting the public display of hametz on Passover is no different in principle from legislating the closure of restaurants and movie theaters on Holocaust Remembrance Day or on Memorial Day.”

He noted that some years ago Parliament passed a law to destroy a monument to Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born Jewish settler who killed 29 Muslims praying in Hebron in 1994. Mr. Sheleg noted that it was hidden from public view and caused little evident harm, but that eliminating it was an appropriate expression of core public values.

Nahum Barnea, a columnist for Yediot Aharonot, said the dispute made him realize how Israel, even as it approached its 60th anniversary, “is still trying to define itself, something most states don’t have to do.”

“We are still debating our existence, not only in terms of policy but in terms of ideology,” he said. “What is Israel? What is a Jewish state? And how can hametz help us find the answer?”