David Weinberg, "Beware of Baba Aryeh"

[David Shasha]

Beware of Baba Aryeh

By: David M. Weinberg

 

Aryeh Der’i represents the deep schizophrenia of SHAS.

 

On the one hand Der’i is a Haredi Jew who wears the standard outfit of that group and maintains a Jewish life that any Ultra-Orthodox Jew would understand.

 

But on the other hand Der’i, in the footsteps of his mentor Ovadia Yosef, has very un-mainstream views on Arabs and the Peace Process that would be considered more Leftist than Settler.

 

Although Rabbi Yosef often says offensive things about Arabs, there is still somewhere deep inside him a positive feeling for the culture he grew up with in Baghdad and he has over the years maintained cordial relationships with figures in the Arab-Muslim world.

 

Der’i has within him a strong resentment against the Ashkenazim and a sense that Israel has consciously sought to destroy the Arab Jews.

 

Sadly, SHAS maintains the religious lifestyle of the Haredi Ashkenazim while it does not advertise its Arab identity.  The values Religious Humanism are largely absent from SHAS-niks as they are immersed in mindless ritual and mystical psychobabble.  They do not study science and philosophy as their Sephardic forbears did and in spite of all this there is still a small spark of Sephardic consciousness in them.

 

Israel Hayom is a product of the Right Wing lunatic Sheldon Adelson and this article shows us the prejudice against Arab Jews who would defy the Settler consensus.  Any form of rapprochement with the Arabs or with Arab culture is anathema to the Israeli hardliners.  In this the Right Wing extremists are in agreement with the Laborite Left as both groups believe that Arabs are inferior and that Israel must remain a European nation in its cultural orientation.

 

So Der’i is called “Baba” in a demeaning and derogatory manner.  His Haredi moves are carefully detailed but his ultimate sin is his support for the Oslo peace process which now remains a dead letter in Israeli political circles and is the ultimate mark of heresy to Adelson’s Ultra-Zionist fanatics.

 

SHAS has not been a Sephardic success.  It has – as the article correctly states – created a Haredi dependency culture which has stifled Sephardim in their attempt to attain a modicum of dignity and equality in Israeli society.  Der’i has adopted the dual tactic of Sephardi resentment coupled with Haredi socio-religious extremism.  It is a paradoxical state of affairs that has unfortunately become the norm for many Sephardim in Israel and the Diaspora. 

 

Some decades ago some Sephardim gravitated towards the racist fanaticism of Meir Kahane and his extremist brand of Zionism.  Kahane paid lip service to Sephardi resentment, but his ideology was rooted in European racist nationalism rather than in Jewish Humanism.  His devoted followers – Sephardi and Ashkenazi – adopted cruelty and violence as basic Jewish values and understood Judaism in a way that sought to make permanent the Eastern European ghetto – this time with armed Jews waiting to kill every Gentile as all Gentiles were viewed as Anti-Semites and aliens.

 

The move towards Ultra-Orthodoxy reflects yet another form of Ashkenazification of the Sephardim who continue to reject their own heritage and pathetically look to the Ashkenazim for validation of their identity.

 

It is lamentable that Sephardim have used the options they were given by the Ashkenazim and suppressed their own culture and historical experience.  There is a deep reservoir of hate and resentment towards the Ashkenazi establishment, a vague sense of Arab identity, and a feeling that religiosity is the only way out of the ghetto.

 

Adopting the intellectual and ethical values of the classical Sephardic tradition is not an easy proposition.  But as we see in the article, those Sephardim like Der’i and his SHAS cohorts who try to be both Sephardic and Haredi Ashkenazi at the same time lose out on the coherence that authentic Sephardic tradition presents.  Traditional Sephardic culture would not be accepted by any Israeli Ashkenazi group, but it at least maintains an equilibrium and coherence that the Haredi SHAS identity does not.

 

DS

Aryeh Deri is back as the top gun in Shas, and that is bad news for just about everybody in this country because Deri is shady, retrogressive, and a purveyor of hate.

Go back and read the district court transcripts of Deri's conviction for bribery and fraud. Read Mordechai Gilat's blockbuster book "Deri's Curse," which details how Deri corrupted everybody around him. Read any of Deri's recent interviews, in which he expresses no remorse whatsoever for his sins of yesteryear.

Yes, Deri "paid his debt" to society through time in jail. But is he really the finest person that the large and important Shas community has to offer as a national leader? Is Deri truly the model individual that Shas educators wish to present before their flock?

And you wonder: Is this really the man with whom Shelly Yachimovich is going to make common cause in presenting an alternative government for the State of Israel?

Deri is retrogressive because he is the mastermind behind Shas' disastrous school system, where children are trapped in an impossible world of ultra-Orthodox strictures and limitations; a system that deems real work and productivity -- what we would call normal life -- "assur" (forbidden); a system that pauperizes and radicalizes the Sephardi population.

Deri is one of the father-figures of the haredi world of dependency, of living off the dole. He was central to the creation of the all-encompassing government-support system for those studying in yeshiva; a system so comprehensive that it simply doesn't pay for a Kollel man to step out into the working world.

Sad to say, Shas mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef publicly praised Deri this week for just this; for obtaining lavish benefits from the government "to the extent that Agudat Yisrael representatives did not manage to secure over four decades." Oh, how ruefully has Rav Ovadia been wrapped around Deri's little finger!

I haven't once heard the newly-reincarnated Deri speak positively about higher education and professional-training programs for the ultra-Orthodox that have opened in recent years, nor has he said one kind word about increased participation of haredim in the army.

Manipulative is Deri's middle name. When he was interior minister, Deri used every trick in the book to force municipalities to favor Shas institutions and party hacks (and to get his brothers appointed as municipal rabbis). He repeatedly monkeyed with Daylight Saving Time to fit one or another perceived (false) "need" of the religious community, to the detriment of the economy and all lovers of long summer evenings.

Why the regulatory mischief? Because it was Deri's way of reminding us who was really running the country.

Worse still, Deri is behind the increasingly hateful and crude language that we have heard from Rav Ovadia in recent years about the State of Israel, about the secular public, and about the religious Zionist community. Deri is responsible for the very-unfortunate estrangement between Rav Ovadia (who was once a chief rabbi of the State of Israel!) and the religious Zionist public.

Deri was almost certainly the person who whispered wicked things to Rav Ovadia about Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayehudi party, leading to the rabbi's outrageous outburst in January that Bennett leads the "Bayit (home) of Goyim," not the "Bayit of Jews."

This so neatly fits the Deri modus operandi: vicious, vindictive, and no-holds-barred.

Reportedly, Deri was also behind the infamous, racist "Kochavit Giyur" (Dial-a-Conversion) advertising campaign that Shas ran in the recent elections. This campaign smeared Russian olim as counterfeit converts, and slandered religious Zionist rabbis as liberal destroyers of conversion standards.

Politically, let's not forget that Deri spawned the "stinking maneuver" in 1990 which attempted to bring down the unity government led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and install a narrow Peres government instead. The move failed, but it cast the die for years of close cooperation between the Left and the haredim.

Deri was a loyal partner in passing the Oslo I and II accords in Knesset, and in doing so bought the Labor Party's support for the haredi takeover of all state religious enterprises (such as the Chief Rabbinate, religious courts and more). Today, Deri is suspiciously close to Ehud Olmert and Haim Ramon, and outspokenly hostile to religious Zionism and the communities of Judea and Samaria.

Just yesterday, Shas MK Yitzhak Cohen sent Prime Minister Netanyahu a surprising letter calling on Israel to embrace the so-called Arab League peace initiative. Can you imagine? A Shas leader imploring Netanyahu to "turn over every stone and investigate every possibility … that the Arab League initiative holds the seeds for a new bridge of understanding between Islam and Judaism and the Jewish state?"

Such phony, lefty openness to ersatz Arab diplomatic overtures wasn't typical Shas behavior under the aegis of former party leader Eli Yishai. But Deri is back and is marching Shas toward the Saudis and the political Left.

Of course, it was just a matter of time until Deri pushed Yishai out of the Shas leadership. Deri has always been about Deri. And with Yosef fading in old age, Shas is going to become a Deri-centric circus even more.

I sense that Shas is going to promote Deri up the ladder to spiritual leader; the heir apparent to Rav Ovadia. Get ready for "Baba Aryeh." You'll soon be hearing rebbe-style miracle stories about Baba Aryeh's mystical, magical powers, and his great humanitarian works.

And soon we'll all be tasting Baba Aryeh's brand of bitter, blithely sectorial, and brusquely cynical politics. Beware.

From Israel Hayom, May 9, 2013