JUST OVER 40 years ago, when our country was barely out of adolescence, I made the spiritual leap out of the fleshpots of exile, to live in this-land-is-ours-God-gave-this-land-to-me. Of course, I missed the swimming pools and clean, clean beaches, the maids and sane drivers. But the “Hatikvah” moments – Look! The bus driver’s wearing a kippa! – and the sense of being part of the greatest miracle of the millennium were ample compensation.Now, in my old age, epiphanies seem silly. Religious coercion has hit us too hard; every family seems to have ghastly stories of corrupt rabbis and implacable enemies in the religious authorities.And the cultish feeling is proliferating. A few nights ago, on a beautiful balmy Jerusalem evening, I had dinner on the pavement of trendy Emek Refaim Street. Brooke Shields served us, dressed in a ubiquitous long, swishing skirt. What I noticed about her, apart from her beauty and lack of English, was that she kissed the mezuzah every single time she passed through the doorway, even when balancing a tray of drinks. At one point we called her back to change our order; she’d hardly kissed her way through the door. She re-kissed the sacred space, letting her hand linger in the air for the inward-bound smooch. She confided that she even kisses the toilet doorpost each time she needs the little room, even though there is no mezuzah on the lintel of a loo. “I can’t manage without it,” she said, “It’s my lifestyle.”It recalled an ancient TV skit where Keren Mor kisses a mezuzah on leaving a room. Two steps away, she looks around furtively and backtracks for a more amorous encounter. She soon flattens herself against the doorpost, getting progressively heated, till she is well-nigh orgasmic with God’s signature of a Jewish home.Today Miri Regev would ban that episode or fire Mor. Welcome to the Jewish Nation-State.Is this what living in the middle of the Middle East does to us – makes half of us cultists, the other half antisemites? Jews have traditionally borne beacons of sanity and light: Helen Suzman, Albert Einstein, Betty Friedan. What’s happened to us here?I wish Bibi hadn’t disappeared out of my REM sleep; I wanted his vision of our future. Is it exclusively one of men in white shirts and women under wraps who support the Bennett-Shaked-Regev triumvirate? Helmed, forever and ever amen, by one eternal leader? Where secular, liberal, non-tzitzitwearing citizens are extinct, except maybe huddled on the last mixed-swimming beach in Tel Aviv? Israel: WTF?
The writer lectures at Beit Berl College and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. peledpam@gmail.com