"There are many places in the world which suffer from terror.However there is no other place in the world where terror has an official 'Authority'".

- Natan Sharansky, upon capture of the P.A. arms smuggling ship Karin A.

"... the push for a two-day weekend in Israel is being led by English-speaking immigrants within Yisrael B'Aliya. The proposal provides a classic win-win opportunity. The beauty of the idea is that it appeals to different groups and individuals for different reasons".

Jonathan Rosenblum, on enacting the YBA "Sundays Proposal" in tandem with any new Shabbat Law.

Dear Friends,

In this Yisrael B'Aliya Anglos Update, please find a statement by Natan Sharansky regarding the terror emanating from the PA, and the conclusions we must reach in light of it. 

Below this, we have included several items regarding the recently proposed "Shabbat Law", and the advantages to enacting it in tandem with the Yisrael B'Aliya proposal to make Sunday a day off. Where possible, we have included web links.

In particular, note Jonathan Rosenblum's two articles (one published in the Jerusalem Post, the other in Hamodi'a) explaining the win-win nature of Sundays off for religious and secular Israelis- all of whom could feel comfortable with Sundays, without compromising their ideals. 

All the best,

Dov Rabinowitz

Director, YBA Anglos

Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky made the following remarks in the course of the Cabinet Meeting concerning the capture of the Karin A, which contained illegal shipments of ammunition.

"There are many places in the world which suffer from terror.However there is no other place in the world where terror has an official "Authority". There is only one place where it is possible to pay millions of dollars, purchase a ship, and hoard it with 50 tons of lethal ammunition designated for terror - that place is the Palestinian Authority."

Minister Sharansky added that the Paris Agreement, according to which Israel transfers money to the Palestinian Authority and Arafat personally, must also be declared null and void effective immediately.

"The Palestinian people are suffering and are in a dire situation - and Arafat is diverting the money intended to relieve their suffering to arm the terrorist organizations.I cannot believe that the United States and European countries, which transfer money to the Palestinian Authority, are pleased with the final destination of these monies. Therefore I consider it imperative that the Paris agreements be voided immediately and that we call upon the European countries to suspend the transfer of funds to the Authority."

The Minister also commended the IDF for its brilliant work in seizing the ship with its illegal cargo. "This is a day for genuine national pride", he said. 

Sundays

THINK AGAIN: Never on Sundays
By Jonathan Rosenblum

http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2002/01/10/Columns/Columns.41458.html

(January 10) "Those who did not live before the Revolution never tasted the sweetness of life," the great French diplomat Talleyrand once remarked.

Many English-speaking immigrants to Israel have experienced similar feelings about the lack of a two-day weekend: Those who have never experienced Sunday as a day of leisure have not tasted the sweetness of life.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the push for a two-day weekend in Israel is being led by English-speaking immigrants within Yisrael B'Aliya.

The proposal provides a classic win-win opportunity. The beauty of the idea is that it appeals to different groups and individuals for different reasons.

The attraction of the law for newly-observant professional soccer players or Betar Jerusalem fans, who feel guilty about attending soccer games after shul on Shabbat, has nothing to do with the attraction to another group.

Secular, national religious and haredi Jews would all benefit from the law, though not for the same reasons. That search for consensus solutions, without striving for agreement over the ultimate purpose of life, is typical of Yisrael B'Aliya's leader Natan Sharansky. More than any other Israeli politician, Sharansky views the search for consensus as a desideratum.

Compromise, for him, is not something to be ashamed of, but a goal to be pursued.

The most obvious benefit of the law is that it would provide all of us with more respite from the sometimes unbearable pressures of day-to-day life in Israel - the threat of war, suicide bombers, the lack of water. The citizens of no other Western country live with such pressure, and yet no other Western country is without a five-day work week.

If we had more opportunities to forget the pressures of everyday life, we might treat one another with a bit more civility. Maybe we would even stop killing ourselves on the roads, in record numbers, rushing to get from here to there.

SUNDAY OFF would encourage leisure activities that today often do not seem worth the effort. At present, couples and families have little reason to take a short vacation within Israel. After packing up and driving there and back by Sunday morning, there is not enough time left to make the effort worthwhile. For religious couples and families, the disincentives are even greater: Why schlep somewhere and pay a lot of money to sit around in a hotel lobby rather than stay at home with one's books and one's familiar minyan. Israeli hoteliers take note.

My guess is that the positive effects of a two-day weekend would be greater than even proponents realize. A five-day school week, for instance, would require a longer school day. At present, the combination of a short school day and two-working parents has created an entire culture of latchkey children who spend the majority of their day without any adult supervision either glued to the TV or hanging around in the malls. That problem is exacerbated by the general absence of school-sponsored extracurricular activities - sports, debate, theater. Two extra hours of school and the greater congruity between parental free time and that of their children would go a long way to alleviating this situation.

At first glance, it might be thought that a shorter work week would have relatively little impact on the haredi world. The study of Torah in yeshivot has never been guided by the secular calendar. Even at the elementary school level, it is unlikely that the five-day week would be fully adopted by haredi schools.

But over time, haredi schools might well move to a half day on Sunday (by dropping the afternoon secular studies), as is common in America and Europe. That would be a boon to haredi families. An acquaintance in England once remarked to me that haredi families in England experienced fewer problems of youthful rebellion than in Israel because of the tradition of Sunday excursions with the whole family. I suspect that there is something to that claim. An ever increasing percentage of haredi men go to work, especially as their children grow older, and they could take advantage of Sunday afternoon for family leisure activities.

A real weekend, as in America, would also make it easier for haredi men to enter the job market. With two days a week in which to learn Torah for many uninterrupted hours, the transition from full-time learning to work would constitute a far less radical break.

Most important, the Sunday law would prevent the rapid slide of Israel into 24/7 commercialization. Each kibbutz mall that opens on Shabbat pressures the storeowners in surrounding cities to open as well. And each city center that opens for business on Shabbat causes other cities to follow suit.

Thus the people that gave the world the idea of a day of rest, of contemplation, of connection to the spiritual aspects of life, has created the most frenetic society in the world. We will soon reach a situation where tens of thousands of those from the poorer sectors of society have to work on Shabbat to serve the wealthy.

For all the good intentions of those sponsoring the so-called Shabbat-bill, which would ban commercial activity on Shabbat, they have no chance of success unless their bill is linked to the proposal for a two-day weekend. Rather than alleviating tensions between religious and non-religious, as they hope, their bill will only exacerbate them.

Demagogues from the anti-religious parties - Meretz, Shinui, and a wide swath of One Israel - eager to find any issue that will return them to popular favor after the failure of their nostrums for peace, rushed to denounce the Shabbat law before it was even introduced. They portrayed the law as a further example of religious coercion, designed to deprive secular Israelis of their "divine right" to shop on Shabbat.

Those appeals will resonate only as long as Saturday is the only day available for shopping without the time pressures of work. Few Israelis, however, will insist on shopping davka on Shabbat, if there is a Sunday alternative.

My guess is that there are many Israelis today who would be interested in exploring more aspects of a traditional Shabbat if it did not mean giving up their favorite leisure pursuits, just as there are many religious Jews who would enjoy activities that are currently inaccessible to them because they take place only on Shabbat.

A two-day weekend, then, would be at least one step toward some form of national culture in our increasingly Balkanized society. 

Religious MKs, like Nachum Langental of the National Religious Party, can congratulate themselves on the fact that they are putting their fingers in the dyke, and that if they do not act now nothing will be left of the status quo arrangements with respect to Shabbos that have existed since the inception of the State. They may well be right. The opening of huge commercial shopping centers on kibbutzim, with the sanction of the Israeli Supreme Court, does, in fact, threaten to turn Shabbos into just another shopping day throughout the country.

At a conference last year under the auspices of an organization calling itself National Consensus, Ra'anana Mayor Ze'ev Bielski pointed out that the opening of kibbutz shopping centers has ramifications far beyond the shopping centers themselves. When Kibbutz Ga'ash opens a shopping center outside of Netanya, for instance, every shopkeeper in Netanya finds himself faced with the choice of opening on Shabbos or going broke. Netanya Mayor Miriam Feierberg, in turn, finds herself under overwhelming pressure to permit full-scale shopping downtown. And if downtown Netanya opens up, so eventually will every nearby city.

In this fashion, the people who gave the world the idea of man as something more than a sophisticated beast of burden whose life revolves around earning money are producing one of the most frenetic, commercially based societies in the world.

Non-religious sponsors of the law, like Labor's Effie Oshaya, can pride themselves on showing respect for the value of Shabbos. And both the religious and non-religious sponsors can be pleased with themselves for having demonstrated an eagerness to try to forge some kind of societal consensus that cuts across religious and non-religious lines. They have made a conscious effort to turn down the heat between religious and non-religious Jews by seeking practical solutions that deliberately eschew the search for an unattainable agreement on ultimate issues.

At the end of the day, however, the bill will not achieve its goals, and will likely heighten secular/religious tensions. Demagogues from the anti-religious Left - Shinui and Meretz and large segments of Labor - desperate to find any issue that will bring them back to popular favor, despite their discredited security agenda, already began attacking the law as an instance of "religious coercion" before it was even introduced into the Knesset. They have portrayed the law as nothing more than an attempt deprive secular Israelis of their beloved shopping seven days a week at the mall. (Polls of the Jewish population, unfortunately, reveal that shopping on Saturday is extremely popular with the public.) In a few short years, Saturday shopping has entered the fabric of Israeli life. By now, secular Israelis view such shopping as a "divine" right.

Nor will chareidi Knesset members support the Shabbos law proposal. Though the terms of the law only specify what is prohibited, all supporters of the law describe it as a compromise that allows restaurants and places of entertainment to be open on Shabbos. The standard rule of statutory interpretation - i.e., what is not expressly forbidden is permitted - makes that permission virtually explicit.

The chareidi world will not act in a way that appears to sanction certain forms of chilul Shabbos, all the arguments in the world about how the "Shabbos law" will reduce the overall amount of chilul Shabbos in Israel notwithstanding.

We must make clear that the Torah is not ours to compromise just because we have a cheshbon that the results will be better. Our task is to do what the Torah demands of us to the best of our ability, and leave the outcome to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Few claims have caused as much havoc both within and without the Orthodox world as, "Where there is a rabbinic will, there is a rabbinic way." The implication that the rabbis are free to interpret the Torah anyway they want when it suits their interests, chas ve'Shalom, has given rise to a host of evils. The first is that many claiming the title rabbi proceed to act in accord with that dictum. The second is that when rabbis who view themselves as interpreters of halacha, not its authors, are unable to find "solutions" to a particular problem - e.g., mamzerus - they are denounced as cruel and indifferent to human suffering because it is assumed that they could find a solution if they really wanted. By demonstrating that we are not free to play with Hashem's Torah, even though doing so might be perceived as advancing our interests, we can go a long way to refuting the lie that there is always a "rabbinic way."

In addition, we cannot do anything that conveys a false message about the nature of Shabbos to millions of Jews around the world.

The chareidi world has never joined with the national religious world in imbuing the state of Israel with theological significance; we never proclaimed the state of Israel reishit tzmichat geulateinu. Nevertheless, it is a fact that millions of Jews around the globe view Israel as "the Jewish state." Whatever Israel does is in their minds "Judaism."

Recognizing this, our gedolim have always insisted that our political representatives do everything within their power to prevent false messages about the Torah from being conveyed by the State. A classic case in point is conversion. The influx of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Russian speakers over the last decade has created tremendous pressure to lessen the standards for conversion in order to somehow "integrate" those Russian-speakers into the Jewish population. The Neeman Commission attempted to finesse the basic problem that only a small percentage of those immigrants could ever be expected to make a full acceptance of "ol mitzvos." Yet without that acceptance the poskei hador hold no conversion is possible.

Instead the Neeman Commission said the State of Israel should settle for the halachic forms of conversion - tevillah and milah before a beis din of three Orthodox musmachim - without its substance. That approach of "kosher-style" conversions was absolutely rejected by the chareidi world as a falsification of the meaning of geirus - a reenactment of kabolas Torah at Sinai. Better to dismantle the entire structure of connection between the state and the rabbinate, and thereby take the state out of the business of determining the validity of conversions, than to have the state convey a false message about what is geirus or "Who is a Jew."

The Shabbos law presents exactly the same issue. If enacted, every child growing up in Israel, and many others around the world, will grow up with the impression that Shabbos is a day of rest- rest from work, rest from school - not much different from Sunday. Today most Jews in Israel violate the Shabbos, but at least they know what Shabbos is. No one thinks that "fun" is the definition of Shabbosdik. Under the Shabbos law, there might well be fewer individual acts of chilul Shabbos, but the concept of Shabbos as a day of refraining from all creative activity in order to remember the One Who created from nothing would be lost to a much greater degree. As long as the concept of Shabbos is still preserved in its pristine purity, there still remains the hope of more and more Jews discovering it, but once that is lost we are left with only "Shabbos-style," which bears no more relationship to the real Shabbos than a "kosher-style" hot dog bears to a kosher one.

Those who proposed the Shabbos law would be better advised to present it in conjunction with another law calling for a five-day work week, as has been proposed by Natan Sharansky's Yisrael B'Aliyah party. Such a proposal links the interests of religious Jews interested in preserving the Shabbos and secular Jews afraid of the 24/7 commercialization of Israeli life. Many secular Jews who cannot imagine life without their Saturday shopping at the kibbutz mall today might find it easy to do so if they knew that there was another day for shopping without the time pressures of work.

Nor would the benefits be confined to the non-religious population. Religious Israelis of Anglo origin often find themselves missing the Sundays they remember from the old country. Those who work would have one more day to learn for a number of hours uninterrupted. Frum families too would benefit from increased opportunities for shared activities outside the home.

The Sunday law, then, is just the type of practical solution that serves the interests of large segments of the population, albeit for very different reasons, without any need for achieving any consensus on the ultimate meaning of life.

Sabbath bill could boost Anglo-led Sunday-off plan

By Charlotte Halle
Jan 4, 2002

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=113757

Sunday could become a national day of leisure if Yisrael b'Aliyah MKs succeed in amending the proposed Sabbath bill, which has passed its first reading in the Knesset. 

The controversial bill would, by default, permit the operation of public transportation on Saturdays, provided it is not subsidized by public funding, and allow places of entertainment and restaurants to remain open. Yisrael b'Aliyah lawmakers are making their support of the bill's conditional on an amendment that would declare Sunday an official day off, and they have been lobbying other MKs to do the same. 

Irrespective of the amendment, the bill sponsors - MK Nahum Langental (National Religious Party), MK Yair Peretz (Shas), Ze'ev Boim (Likud), Labor faction head Effi Oshaya and Nehama Ronen (Center Party) - have come under fire this week from both religious and secular MKs, who believe the rights of their constituents will be damaged if the bill becomes law. 

Yisrael b'Aliyah executive director, Boston-raised Eli Kazhdan, says he has yet to gauge the responses of the bill's sponsors to the Sunday amendment, as they have been too busy dealing with opposition to the proposed legislation within their own parties. However, he says he hopes to win their backing. 

Kazhdan says that even if the bill falls apart, the Sunday issue will be lodged in the minds of MKs, who may view its concept more favorably in the future as a result. 

The thrust of the Yisrael b'Aliyah's "Sunday project," an initiative launched by its Anglo faction, is to make Sunday, rather than Friday, an official day off, creating a full, two-day weekend. This will add more time for recreation and relaxation in the lives of all Israelis, and will promote interaction between religious and secular communities, Kazhdan explains. With Fridays and Saturdays off, the "weekend" is mainly Saturday, he continues: For some, it is a day of religious observance and rest; for others, it is a day of limited recreation because many places are closed by law. 

Former New Yorker Rebecca Weinberger, coordinator of the Sunday project, believes that making Sunday part of the weekend would introduce a "shared leisure culture" in Israel. She has spent the last six months lobbying MKs to gain an overview of individual Knesset members' positions on a bill that would declare Sunday a day off. She revealed that the response was "generally positive," but was unwilling to be more specific about the scope of support for the proposal. 

Weinberger has also begun to meet with leaders in business, cultural and medical fields, such as hospital and museum directors, to gauge opinion and stir up momentum for the initiative.