The smoke of the elections has not yet cleared, and Facebook has already been filled with heated debates between secularists who are anxious about the imminent “state of Halacha” (here you see, the secularists have already become anxious!), and religious people who are trying to calm them down. In such discussions, the claim that there is no symmetry between the two sides is repeatedly heard: the religious and the ultra-orthodox, as we know, want to impose their religion and belief on everyone and force everyone to live according to the Torah, while the secular are liberals who do not seek to impose anything on anyone, only to allow everyone to live as they wish, As long as it doesn’t hurt others. Because of this, the religious have nothing to fear from a secular government, but when the government is religious – the secular have reason to fear and how.
But this claim is patently unfounded, to the point where it takes a particularly alarming lack of self-awareness to make it. Are the liberal and enlightened secularists not forcing anything? Let’s start with the simple fact that only 17 years ago, about 10,000 Jews were forcibly displaced from their homes, under complete coercion and against their will, when they were forced to see their homes destroyed and their beloved country handed over to terrorists. As a result, many of them suffered from financial collapse, family and relationship problems, and a host of traumas and scars that some have not yet healed. This is not about some imaginary nightmare scenario but about a tangible and painful reality, which was made with the support and encouragement of the people of the left, most of them liberal secularists. Those same people, not only did they not retract and apologize, but many of them openly talk about their ambition to deport and uproot tens to hundreds of thousands more Jews in a similar way, all out of their blind faith in the vision of peace, even though it blows up in our faces again and again. What other name is there for it other than coercion?
But this is not the only compulsion. In recent years, secular coercion has been expanding into other areas. It is forbidden to hold separate events. Religious female singers are forced to perform in front of mixed audiences, or they will not perform at all. Business owners are obliged by the courts to provide homosexuals with services that are contrary to their beliefs. Progressive content is forcefully pushed into the curricula of schools and kindergartens. And that’s without even talking about the secular atmosphere in the public space in terms of advertisements, clothing, modesty, and the like. How do you say about it, “If it bothers you, don’t look?” – Well, it’s like smoking in people’s faces and telling them: “If it bothers you, don’t breathe.”
Let’s face the simple facts: every law is a form of coercion, and every party that promotes certain laws, imposes them on all citizens. Feminists impose laws that are supposed to benefit women, even if it is at the expense of men. The vegans, if they had a strong party, would probably prohibit or limit the use of animal products by law. The left is forcing “painful concessions”, security deterioration and a destructive socialist economy, and the right is forcing soldiers to guard the settlers in dangerous places. This is how a country is run, and it is completely legitimate for every public and party to advance their goals this way. The blindness or hypocrisy is in the claim that only the promotion of religious values is an invalid “religious coercion”, while any law or ruling from the secular side is not coercion, they only preserve freedom and prevent infringement of someone’s rights.
So don’t get hysterical. A Halacha state is not currently on the agenda, and in fact no one has any idea what exactly this concept means. But alongside the desire to calm spirits, there is no reason to hide our true ambitions: yes, I and many other religious and ultra-Orthodox people aspire to see a more Jewish state here, which is run according to the values of the Torah and Judaism, and not according to the rotten madness of progress, imported from the United States. And when we get that, we can hope that the secular minority will learn to get along with this reality, just as the religious have learned to live and get along in a secular country all these years.