Neilah on Dizengoff Square

It’s hard to know what to make of the events that unfolded in Tel Aviv towards the end of Yom Kippur. But what’s not difficult at all is to understand that the incident—not quite a riot, but a serious incident of incivility and poor behavior—is a good example of what happens when people mistake intolerance for zeal and antagonism for principled disagreement.

The incident had to do with a public-space gathering to recite the Neilah Prayer that ends Yom Kippur. Every shul-Jew knows this to be a highlight, not only of Yom Kippur or even the High Holiday season, but really of the entire prayer-year. The mood in our sanctuary at Shelter Rock, for example, is intense, focused, and very stirring. The spirits whose palpable presence made the air in the room so heavy during Yizkor have mostly departed back to Sheol (or wherever), but the residue of their ghostly presence lingers still in the room. The fast has begun to take its toll; people are hungry and thirsty. Those of us for whom a day without caffeine is torture are mostly nursing giant headaches. The specific nusach that the cantor uses to chant the prayers is hauntingly beautiful, but also vaguely ominous; the notion that the gates are poised to swing shut—and our chances to have our initial inscription in God’s great Book of Life upgraded through some combination of repentance, prayer, and pledges of charity thus dwindling by the minute—creates a unique blend of resignation and (despite all we know of ourselves) hope that all who have experienced Neilah in a traditional setting will recognize easily. It’s a remarkable moment.

And, for the last few years, an effort has been made to hold public prayers services in Tel Aviv, the heart of secular Israel, in an attempt to reach out to Jews who would otherwise not experience any aspect of Yom Kippur as a day devoted to prayer and introspection. The service the previous evening—the Kol Nidre service—went well enough, but there were those present who strongly objected to the insistence of the prayer service’s organizers, a group called Rosh Yehudi (“A Jewish Head”) headed by one Israel Zeira, to separate men and women during the service. Gender segregation is a big deal in today’s Israel, a kind of a flashpoint between secular and Orthodox-religious Israelis. It's not only a matter of synagogue seating either—the issue has to do with mixed-gender seating on buses and trains, on mixed-gender classes in public schools, and in public swimming pools maintaining “men only” and “women only” hours alongside the “regular” schedule that invites men and women to use the pool simultaneously. So this is a big deal in Israel and, as such, a much touchier issue than it is in our country.

Erev Yom Kippur went more or less as planned. But the following evening, both sides of the dispute dug their heels in. Suddenly, there was an actual barrier separating men and women, albeit a flimsy one that was really just a wall of plastic Israeli flags. But that was just as provocative as the Rosh Yehudi people should surely have known it was going to be. And so, when secular Tel Aviv arrived in Dizengoff Square with their own agenda and their own strong, angry, hostile words to add to the mix, things did not end at all well.

To refer to what ensued as a riot (as I noted in several on-line sources) is probably an exaggeration. But what happened was a travesty nonetheless and, at that, one that could and should have been avoided.

The good news is that large numbers of secular Israelis, most of who would not think of spending Yom Kippur in a synagogue, have been drawn to these public prayer services since their inception in 2020. That yearning for spiritual fulfillment I have noticed in Israel over the years in many different contexts—and to such a great extent that even the traditional division of Israelis into secular ones and religious ones has seemed less meaningful to me in recent years. So the idea itself of organizing public prayer for shul­-averse citizens is not only rational but, in my opinion, laudable. But by insisting on gender segregation during prayer—given the status of that specific matter as a hot-button issue across Israeli society in recent years—was almost to doom the effort to failure even before it got off the ground.

On the other hand, the secular types who came to the service with their dukes up, spoiling for a fight and prepared to use the most vile, insulting, and vituperative language—those people have a lot to learn about what Yom Kippur means and should mean. A day devoted to prayer, to repentance, and to making peace where peace needs to be made was sullied by extremists more eager to make their own point than to reconcile with people who feel differently than they do. And that was a true travesty and a disgrace.

It's easy to make peace with people with whom you disagree slightly, significantly less so when the parties involved are at loggerheads on foundational issues relating to culture, societal norms, and a nation’s basic ethos. But that is how peace is made in a society divided against itself—by listening carefully to the good on the other side and by finding a way to be flexible emotionally and politically without being untrue to yourself.

The secular types who were outraged by the idea of gender segregation in a public spot needed to get a grip on themselves: this wasn’t an instance of women being denied the vote or made to wear chadors in public, and neither was it an instance of women being told to go home or not to participate or not to say their prayers at all. Yes, it was a bit ham-fisted (if you can say such a thing about religious Jews on Yom Kippur), but it was also a way to draw in Jews used to the idea of separate seating during worship and so to make such people feel comfortable and welcome. And that seems to me to be the more crucial issue here.

The Rosh Yehudi organizers and their follows who couldn’t imagine a Neilah service that didn’t involve gender segregation needed to get a grip on themselves too. Dizengoff Square is not a synagogue. The whole idea of public prayer is that the prayer service be welcoming to the public, a goal at total cross-purposes with an insistence on flouting the laws regarding gender separation. The idea of creating an opportunity for secular Israelis to feel drawn to tradition through the medium of public prayer is a noble one, a good one. But if someone is drowning in the sea, you can only do good by throwing a life preserver into the water where the person in trouble is, not where you yourself are! To involve secular Israelis in prayer means to create a setting in which such people are comfortable and at their ease, in which they are predisposed to let the words of the liturgy enter their hearts and move them, possibly even to awaken some kind of dormant faith in them. And if that requires abandoning some norms that would prevail automatically in a room in which everyone present self-defines as an Orthodox Jew, then that’s what’s required. The Rosh Yehudi people, as far as I can see, wished to do good. But they wished only to do it on their own terms. And that is, generally speaking, not how good is really ever done.

So that was last week. This week, Israel is covered with sukkot both in public places and on people’s roofs and balconies, and in the courtyards and gardens of apartment houses. Those sukkot represent the great sukkah of peace for which we pray daily in our evening prayers. And this year those sukkot should be suggestive to all of the great lesson of Sukkot: that the medium in which spiritual progress—both on the individual and the societal levels—is made is peace: peace between nations, peace between warring factions within society, and peace between individuals. Yom Kippur in Dizengoff Square was a disaster. But it could also serve as a wake-up call for a riven nation in need of healing on all fronts: politically, religiously, and societally. What is needed is compromise, the cultivation of intellects supple enough to respect others’ opinions, and the abandonment of the kind of cultural arrogance that cannot imagine an alternate opinion to one’s own being valid. Intransigency is not a virtue. Reaching out to others with respect and a willingness to compromise—those are the virtues that can save any society, no matter how divided against itself it might have grown.