The Jewish Shout
By Berel Wein

(February 15) Now that some of the dust of the recent election 
for prime minister has settled, I would like to offer my two 
bits worth of political analysis on the matter. I am not an 
expert on political analysis, but then again I am not an 
expert on many other matters about which I have written 
newspaper opinion columns, so why should political analysis 
be different? 

Ariel Sharon won the election by 25 percentage points. To the 
best of my knowledge there has never been a majority of such 
proportion in a fairly held election in any country, certainly 
in recent memory. 

Can it be that Sharon was so popular? That Barak was so 
unpopular? I don't think so. My heart tells me that there is 
a deep underlying call that motivated these election results. 

There is a hassidic story about a Jew who was in the midst of 
a very demanding task on a Friday afternoon and did not notice, 
as the time passed, that the Sabbath was fast approaching. 
This Jew was known to be a mild-mannered, soft-spoken person. 
As darkness began to fall, he suddenly realized that it was 
time for the Sabbath. He ran out of his workshop to the 
synagogue and arrived there, dirty and disheveled, not wearing 
his Shabbat clothes and breathless from exertion. 

Upon arriving at the synagogue he heard that the introductory 
prayer welcoming the Sabbath had already been completed and 
that the congregation was already standing to pray the first 
Shabbat prayer. The Jew, beside himself in anguish at having 
been late for Shabbat, shouted a great shout of agony and 
frustration. 

The congregation, knowing him to be so mild-mannered and 
soft-spoken, was in shock at his behavior. But the great 
hassidic rebbe who witnessed the scene said: "It was not his 
own shout that we heard. It was the shout of the Jew within 
him that reverberated in our ears!" 

THIS PAST election gave voice to the great Jewish shout that 
resides within the broad Israeli public. It was a shout about 
Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, about 
Rachel's Tomb and the Machpela Cave in Hebron. It was a shout 
that said that even if many of us are not necessarily observant, 
we still are Jewish. We might not be strict Sabbath observers, 
but we don't want Saturday to be just like Tuesday. 

We may be turned off, and perhaps correctly so, by the Orthodox 
political and bureaucratic establishment in this country, but 
we are not interested in "secular revolutions." 

We may be late at arriving at conclusions, just as that Jew was 
late in arriving at Shabbat prayers, but once realizing how 
late we are, a mighty shout emanates from deep within us. 
We are not willing to abandon our Jewish dreams of Zion and 
Jerusalem, of being a special people and being responsible to 
Jewish history, of attempting to create a just and fair society 
for all, in favor of the false allure of economic globalization, 
American pop culture and so-called intellectual democratic values. 

In 1891, Ahad Ha'am, hardly an Orthodox Jew, visited Jerusalem 
for the first time. Jerusalem was then a small and dusty town, 
with Jews suffering under the yoke of the Ottoman and Arab 
oppressors. Mark Twain, visiting Jerusalem at the same time, 
wrote that he found the place appalling. 

But Ahad Ha'am nevertheless wrote home to his family: "I am now 
in Jerusalem. I cannot express to you, even in a small way, my 
emotions at being here. Every step, every stone speaks to me of 
our history. Mount Zion, the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives. 
Only when one is here does one realize how foolish it is of our 
opponents, the Arabs, to think that we will ever give up on 
Jerusalem. It is the heart of the Land of Israel, the heart of 
the Jew. I am convinced that every inch of Jerusalem is not less 
worthy than the most developed settlement that we have built in 
Galilee." 

Ahad Ha'am did not write those words. It was written by the 
Jew within him; the Jewish shout that, though late in coming, 
reverberates within all of us and does not allow us to forsake 
our past and future, no matter how tempting and soothing is 
the siren call of peace, security and international approval. 

The results of the past election did not come from the Israeli 
electorate. It was rather the Jewish shout within us that was 
heard in great strength.