Corrosive Corruption

I was quietly studying chapter 1 of the prophet Isaiah when from the holy text there leaped headlines from the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Maariv, Yediot, as well as the major newspapers of the West: Your leaders have become plunderers, associates of thieves, lovers of bribery, pursuers of payoffs… (1:23)

The rest of the chapter, as they say, was commentary: How has she become like a harlot, the city of faithfulness. Once it was filled with justice and righteousness, but now – murderers…

One often turns to the Bible for solace and comfort, but in this instance, the only consolation was in the knowledge that we today did not invent corruption. Greed and selfishness are part of the human condition. This is precisely one of the major purposes of Judaism: to help man transcend his natural inclinations and to become a mentsch and not remain an animal.

That this is an ongoing struggle is evident from the endless string of scandals and sheer incompetence in Israeli public life. When 85% of the Israeli public believes its government is corrupt, it is time to ask: Have we become just another Levantine state on the shores of the Mediterranean, whose officials are always on the take, and where bribery and cronyism are an accepted way of life? Does Israel now embody the fear of the prophets that some day we would be truly become kechol haGoyim, “like all the nations,” instead of an ohr laGoyim, “a light to the nations”?

The distinguished congregation of suspects is frightening: former Minister of Justice Haim Ramon and the current president of Israel face morals charges, while an earlier president resigned because of financial improprieties. PM Sharon and his sons were accused of financial misdeeds, and former PMs Netanyahu and Barak have been under investigation, even though charges were never formally brought. Star players of a major soccer team are accused of accepting payoffs from gamblers. Even Orthodox political leadership does not always behave in ways that bring glory to the name of Torah.. And now, the frosting on the cake: Israel’s topmost tax officials and businessmen are accused of defrauding the Tax Authority, while Olmert himself could soon be under investigation for other improprieties — all underscoring what Yediot describes as “the tight relationship between the criminal world and the public bureaucracy.” In a recent survey of countries judged the most honest in the world, UPI recently dropped Israel from its former #10 position to the #34 position, along with such exemplars of rectitude as Cuba and Laos. A corrosive culture of corruption surrounds us. One needs more than a lantern to search the dark for an honest man.

Let no one think that it is only “they” who are affected by this. Each one of us is affected. If everyone is cutting moral and ethical corners, why should I not do so as well, lest I be labeled a sucker, a freier? The great threat to our future in this land emanates not so much from the enemies around us, but from the enemies within us — in keeping with another prophetic dictum: Those who undermine and destroy you will emerge from you ( Isaiah 49:17). For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for thee — for the moral climate of the country.

The secular founders of the modern state of Israel wanted to create a new Jew. They would toss Judaism overboard as a Galut phenomenon, and create an Israeli in tune with contemporary times. Not for him the inhibitions and onerous restrictions of Judaism. He would be carefree and joyous, not caftaned in gloomy black, but wearing shorts, sleeved rolled up, arms and legs bronzed from the sun, always smiling, optimistic, carefree. The original Zionist anthem was emended, and lashuv l’eretz avoteinu, “to return to the land of our fathers,” was replaced by lihyot am chofshi b’artzenu, “to be free in our land.” Chofshi — free not only politically, but from any anchor in the past.

They have succeeded only too well. Like any banana republic, the common currency consists of graft, greed and cynicism. Is this what has become of the Zionist dream? Little wonder that men of integrity like Benny Begin, Natan Sharansky, and Dan Meridor leave government for private life.

We are new Jews. The shared suffering of Jewish history, our moral triumphs over savagery, the long, mystic chord of Jewish national memory, the unique Jewish perspective on God, life, morality, and the world around us — such things have been torn away from our being.. And when we do pick up shards of our history, we immediately distort them. We celebrate Chanukah, but we celebrate exclusively a military victory of the few over the many: God’s miraculous intervention is not part of our Israeli narrative. We observe Passover with matzos and special food, but God’s intercession is not part of the story. Shavuos is no more than an ancient agricultural festival, celebrating the first fruits of the land. Sinai and its thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots are not on the screen. Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of the world’s creation and a time to acknowledge His sovereignty, is instead a time for trips to the beach and jaunts to other countries.

One has only to look around to see what has occurred. Our youth imitates the worst attributes of the West, with its drugs and instant gratification. The riches of our spiritual and literary tradition are a closed book for them. (In a recent chat with a tenth grade secular boy, I asked if he studied any Mishnah. He had never heard of the word.) Having lost all pride and self-confidence in who they are, and knowing and caring little about the long history of the land, they are unable even to defend the very idea of a Jewish state, much less prepared to sacrifice for it. As for much of our intellectual elite — having discarded their own unique Jewish identity, they parrot the trendy anti-Jewish clichés of intellectuals around the world, and consider Israel to be a colonial occupier of land not their own.

We are in the throes of a struggle for the soul of Israel. Will it be a light unto the nations, or just another corrupt little state, the only difference being that our corrupters speak not Italian or Turkish, but Hebrew? The future well-being of Israel will not be determined by bombs or planes or military might — as crucial as these are to our physical survival — but by our strength of character, by our recognition that there are transcendent forces in life that surmount the dollar, by the realization that our past is precious and of enduring relevance. This is why the moral flabbiness that is so pervasive in our public square is so distressing. Internal rot is much more insidious than external assault.

There are those among Israel’s cultural and academic elite who are not blind, and who realize that there is a Jewish history and sacred heritage that antedates Herzl, and that a radical re-assessment of our educational and spiritual priorities is long overdue. They surely recognize that this slavish genuflection to the values of the West leads only to a dead end. It is time for these opinion leaders — together with the masses of our people who deep within themselves yearn for truth, meaning, and transcendence — to speak up and demonstrate their revulsion, lest Jerusalem the city of holiness becomes Jerusalem the city of graft.

These are dispiriting times, and yet, if Isaiah’s prophecy about thieves and bribery constitute today’s headline, then the following prophecy — from that same first chapter — could also be tomorrow’s headline:

Your judges will I re-establish as of old
and your counselors as at the beginning…
Zion will be redeemed with justice,
and her returnees with righteousness.

This article appears in today’s Jerusalem Post.

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10 Responses

  1. chaim says:

    if i understand correctly the gist of this article,it is that somehow because of the fact that israel developed into a predominantly secular state ,therefore it was inevitable that its leaders and people became corrupt
    i have to disagree ,and let me ask you a simple question,what do you think is the percentage of frum and chareidi jews in israel that do not cheat on their taxes?
    by the way i am chareidi,but we have to be truthfull even with ourselves

  2. Yehoshua Friedman says:

    Israel is not a banana republic, it is a banana peel republic. It is not merely a police state but a police state run by the Keystone Cops. The depth of the tragicomedy is as deep as the misguided Jewish soul. Those who fail to learn from history (and Torah) are doomed to repeat it, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Let us get our act together so that we can have some good laughs instead of bad ones.

  3. Dov Kay says:

    I am not a secular Zionist, but I do not recall that secular Zionism ever magnified the virtue of graft. So what does graft have to do with care-free, bronzed pioneers, and why blame them? On the contrary, Herzl and Ben Gurion would no doubt be disgusted with contemporary corruption as a betrayal of their vision. If modern Israelis were truer to the original Zionist commitment to the public good at the expense of individual benefit, corruption would decline. So I do not see how secular Zionism can be blamed for this particular problem, unless you argue that its secular underpinnings made it vulnerable to debasement. If so, this is an excellent argument in favour of religious Zionism.

  4. Ori Pomerantz says:

    I assume you mean this corruption index: http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi . If so, please don’t blame western values. Nine out of the top ten are westen. Singapore, which is also in the top ten, got many of its administrative traditions from the British Empire. Whole-sale acceptance of western values, which include transparency and market competition, does not lead to corruption. The problem is the loss of one set of values without the acceptance of another. This leads to a vacuum that the evil inclination then fills.

    I think my grandparents’ generation understood this. They did not just reject religious observance. They replaced it with Zionism and Socialism. However, those ideals came without the education infrastructure that Judaism has. This made them a lot harder to transmit across the generations, especially as the conditions that made them appealing in the first place disappeared.

    BTW, is the administration of religious cities, such as Bney Brak, measurably less corrupt than the administration of secular cities such as Ramat Gan?

  5. Isaac says:

    I do not read the article as Chaim does in comment 1. I think the article bemoans the state of Israel’s jettisoning of Jewish heritage and our literature and the wholesale embracing of the worst of Western society. By and large, Chareidi society – and certainly Israeli Chareidi society – has not embraced Western values (neither the good nor the bad. Perhaps, that would not be problematic if Rabbi Feldman’s first critical observation of jettisoning our Jewish hertiage and literature had no application to Chareidim. However, Chareidim often suffer from a hyper-technical version of religious study and observance at the expense of the broad themes of honesty, integrity in dealings with others and societal justice for those other than your own narrow community. Tax cheating is only one of many obvious results. As a Chareidi, I did not get much in the way of serious reading and drawing of lessons from the Prophets like Isaiah. Without those lessons, we and Israeli society are dooming ourselves to being just another second-rate, third-world, corrupt Mediterranian society.

  6. HILLEL says:

    “THE FISH STINKS FROM THE HEAD!”

    PM Olmer, himself, is now under investigation:
    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/814213.html

  7. HILLEL says:

    Dear Chaim:

    So you think that it makes no difference whether someone fears G-D or not.

    Our Torah–the word of G-D–says differently. To quote Abraham (on his way to Egypt) “Rak Ein YirAs E’Kim BaMakom HaZeh, VeHaRoGuNi Al Devar IshTi.–Since the Egyptians have no fear of G-D, they will kill me, in order to steal my wife.”

    Or, to quote a MIshneh in Pirkei Avoth (Chapters of the Fathers), “IlMoLei YoReh Ish Es ReHu, Chaim BeLaHO–Were it not for the fear of one man of another, he would swallow his neighbor alive.”

    I get the sense that you are so closely aligned with secular culture, that you feel threatened by Rabbi Feldman’s analysis.

  8. dovid says:

    HILLEL to Chaim: “So you think that it makes no difference whether someone fears G-D or not.”

    It makes all the difference. But who says that someone who “piously” observes kashrus, Shabbos, and wears Chareidi levush has iras shomaim? A person’s iras shomaim index is the choice he makes when he gets the chance to act keneged din and get away with it. Most of us have come across Jews masqueraded as Chareidim.

  9. Ori Pomerantz says:

    Dov Kay: So what does graft have to do with care-free, bronzed pioneers, and why blame them? On the contrary, Herzl and Ben Gurion would no doubt be disgusted with contemporary corruption as a betrayal of their vision. If modern Israelis were truer to the original Zionist commitment to the public good at the expense of individual benefit, corruption would decline.

    Ori: True. Early Zionists were very committed to the public good. However, I think they went overboard, and were willing to be dishonest for the public good’s sake (I heard some horror stories from my mother about dishonest business dealings by Socialists who thought they cheated my grandfather for the sake of the working class). The evil inclination being what it is, dishonesty is a lot easier to pass on to the next generation than a commitment to sacrifice for the public good.

    The early Zionists were very noble, but like many people in the early 20th century, they had an unrealistic belief in the power of social engineering to change human nature. I’m glad I live in a country whose constitution came from founders who were a lot more cynical and expected things to go wrong.

  10. dovid says:

    One gets the feeling that the author is gloating over the pitiful condition of Israel’s secular society. The uninitiated, reading this article, may surmise that secular = crook, therefore, orthodox Jew = honest. It should be like this but it is not. Agudas Israel of America organized several lectures and workshops in the past years attended by the Orthodox sector of the community whose theme was integrity at work place. Why would the Agudah organize them? Because they are badly needed. Shall we derive from this that our iras shomaim is not what it should be?

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