The Pesach-2008 saw a tremendous hypocrisy contest in Israel. A secular court in the holy city of Jerusalem lifted the punishments imposed on several sellers of leavened bread (hametz) the previous Pesach. In effect, the court made it unpunishable and therefore legal to sell leavened bread on Pesach.

The commandment prohibiting leavened bread on Pesach is among the most prominent in Judaism. The commandment is equally binding on Jews and non-Jews alike in the Land of Israel, and its violation is punishable with death. Judaism is neither liberal nor individual; its rules are enforced throughout the Land of Israel.

Israeli state retained the paraphernalia of Judaism, and the Pesach is its national holiday. The state, however, dropped the Pesach’s two major commandments: the Temple service and non-leavened bread. While a modicum of political justification is advanced against rebuilding the Temple, the permission to sell leavened bread on Pesach is entirely voluntary. The state of Israel chose its secular character over the Jewish identity.

Israeli government against G_d

Israeli religious parties decried the court’s verdict a bit too late. After the sixty years of atheist brainwashing in Israeli schools, after the government’s ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, after the announced decisions to abandon Judea and Jerusalem to Arabs, the permission to sell hametz on Pesach is really not unexpected. And it is a relatively minor thing compared to the government’s other offenses against Judaism. But for ultra-Orthodox Jews, symbolism long outweighs the substance. They murder Judaism with a death of a thousand rites; they replace the Jewish life, Jewish wars, Jewish statehood with Shabbat elevators.

There is nothing technically wrong with the Jerusalem court which decided on hametz. The court merely acted upon the laws of the state. If Israel is a liberal democracy, then it cannot enforce religious rules on unwilling subjects. Imagine an outcry if Russia or Greece enforced religious rules concerning the Christian Passover, a forty-day partial fast, for example.

The court was only happy to apply the law straightforwardly in order to further its own anti-Semitism, a time-honored self-hatred of Jews who happily eradicate Jewishness of others. Israeli left applauded the court’s decision not because of liberalism. Israeli leftists are anything but liberal; they are some of the worst totalitarians who keep political opponents, even teenage girls, in jail. The verdict signified the left’s triumph over their main enemies, religious Jews.

There is no way to reconcile a secular and a Jewish state.