By Moshe Feiglin
This week's Torah portion, Ki Tetzeh, is a "social justice" portion:
Deuteronomy 22:1: You shall not see the ox of your brother or his sheep driven away, and hide from them; you shall bring them back to your brother.
Deuteronomy 23:16: You shall not deliver a slave who has run away to you to his master; 17: He shall live with you in your midst, in the place that he shall choose within one of your gates, where he likes best; do not wrong him.
Ibid 20: You shall not lend with interest to your brother: interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of any thing that is lent upon interest.
Deuteronomy 24:10: When you lend your neighbor any manner of loan, you shall not go into his house to fetch his pledge.
Ibid 14: You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether he be of your brethren, or of your strangers that are in your land within your gates. 15: In the same day you shall give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and sets his heart upon it: lest he cry to G-d against you and it shall be a sin within you.
Ibid 17: You shall not pervert the justice due to the stranger, or to the fatherless; nor take the widow's garment as a pledge.
The laws of leaving part of the harvest for the poor are also included in this week's social justice portion.
So where is the Jewish solution to the financial distress in Israeli society?
The Jewish voice is hiding behind right-wing sectarianism. The Right is preoccupied with deciding if protest leader Daphni Leef is a leftist or not. She is. In fact, she's an anarchist from the wealthy suburb of Kfar Shmaryahu. But the story is not about Leef. The story is that in the summer of 2011 a tectonic movement took place in Israeli society. The elite has turned into a sector. "A person shouts about what he lacks," sang Meir Ariel. When the Ashkenazi, secular elite goes on stage to shout, "We are the people," that means that they truly are not. Elites do not demonstrate; they are demonstrated against.
A huge swath of society (at least the 70% of Israelis who are middle-class and under) is groaning under the disgraceful exploitation of what looks like capitalism, but is really nothing more than the monetary oligarchy of a few super-wealthy Israeli "nobility" families. The extreme left New Israel Fund has skillfully identified this need and has channeled it to its own ends.
Clearly, the radical Left has no solutions. But the faith-based public, equipped with all the foundations to propose comprehensive answers - has opted out. Instead of presenting genuine Torah-inspired solutions from center stage - it pre-occupies itself with Daphni Leef and whether or not she called upon the public to disobey army orders.
Shabbat Shalom
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