Because there is no better word to describe the shameful decision of the Israeli 'Department for Jewish Culture' that ordered the disqualification of Lucy Ahrish (a famous Arab-Israeli journalist) participation in Tikkun Shavuot.
This is a decision that requires correction and should not wait until the night of Shavuot.
It turns out that in 2023 Israel, under the Netanyahu government, a brave woman who raises her voice in defense of democracy and started a family with a Zionist partner out of a joint decision to provide a multicultural education to their children, is not acceptable in the esteemed opinion of the members of the Jewish Culture Division.
The culture of the 'Gaon of Vilna', Maimonides, the 'First of Zion' and Rabbi Kook is also the culture of Herzl, Freud and Kafka.
No one has ownership of the Jewish identity that developed over generations in constant dialogue with the cultures surrounding it from the days of the pharaohs in Egypt, through the poetry of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi in medieval Spain, to the "Jerusalem" of Moshe Mendelssohn, the father of the Enlightenment movement who believed in the combination of Judaism and universal enlightenment.
The decision of that department is a door slam to the model society vision of the Israeli founding generation. "Regardless of religion, race and sex" they bothered to state in the Declaration of Independence and now it turns out that racial laws exist here as well.
Jewishness is kosher. The Arab woman who tied her fate to the fate of the Jewish state, is married to a combat soldier and is an activist for the promotion of Israeli democracy is disqualified due to fear of defilement on the night of Shavuot.
Such a woman, in their view, may mercifully encourage assimilation. Here is the seminary of Benzi Gopstein and his friends slowly seeping into the mainstream of the Israeli public.
The communities of the Megiddo Regional Council are not confident enough in their Jewishness to hear from Arabs about their Israeli identity. She does not understand the Torah, she is not one of us, the gatekeepers of "Judaism" are not ready to support the financing of her appearance on the night of the giving of the Torah in which mitzvots such as Loving the "Ger" were enacted.
Tzachi from the Levy family loves her, protects our safety with his body, but his wife, who was born to another race, is not good enough for us. It's a shame that the people of the Department of Jewish Culture didn't bother to look at the scroll that they read on that holiday that describes the story of a brave woman from a foreign culture and, by chance or not, from a seminary house that built Jerusalem who didn't believe then that a day would come when people who claim its continuity would criticize a woman like Lucy.
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