As if we needed any new sins to commit…

…voting for Kadima apparently applies.

National Religious Party’s spiritual leader Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has declared it so. Voting for any party which supported disengagement is, as decided by him, a sin.

He explained “A party that supported the pullout, even if it is religious,
must not be voted for. It’s not considered religious if it agreed to transferring parts of the land of Israel to the nations of the world.”

Emphasis mine.

Because, you see, being religious has nothing to do with looking out for the orphan, the widow and the stranger, or being scrupulously fair in business dealings. It has nothing to do with guarding our lips from slanderous speech or seeking an honest relationship with God. Nope, it is clear that the definition of “religious” is one who did not support disengagement.

Hmm, maybe we’re thinking just a little myopically.

Nonetheless, it brought to mind a line from Yossi Klien Halevi’s interview on Blogs of Zion where he talks about Jewish radicals:

Jewish radicalism of left and right is an understandable response to the maddening complexity of our dilemmas. It is also a simplistic response. One can only be a radical of the left or the right by maintaining selective hearing. You can only hear those arguments that confirm your world view and you need to filter out those arguments that conflict with that view. Left and right have been doing that for forty years, since the 1967 Six Day War. If they’d listened to each others arguments we might not have embarked on indiscriminate settlement and we might not have brought in tens of thousands of PLO terrorists.

The only way to maintain certainty in the face of such complicated issues is through audio filtering. For that reason both left and right are semi-deaf. The left still doesn’t get what went wrong with Oslo and the right still doesn’t get why we pulled out of Gaza. To have productive discourse about the future of Israel and the Jewish people, we need audio faculty in “stereo,” with both left and right speakers working.

Anyway, here’s to rocking the Israeli vote on Tuesday. In strereo.