Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Picking your battles

This is something that the Charedi world has not yet learned. The Charedi world makes everything into a big issue and fight. A perfect example is the switch from Daylight time to Standard time. In the Western world this happens at the end of October beginning of November. In Israel, it already happened, why? So that Yom Kippur would end an hour earlier. This provoked some tremendous battles between the Charedi MK's and secular ones. The question we need to ask is, is it worth it? Is this really that important that we need to provoke a fight with the secular public?

I was very happy to see that Rabbi Horowitz Is Everything a 10? makes the same point.

2 comments:

Rafi G. said...

this issue was "resolved" a couple of years ago when the government passed a law making it uniform when the DSt time changes. Every year it is now the same with some rule to calculate it.
We no longer have the fights we used to have every year regarding that.

In addition, it was not really a chareidi fight. The classic chareidi fight is waged by Gimmel (UTJ). This fight is one that used to be waged mostly by Shas, which is a religious party and its members are chareidi (sephardi charedi). However, the party is not really a charedi party. They appeal to the traditional/masorati and even secular. I do not think they call themselves a charedii party.

They waged the battle of the time change because the sephardim have to get up ealrier for slichos and therefore are affected by it in a much more adverse way.

That is how I remember it. Maybe I am wrong though.

bluke said...

You are right that there are no more fights, but the general public is still very resentful. Today Sept. 19, it will be dark by 6:00PM. It is particularly painful for business (I know, I deal with people abroad all the time) where for a month the difference between Israel and world changes (e.g. the West Coast is suddenly only 9 hours behind instead of 10). There are many meetings missed because of this.

Shas is most definitely a Charedi party.

I remember in the late 1990's when Shas had 17 seats, we switched off DST on Rosh Chodesh Elul in August so that they could say selichos. WADR to the Sefardim saying selichos, that is simply ridiculous.