Yesh Atid's religion of reverse psychology
Yair Lapid's party is increasingly turning out to be the kind of religious party it promised to fight.
By Aner Shalev | Aug. 19, 2013 | 8:45 AM
Education Minister Shay Piron has good intentions. When he ruled, some years ago, that religious law bars Jews from selling homes to Arabs, he might also have had good intentions. When he became the first education minister to fund separate classes for boys and girls in state religious elementary schools he presumably had good intentions then as well. And when he canceled the Meitzav standardized assessment test and the matriculation exam in literature he did so in the name of values.
It's hard to attack Piron. It's easy to attack the head of his party, Finance Minister leader, Yair Lapid: for his arrogance and his broken campaign promises, for tormenting the middle class he claimed to speak for and for selling out for the sake of the alliance with Habayit Hayehudi chairman and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, and perhaps also for his good looks; definitely on account of his good looks.
No one would accuse Piron of any of those things. He's personable. He’s sympathetic. He's not an actor begging for affection, and that's why he receives it. He's genuine, and his famous confused laugh in the Knesset attests to that. He's not a pitchman. He means what he says. But what is it he’s saying?
Piron believes in values, and in our competitive and utilitarian era there's something refreshing about that. But God is in the details, and the details are adding up and becoming horrifying. At the height of the budget crisis and the heartbreaking cuts past the fat into the meat, the Education Ministry sees fit to allocate funding, for the first time, for gender separation in the state religious schools. The number of schools that separate boys and girls is rising meteorically, but until now it was funded by parents and other sources, not the state budget. The budgetary support makes it clear that gender separation is suddenly part of the ideology of Piron and his Yesh Atid party, which are also discriminating in favor of religious education (separation creates small classes).
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Sometimes, reading about the actions of the Mideast governments involving religion is like reading the results of a laboratory experiment.