Beit Shemesh has a new mayor. Too bad his campaign violated Torah law and values in order to win.

Meraglim "the Gedoilei Hador" of the "dor deah" 

    

SCOTT KAHN MAR 12

On Sunday, the people of Beit Shemesh elected a new mayor, Shmuel Greenberg. He is affiliated with the ultra-Orthodox Degel HaTorah political party, and he defeated the incumbent mayor, Aliza Bloch, who is Orthodox but not part of the Chareidie  world. The election wasn’t particularly close; Greenberg won 58% of the vote. It’s hardly likely that last-minute electioneering saved him from defeat. Greenberg won and was always going to win. So why did some rabbis, ostensibly in the name of Torah values, resort to slander in order to ensure his election?

My friend Rabbi Natan Slifkin addressed some of the problems in a recent post. Let me translate further from the same election material that he cited: "A great cry from the rabbis of the city: “We have come to express our opinion that it is a great and holy obligation incumbent upon every individual man and woman of the city’s population, without exception, to vote only for the Chareidi candidate, Rabbi Shmuel Greenberg. It is incumbent upon everyone to feel the great responsibility placed upon him, both to vote himself, as well as to work to influence his friends and acquaintances and to worry that the name of heaven will not G-d forbid be desecrated by our hands, given that the entire existence of Judaism and the development of the community of those who fear Hashem, and the city’s institutions of Torah and Chassidut, are dependent upon this vote. [Italics mine] “One may not be lazy, and it is forbidden to separate from the community [of those who vote for Greenberg].  “One who listens to our words should be blessed with all things, goodness in spiritual and physical matters, and he is included in the blessing, ‘Blessed is the one who upholds the words of this Torah,’ and he has sanctified the name of heaven and the merit of the many is dependent upon him.” This is silly and absurd election hyperbole. In the five years of Aliza Bloch’s term, the Chareidi population of Beit Shemesh has grown significantly, while Chareidi and Chassidic institutions have increased tremendously. The notion that for “five years, the Chareidi community has been lowered [or humiliated]” - another claim in that same brochure - is news to anyone who actually lived in or visited Beit Shemesh during Bloch’s term in office.

It’s simply false! The problem is that this letter, which implies that Bloch will undermine Judaism and Chareidi Torah institutions, is signed by twenty local Chareidi rabbis. Twenty rabbis who, on the record, said that “the entire existence of Judaism and the development of the community of those who fear Hashem, and the city’s institutions of Torah and Chassidut, are dependent upon this vote” - as if Aliza Bloch had been personally undermining synagogues and destroying yeshivot over the past five years. (Many non-Chareidi residents of Beit Shemesh have been frustrated by Bloch’s term because, they say, she gave more to the Chareidi population than to her own constituency.) This letter is not just false; it’s a form of slander.

 

The Hebrew term is motzi shem ra - giving someone a bad name - and it’s one of the most serious transgressions in the Torah. Even if those who signed this letter somehow twist reality to argue that these claims are not completely false, no one would every say under oath that they are 100% true; and the Chofetz Chaim, in defining motzi shem ra, writes that, “the Torah forbids adding a small mixture of falsehood like falsehood itself” (Be’er Mayim Chaim 1:2). The fact that it is written rather than spoken, and hinted at rather than said explicitly, does not lessen the severity of the transgression whatsoever (Chofetz Chaim 1:8). But of course, the whole political thing is just a game. That’s how you play, and that’s how you win. Except that if a party runs on the conceit that it represents Torah values, how can it play by rules that run counter to the Torah itself? As I wrote above, Greenberg was going to win regardless of whether his party engaged in petty (and not-so-petty) lies in the service of leading him to victory. But let’s suppose that the election had been close, and the only way for Greenberg to win was through violating the Torah: would that in any way justify slander? Have we fallen so far as to actually believe that the Torah permits anti-Torah methods as a way to reach a desired, even righteous goal? As my teacher, Rabbi Moshe Simkovich, told me last night: the ends justifying the means is a Stalinist teaching, and antithetical to our Torah. If winning a municipal election requires slander - then those who follow the Torah should be prepared to lose that election.  But apparently, in the service of winning elections, Torah law and Torah values are a secondary concern. The ends, after all, justify the means. We see this again and again and again. It’s just one more reason that the mixture of Torah and political parties is a disaster for Israel - and most certainly a disaster for anyone whose goal is making the Torah great and glorious, l’hagdil Torah ul’haadira.

 זו תורה וזו שכרה