Religious Violence 77

Therefore, there is no permission to harm or attack a Sab­bath-desecrator if the zealousness is not a spontaneous emo­tional outburst. The carefully planned activity organized in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, such as Me’ah She’arim , far from the Ramot road, were not spontaneous by any standard and could hardly satisfy the halakhic criterion that licenses those zealous for the Lord to give vent to their pent-up feelings.

Rabbi Hirsch , other ultra-Orthodox leaders, and their fol­lowers who hurled stones and bottles at vehicles clearly believe that they may desecrate the Sabbath in order to keep others from desecrating it. No one has ever stated the source of this permis­sion, probably for the simple reason that it is not to be found anywhere in the codified halakhah. Not only are these actions by the ultra-Orthodox crimes against the laws of the state, they are also severe violations of the Sabbath .

It is permitted to desecrate the Sabbath for only one reason— to save lives; that is, saving human life(pikkuah nefesh) takes prece­dence over observance of the Sabbath . The underlying principle is based on the Biblical verse:“And the Children of Israel shall keep the Shabbat ”(Exodus 31:16) which is interpreted by the Talmud to mean“The Torah tells us: desecrate one Sabbath for his sake so that he may observe many Sabbaths”(BT Yoma 85b).

Desecrating the holy Sabbath to save a human life aims in fact ataugmenting its holiness through the observance of the Sabbath and other precepts in the future. The desecration of the Sabbath by the ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem does not and cannot increase the prospects of Sabbath observance in the future or augment its sanctity. In fact it has quite the opposite effect, because it leads to

| further radicalization of the nonreligious population as well.

Instead of educating nonreligious people and helping them

| experience the wonderful value of Sabbath observance, ultra­| Orthodox zealousness and extremism repulse them and push | them further away from Jewish tradition.

The periodical of the religious kibbutz movement(Hakibbutz Hadati) published the following evaluation of the results of the Zealots’ approach:“Seclusive ultra-Orthodoxy as the option of Scape, weakness, and abandoning the majority of the people is

|“+ a prescription for failure. It is a fact that the vast majority of

the secular and even antireligious adult population was a product

| of the ultra- Orthodox path but fell away from it in the recent gen­

erations of secularism.”?