The Weekly Scandal: “Blow up the Supreme Court”

There is hardly a week that goes by without a scandal or a struggle over religion and state. The weekly scandal, which accompanied last week's Independence Day celebration, is the video clip in which MK Yitzhak Pindrus, chair of the UTJ (United Torah Judaism, the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox faction in the Knesset) is seen expressing his desire to blow up the Supreme Court: “You know what my dream is? To bring a D9 [bulldozer] and blow up the building.”

Uri Regev 10/05/2022 22:00

Tags: Yitzhak Pindrus · Supreme Court · United Torah Judaism

Yitzhak Pindrus (source: Wikipedia)

The wording chosen by Pindrus caused the current storm, but the problem is not in the violent words themselves but in the perceptions that stand behind them, which characterize not only Pindrus but all his partners in the ultra-Orthodox parties and also many of the Zionist religious leaders. For example, MK Moshe Arbel [Shas], publicly criticized the way Pindrus expressed himself, but his smooth rhetoric concealed the fact that his party, too, is partner to the struggle against the Supreme Court and seeks to undermine its authority and independence.

Anyone who reads the newspapers of these parties knows that they often engage in vile attacks on the civil judiciary and Zionism in their internal discourse, as well as attacking democratic values such as freedom of religion, pluralism, and equality. This ideology feeds their political action. When reading Arbel’s criticism of the way in which Pindrus expressed himself, we might do well to remember that it was none other than the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the most important leader of Shas, who repeatedly incited against the Supreme Court in the past. The supreme court judges, he said, are ''wicked . . . empty-headed and wanton evildoers…whoever presides over a court of gentiles, and judges using the laws of gentiles, gives up the Torah of Moses, and is called wicked. They judge according to the laws of the nations, not the Torah. They accept the testimony of women. This is against the Torah.” Rabbi Yosef related an incident presented to him, in which a couple married with an Israel court judge as a witness. Rabbi Yosef ordered them “to marry again, with a different ketubah. That ketubah is invalid. Why? He [the witness] is wicked, and incompetent to testify.” He went on to label such a marriage invalid, likening it to living in sin with a prostitute.

This is one and the same Pindrus who prescribes violence and killing as a worthy solution to the challenges of our era, and from the Knesset podium recommended that in order to achieve peace, those who cause assimilation should be murdered, much like Phinehas, the zealot priest described in the Bible.

Getting back to Pindrus, This is one and the same Pindrus who prescribes violence and killing as a worthy solution to the challenges of our era, and from the Knesset podium recommended that in order to achieve peace, those who cause assimilation should be murdered, much like Phinehas, the zealot priest described in the Bible. This is the one and the same Pindrus who describes the female soldiers who made Aliyah from the former Soviet Union and who converted via Orthodox conversion in the IDF as "Shiksas" [gentiles] who cannot be considered Jewish, and if anyone marries them, the groom’s father should mourn him as if he had died. This is the same Pindrus who initiated a “donkey parade” to counter the Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Pindrus dreams of the bombing of the Supreme Court a worthy solution for eliminating the civil judiciary to make way for a Torah State, governed by Rabbinic Halacha. However, one cringes at the political cynicism in Israel that views a party based on these values as a worthy and desirable partner in forming a national Zionist government coalition.