Last night I escorted my son’s sixth grade class for a tour of Jerusalem that ended after midnight in the old city by the Western Wall.  The tour, which took us through some of the most staunchly religious areas, solidified my belief that the fundamental problem in this country is the religion.  Some who read this might take offense, but please hear me out as I am not anti-religion, rather I am trying to convey that religious people tend to miss the point of what the religion truly means.

I was brought up in an Orthodox environment, but from a very young age I had problems with the unwritten tenets by which the community I grew up in lived.  Make no mistake, the people I grew up with were good people – just a little misguided as to what the whole point of this thing we call life is.   They believed in the words of their rabbi like it was the word of God; they frowned upon co-mingling with other branches of the religion, let alone other religions altogether; they ostracized those that questioned a rule and banished those that verbalized dissent.  The community I was brought up in was similar to many of the neighborhoods we visited last night, and seeing it again made me realize how much we, as a nation, just do not get “it” – and by “it” I mean everything.

One of the cornerstones of the religion, and in my opinion the main objective, is to “love your neighbor as yourself” – it is from this statement in the bible where we get the Golden Rule which is to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.”  (It is worthy to note that by some great coincidence, the Chinese, Buddhists, Hindus, Ancient Babylonians, Ancient Egyptians and virtually every other culture have something similar to this rule – go figure).  And yet, while this sounds good on paper, few who practice the religion actually abide by it.

Our tour yesterday took us through the outer fringes of the Mea Shearim neighborhood to see two synagogues from a Jewish community with roots in Central Asia, the Bucharian’s.  Mea Shearim, home to some of Judaism’s most fanatical Hasidim, is famous for the inhospitable way in which they treat tourists – or as they call them, trespassers.  You see, even though we are all Jewish, they are better Jews than we are, and therefore we cannot walk amongst them in their native habitat.  So much was the animosity we faced that as people walked by they mumbled angrily in Yiddish looking down at the ground and spitting on the floor as they passed us – a few were even so bold as to look up, never making eye-contact though, and screaming in Hebrew to “leave my home!”

Now, it is no secret that I cannot stand most Haredim, and it is specifically for this “I’m holier than thou” / “you are not good enough for me” attitude.  Their leaders tell them not to engage with the rest of the world – they lead sedentary lives secluded from civilization – all the while living within civilization.  They ignore what is around them and have less than zero tolerance for anything, and anyone that is different.  My gut reaction last night was to yell back at those that were cursing our group of fellow Jews interested in expanding our knowledge of our vast culture, to point out that my taxes enable them to exist; that they have bastardized what was once a beautiful religion; that they repress their women and thus violate the core principles for which they think they stand for.  But I held back, it’s not worth it – not worth the potential embarrassment to my son had I done so, and not worth the waste of air as they would not hear me anyway – they are lost in their own little bubble.

So, here we are back to the original point – the Golden Rule – Leviticus 19:18 – and the reason why we are in more trouble than we think.  With the population of Israel now tallied at just under eight million, and a good part of that wonderful number living in their own little world thinking they are the true believers and true bearers of the title of Jew – not believing they have any responsibility to the rest of the population and shunning anyone who dares challenge their claim – we cannot survive as a people.

Religion was a beautiful idea once upon a time, but unfortunately man killed it – and then they starting killing each other – and so the cycle began. If we as a people, as a nation, cannot learn to respect those that are different from within our own society – our own blood – how on earth can we learn to respect those from the outside?  I am no better than the next man; I am flawed in many aspects.  I do not believe I am more right than anyone else – I believe what I believe.  I am not a religious man but I respect those that are and I try to teach my children what I believe to be the key to what the Torah was trying to teach us – respect your fellow man, even, no, especially if they are different.

This country was founded as home for the Jewish people – not a Sharia type state that follows the letter of the law created millennia ago for a different age and time.  We are Jews – and this is our home.  The Heredim are no more right than the National Religious, or the Conservatives, or Reform, or the non-religious and vice versa.  We are Jews, this is our home – and we will lose it – from the inside - if we cannot learn to respect each other’s beliefs.  Think of this as a litmus test for peace with our neighbors.

May the deity that we refer to as God help us all.

When I lived back in the States, one of things I took for granted was the mid-afternoon daily briefings from the white house – the Americanized version of Wednesday “Prime Minster’s Questions” in England – the only difference being in the US, it was seldom the head of state answering the queries and it was never the congress posing them.  Nonetheless, I took them for granted as it was an everyday occurrence and more often than not, much of what was being discussed was quite boring as it related to everyday life in the States.

As I live in Israel these days the longing for information makes me lament the days when I would listen to the likes of George Stephanopoulos, Joe Lockhart and Ari Fleischer spinning the day’s events – and to be certain, they were spinning the White House’s angle on things, but it gave me the opportunity to know the information and form my own opinions irrespective of what the administration’s take on it was.   This is a big problem with Israel, the lack of information and governmental transparency – real or feigned – on a regular and consistent basis.

I believe this is important in a country so close to the world spotlight, and as small as we are we are often on the global stage and more often than not, putting on a crappy show.  In fact, the entire PR system in this country as it relates to the government is absurd, if not outright detrimental to our image. Take our esteemed Foreign Minister, Comrade Lieberman, for example.  In the face of rising tensions with what was arguably our closest ally in the region, Turkey, Lieberman lets leak that Israel will start talking and cooperating with a Turkish opposition entity and recognized terrorist organization, the PKK.  Not only was this statement inflammatory, as it was blasted in international circles there was no effort to try and spin it a different way and no mechanism in place to do so either.  Almost every report I read about it from foreign press all had the same line it, “up until the time of this printing, there has been no official response from the Israeli government.”

We (Israeli’s) live in the dark most of time regarding practically every decision being made in government – aside from the fact that most of us have no say and what we believe and feel and stand for makes no difference in how policy is shaped.  There is no accountability – and no one to tell us what happened today and answers questions as to why decisions were made one way or another.  We do have a highly scripted cabinet meeting once a week in which nothing really happens – how can it when the Prime Minster surrounds himself with the people he appointed?  Rarely is there any challenge to the decisions the Prime Minister makes in these meetings, and if there is – it is cast aside as a dissenting U.S. Supreme Court opinion is, a footnote not worthy of major headlines.

This country needs accountability, and that starts with a daily briefing open to reporters both domestic and foreign.  We need to explain to the world why we do what we do when we do it – and stop acting like a typical Middle Eastern Country with scripted photo-ops and pressureless engagements with the media at large.   The problem with Israel is that while we culturally try to identify with the West, we run our affairs like our neighbors.  In the era of the so called Arab Spring, where images of Mubarak, Asad and Kaddafi sitting around their cabinet tables smiling as if nothing is really going dominates the news coverage,one would think we would try and distance ourselves from similar images.  The world, our world in specific is exploding around us, we are alienating ourselves from almost every friend we have historically had, decisions are made on our behalf that are not decisions that most of us would make – and we have no idea why they are being made.

Freedom of the press in Israel does exist, do not get this wrong as our press and our public is free to say what it wants without fear of being strung up or shot in a dark alley one day.  But our freedom of information is severely limited by a governmental structure that does not offer any accountability and that has over its 63 year history failed to rationally explain practically anything to anyone, with few exceptions.  I go back to my statement that we act like our neighbors – in the way we make decisions and don’t make any effort to explain them and act dismayed when people question them.  Not everyone is happy with every decision, but a government that can account for the decision – a government that opens itself up to criticism not only in a newspaper but in person – a government that rationally lays out its logic for a decision is more respected.

We need better PR.  We need more transparency.  And we need a government that has mechanisms in place to account for its actions and convey its opinions.  As a first step towards reforming this flawed and corrupt system, this would go a long way to doing that.

Just imagine a Prime Minister or his Press Secretary having to answer in public why an unqualified man was just named to head a major post in the government.  Just imagine having to be held accountable for every decision made – and having the opportunity to address criticism of our policies in a logical and coherent manner each and every day.  For me, this is a good first step.