Indicadores Ambientales de Residuos Sólidos

It is interesting to note the many different foci in Shas officials' answers to what Shas is about and what their ‘revolution’ is concentrated on. Sometimes the social and economical situation of the Sephardim in Israel is pointed out as the most important issue, other times it is the Jewish character of the state or the supremacy of the Halacha of Ovadia Yosef over the Ashkenazi Halacha. Shas does not appear to have a set type of lifestyle people have to follow in order to be accepted as Sephardi or religious. They operate with room for personal preferences and accommodation. This is illustrated by the fact that Shas official representatives answered with their personal interpretation on different issues. An example is Itzhak Avidani’s personal preference to have female representatives of Shas in the Knesset, another is Itzhik Sudri’s way of formulating his answers: “I think this is what Shas means in this issue [...]” and “From my understanding [...]”. The spokesmen do not express any uneasiness or feeling of deceiving Shas by these answers.

Moreover, between spokesman Itzhik Sudri, welfare institution manager Carmella Naor, Member of Knesset Shlomo Benizri and official Itzhak Avidani, there are at times direct contradictions in their understanding and explanation of what Shas is. Apparently, to my informants this diversity, and what might seem to the outsider as lack of a focal point (or points) and common ground, is not considered a problem. If I confronted them with the different or even contradictory answers of other informants, they would either see this as natural according to the position of the other person, privately or officially, or they would agree with the statement of the other informant and withdraw their own answer. This last type of reaction often occurred if the informant had a lower position in the hierarchy of Shas. He or she would then easily withdraw his or her statement with the explanation: “If such and such a person said that […]”, and seem to feel at ease with this. For example the Shas officials working with the Shas Members of Knesset would always concede to the positions of the Member of Knesset. And, if pointed out, everybody would agree with the statement of Ovadia Yosef if this was in disagreement with any of his or her own answers.

From these interviews it is complicated to deduce which agenda is the most important and what is the one unifying element in Shas. My informants have described

Shas as: “Sephardi”, “Torahni”, “Jewish”, “religious”, “Israeli”, “Zionist”, “not political”, “there to help Ovadia Yosef reinforce the Sephardi Halacha”, “modern”, “against secularism”, “against a Halachic state”, “not extreme” and finally “Haredi”. How should we understand a party-movement and the motive power(s) behind it when the people involved do not seem to have one answer or one major agenda they agree upon?

According to Willis (Willis, 1992:3), the pan-Sephardi identity, which is the result of the religious change Shas represents, creates a new sense of a common past backing a group identity that he calls “Sephardism” or “pan-Sephardi unity”. This group identity is the drive behind the party, not any political ideology, and this is the reason why Shas is able to cooperate with different coalition partners from the right to the left. According to Willis, Shas is a product of identity politics, not of ideological debates.

In his new book Kimmerling (2001:194) writes that Shas is the most important new political-cultural movement in Israel and describes Shas as a “Mizrahi traditionalist- revivalist movement”.108 _{Kimmerling defines traditionalism as the relationship between}

religious beliefs and commandments to individual behaviour. In addition to this, traditionalism provides a separate belief system consisting of formal and popular/folk religion, wherein the folk religion represents the newly invented past, that is considered glorious.

An Created Past

When Shas refers to the past as ‘glorious’ and ‘uncorrupted’, it is, like many other religious movements in modern time, not necessarily referring to a real past, but rather to a created past, which again can be either of religious, theological, social or traditional focus depending on who is talking and the person’s relationship with Shas. Kimmerling defines this past as an ‘invented past’ and according to him the believers might confuse the invented parts of this past with the real past, a common confusion for human beings to make while looking back to the past. According to Friedman (1993:48-164), the Ashkenazi Haredi consideration of the traditional Jewish community before modernisation and secularisation as the fullest expression of Jewish society, fosters “conservative fundamentalism”. He characterises “conservative fundamentalism” as an anti Zionist Haredi movement. Heilman (2000:170) writes that Haredim perceives “the world in a process of moral decay” – “the ancient were always superior to the

108 _{Mizrahi here means Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries, for detail on term see the}

contemporaries”(Heilman, 2000:234). The Haredim of today are keeping the memory of the venerated Jews from the past alive. According to Heilman (2000), to Haredim nothing is considered so old it is outdated, including the ancient lawmakers. The Haredim are looking and aiming for the pure and unadulterated Judaism.

In Shas there is more than one way to understand the concept of ‘the past’, whereas in Ashkenazi Haredi movements the past is more likely identifiable with a precise historical situation and circumstances in East and West Europe before the Enlightenment. This can be explained by the fact that Sephardim in Shas come from many different countries and thus have different experiences before immigration to Israel. Another important point is that the legal and religious traditional development of Ovadia Yosef is based on a desire of unification and wholeness, whereas the result of the Ashkenazi Haredi development was sectarianism and even competition among the different positions. Shas does not forfeit a conservative defence of Judaism, but rather use history and tradition politically to cope with the challenges of the present context. This is the policies and method of interpretation of the Halacha followed by Shas in customising the tradition to the new modern circumstances. Shas uses the Sephardi traditional culture selectively to be able to embrace a modern society and context. This practice is better characterised as ‘self- renewal’, instead of adopting the Western concept of ‘modernisation’.

This part of the interpretation represents the reformation within the religion as understood by Gellner. In this case the ideology and Halacha of Shas is put together to represent a larger and more unified tradition and religious culture of the Sephardim in Israel, as opposed to ethnically divided traditions and congregations of Sephardim in the Diaspora and in the land of Israel before the establishment of the state. The formation of this new ideology also shows a selective use of the Sephardi and Jewish culture in producing new interpretations of the religion adjusted to fit modern society. Further, this part of the interpretation also corresponds to Beyer’s (1997) explanation of how religious leaders find functional ways of making religion necessary and enlarge its domain in our modern global world, by providing norms, values and collective identity that no other institution in society can provide.

Future perspective

By referring to the past the slogan is also oriented towards the future, where the ideal and realities of the past, through Shas’ work, will be materialised. Shas officials understand this materialisation as their “revolution”, whether oriented towards the religious piety of

the individual Jew, the status of the Sephardi Halacha or towards the situation of the Sephardim in Israel; it is part of the transformation by Shas of restoring the glorious past in today’s Israel. Shas officials concentrate on the Israeli society in their work “to restore the tradition and culture” as Itzhik Sudri put it, instead of going back to the situation before they immigrated to Israel. Whereas the Ashkenazi Haredim are organising their community in the reshaping of the organisational forms of the European ghetto, Shas is shaping Israel today.

6.6 Summing Up

In relation to this chapter the ‘measures’ used to investigate Shas’ relationship with modernisation are its understanding of past and future and its relationship with traditional religious power institutions and to the central state, here understood as the Zionist ideology and the Israeli democratic system of government. Shas’ relationship with the central state in terms of practical politics will be discussed in chapter 9. The crux of Shas’ slogan is to restore the Sephardi tradition and culture in accordance with the wording: ‘To Restore the Crown to Its Ancient Glory’. This refers to the Halacha and observance of individuals and to the socio-economic situation of the Sephardi population in Israel.

The Crown in Shas’ slogan thus refers to different entities; it can be the Sephardi Halacha or the entire Torah, or the religious observance of the individual Jew. According to Shas, these entities have deteriorated in status or in the individuals’ conduct, and they must be restored. The restoration implies a return to something in the past that is understood by Shas as glorious, in comparison with the situation today. However, as shown above, Shas does not operate with a given historical past, which should be copied or enacted, as the Ashkenazi Haredim do. Rather, Shas looks back to different historical and the religious legal ideas of Yosef Caro to set the ideals and values for the future, which they reinterpret into their political, social, economic and modernised surroundings. I interpret this to indicate that Shas looks to the future, not to the past and therefore can be said to promote modernisation. This difference from Ashkenazi Haredim is a result of the different surroundings in which the two Jewish identities have taken form.

By way of Shas, Ovadia Yosef wishes to undo the discrimination he and his contemporaries have experienced from the Ashkenazi Israeli traditional religious power institutions, both from the national religious institutions of Israel and the Haredi institutions. Shas’ relationship with the Haredi religious establishment is complex, especially in terms of the connotation of Haredi that classifies a certain level of religious

observance and piety, that Shas sometimes uses to define its religious level. Another issue is the historical fact that, albeit the discrimination Sephardim felt in the Ashkenazi Haredi institutions, they were welcome into these institutions after their immigration to Israel. Also Shas’ relationship with the national religious institutions is complex because of the dominance of Ashkenazi traditions in the unified Halacha for Israeli Jews. Ovadia Yosef and Shas fight for equal, or rather complete, emphasis on the Sephardi Halacha and traditions for Israeli Jews. At the same time Ovadia Yosef and Shas have an established relationship with the national religious institutions, compared to the Haredim. The consequences of this is that Shas can use its influence on two levels: the national religious level and in its own institutions. Thereby it reaches more people, and a greater variety of people, than the Ashkenazi Haredim, and moreover Shas is thus part of the decision- making of the national agenda. This partaking in the national centre is also pointed out by Chetrit (2000:26)109 _{as one of the major differences between Shas and Agudat Yisrael.}

As discussed, the consequences of the room for different opinions and individual interpretation expressed by my informants in their diverse understandings of the centrality of the foci of Shas’ slogan, as to what is the most important focus, showed that Shas does not operate with one set agenda. As pointed out in this chapter, the individual opinion has to step down if it is in conflict with that of Ovadia Yosef or of other more prominent leader figures. I interpret the diverse foci, with the adjoined different references to the past and Shas officials’ freedom of opinion, to indicate Shas as a party-movement in the making that has not fixed a particular set of ideology and policy, but rather is developing this as it interacts in the Israeli society. This again is in contrast to the Ashkenazi Haredim who have had their set agenda since the establishment of their parties and organisation, namely to work against modernisation. Shas is creating modernising effects in this context because it is looking to the future that it is aiming to mould.