Sunday, November 29, 2009

The many facets of spitting

Last Friday, a few hours before Shabbat, I dropped off a home-made challah at my friend's house. She had asked me to make one for her and I was more than happy to have an excuse to make extra. When I arrived at her house to give it to her, I couldn't help but hear one of her children crying -- it was coming from the upstairs window. I also heard her husband's voice disciplining the child who had apparently been ...... spitting.

When my friend came to the door she was slightly uncomfortable with the kiddy bellows coming from upstairs, but as someone with older children than she has, I couldn't help but laugh because I only wish that spitting was the biggest issue on my child-rearing plate.

When I saw the spitting culprit in synagogue the next morning, she looked none the worse for wear so I can only assume she learned her lesson and was now getting on with her spit-free life!

If that had been the end of the spitting issue I wouldn't be sitting here writing about it. However, when I turned on my computer today and started to peruse the JPost, I stumbled across an article by Larry Derfner about religious Jews in the Old City (of Jerusalem) spitting on the leaders of other religious groups.

Last Thursday spitting wasn't even an issue, and here I am on Sunday, and I just can't seem to get away from spitting. Since when did spitting make such a big comeback? I must have been out of town when it happened.

Okay, I am getting to the point.

I thought it was a typical right-of-passage when I heard the four-year-old spitter getting a talking-to from her father about the unacceptability of spitting. It's a typical lesson for kids that age and heaven knows I have given that lecture a couple of dozen times myself. I am willing to bet that almost every parent has. And while it might seem obvious to a generally well-adjusted adult that you can't go around spitting on people, apparently that message never got to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

When a senior Armenian Orthodox cleric tells the Jerusalem Post that he has been spit at or on at least 20 times in the last 10 years by Orthodox Jews, I am left speechless. And apparently it isn't directed only at this one cleric. The same fellow reports that it is a common experience for every Christian cleric (of both sexes) who walks around the Old City in traditional cleric garb.

Where the heck were these spitters when they were kids? Didn't their parents discipline them when they spit on someone? I can't help but think that they did not. Spitting has probably been around since the beginning of time, but I am willing to bet that for the past 1000 years it was poor child's play, not adults who should know better.

I am really angry at these spitters. And I am not going to let them off the hook as I did my cute little four-year-old spitter because frankly, their actions are pathetic. These Orthodox fanatics don't spit on Muslims ... oh, no, that might cause an international incident or a Muslim might retaliate. But somehow spitting on Christians is okay, because in Israel they are a small and quiet minority.

I really hate these stories because they show a side of some Jewish people that is so embarassing and so easily an excuse for anti-semitism. I know that these spitters are not my people and not my Jews but the fact that they show so little tolerance to people who are different from them, speaks volumes about what they have forgotten about the collective past of their own people -- my people.

These same people wear the outwardly defining clothing of religious people, so you would think that it would make them think twice before acting so badly. (Like the kid with red hair who has to think twice before participating in a shady activity because he will always be easily identifiable as the kid with the red hair.) But apparently not. I think that the religious fanatics see their clothing as their free-pass. They think that because they wear those clothes that they are better than other people and that they are not measured by the same standards; they are above those standards.

They think that they are the arbiters of who is acceptable and who is not. While a four-year-old spitter is just learning the ropes of life, a religiously-educated and supposedly observant adult spitter is someone whose father never took them aside to explain

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