The Human Spirit: Sound the Trumpets. It's Time to Vote.
November 6, 2008
My grandson Tzur, a first-grader, asked me recently if I'd attended a Hakhel ceremony, the biblically mandated gathering of men, women and children that marks the end of the seven-year shmita cycle by top officials reading from the Book of Deuteronomy.
In his rural regional school, the year began with such a ritual. The role of the high priest was played by a prominent local rabbi and the head of the regional council acted the part of the biblical king.
Tzur related the last with a smile. Even a six-year old realizes that there's a gap between today's council head and a king of yore. Still, you have to applaud an educational program that introduces its first-graders to its elected local officials and so elevates them, even though voting is so many years away for the youngsters.
It's not even an election year for the regional council, unlike in Jerusalem, where we get to vote this week. I cannot fathom why fewer than half of those eligible cast their ballots in the last municipal elections. We 527,627 Jerusalemites who are eligible to vote have the privilege this week of choosing not a king, but the mayor and city council of one of the most important cities in the world. The leaders of Jerusalem deal not only with issues of garbage collection and public parades, but hold the attention of the world.
Here's my opportunity to urge us all, no matter our political views, to vote on Tuesday.
OUR BELOVED Jerusalem is a city with manifold challenges - low per-pupil investment in education, little affordable housing, and time-squandering traffic jams exacerbated by the endless digging of a light rail to nowhere to mention just a few. Household break-ins have become so common that we swap robbery details with our friends. We remain a target of terror. During the intifada, most of the terror attacks in our city were carried out by outsiders. In the past year, we have experienced eight terror attacks, most of them perpetrated by fellow Jerusalemites. Just two weeks ago, the children in an elementary school in Gilo witnessed a murderous terror attack from their school windows.
Jerusalem women have to contend with additional paradoxes. In a city where the speaker of the Knesset is a woman, the president of the Supreme Court is a woman and a serious contender for prime minister is a woman, we have been forced to sit in the back of the bus on certain lines and to perform cloaked in a dance performance organized by the municipality. We have to go to court to get permission to have campaign photos on public buses.
In Jerusalem, voting for mayor is the easy part. The four candidates' photos are displayed on bridges, buses and billboards and we know what they stand for. But each of us will get two ballots on Tuesday, one for the mayor and one for members of the city council. Choosing the city council can make your head spin.
I CLIPPED Peggy Cidor's excellent article on the vying parties in last week's In Jerusalem to make sense of the party lists. Like the mayor, these men and women also hold their positions for half a decade. Six of them are chosen for paid positions; others are volunteers. Heavy responsibilities remain for all of them. Nonetheless, they remain oddly shrouded in mystery. Eleven days before elections, not even the most intrepid In Jerusalem reporter was successful in securing the names of those standing on the powerful United Torah Judaism list. They remained faceless. Are they anonymous and interchangeable? Don't we deserve to know who they are and what they think? We often complain that our national government is hampered by the lack of accountability to a constituency. But in these municipal elections we are even further removed from the actual men and women who will represent us in making key decisions about our city.
The opposite should be true.
Members of the Wake Up Jerusalem list did indeed try to introduce themselves, but the Canaan advertising firm which won the tender for bus electioneering refused their posters because the candidates included women. When I spoke to party head Rachel Azaria Fraenkel a week before the elections, she was using valuable energy and resources to fight a legal battle with Canaan instead of campaigning. There should have been across-the-board condemnation of this gender discrimination by all the mayoral candidates.
The majority of Jerusalemites are women, of course, but the parties don't seem to notice. A young man representing the National Union-National Religious Party canvassed me recently for my vote. When I asked how many women were on the list, he proudly pointed to the placement of a woman in the third spot of the top six. He seemed genuinely surprised and disappointed that I would expect more from a modern religious party which has always had an array of spectacular women in its ranks, particularly in Jerusalem.
Not that the other major parties are better. Whoever comes forward on the United Torah Judaism candidates' list, we can be sure none of them will be women. There's not a single woman on the roster at Shas.
But before you blame the religious again, please note that not Meretz nor the Likud nor Social Justice, nor For the Sake of Jerusalem, nor Green Leaf nor Nir Barkat's Jerusalem Shall Succeed is running a woman in one of the two top slots.
Certainly, gender equity isn't the only criterion for choosing a party. But let us remember that a 2004 report on more than 350 Fortune 500 companies found that those with the highest representation of women in top management had performed better financially than companies with the lowest women's representation, as measured by return on equity.
In the biblical Hakhel ceremony, all men, women and even children are commanded to gather before their political and religious leadership. That's not only for us to see our leaders, but for them to see us.
Sound the trumpets. My fellow citizens, it's time to vote.
