Answer is here.

For the record, about 50% of Israelis fast and attend synagogue on Yom Kippur.

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2011/10/08/yom-kippur-and-the-death-of-the-jews/

Well, it makes a heck of a lot more sense than his usual fare.

Courtesy of Dry Bones

As the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur, approaches, I would like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere apologies to any of you I may have hurt or offended with my words or actions.

In the meantime, here is non-Jewish singer Johnny Mathis singing Kol Nidre. Because it’s beautiful and random, kind of like this blog.

Tzom Kal and Gmar Chatima Tova to all my Jewish readers.

Is the whole world turning Jewish? Here’s Peaches Geldof (right) sporting a kippah at a pre-Yom Kippur meal with of-the-faith boyfriend, film director Eli Roth, in a picture posted on Twitter. (Or else she was indulging in a little papal emulation).

Another celebrity faster was actress and Kabbalah student Demi Moore who joined Jewish husband Ashton Kutcher in a day of abstinence before they ended their fast in Applebees Grill Bar.

And also getting in on the festive spirit, if you can call it that, was Boy George who tweeted that he had observed the fast even though not Jewish. It was ” a starting point to get even more brutal with my current diet”, he said. Although I doubt his chosen fast-breaker would find few takers in Hendon: cherry tomatoes – even if he did find them “orgasmic”

Having a girlfriend called Peaches on a fast day has to be difficult.

Simply beautiful.

A post by Brian of London: this is a mild reworking of an article I posted a year ago.

Tonight the Yom Kippur Day of Attonment for Jews begins. Many people know that Jews don’t eat or drink for around 25 hours (sun down to sun down) but few know what actually happens on Yom Kippur in modern, non-religious, Israel. What I’m going to write below, many Jews in the UK don’t know. I didn’t know this till I moved here!

Maybe it isn’t so clear to Jews or others outside of Israel what happens on Yom Kippur in Israel. Cars stop for the day. They just stop. It looks like a post apocalypse movie where the oil ran out one night and all we have left are bicycles and roller blades.

As far as I can tell (people are very vague on this) there really is no enforceable law against driving, it just isn’t done. The police could stop you, but they’d just ask why you were driving, tell you to be careful and let you go. There is no religious police to enforce this kind of thing in Israel as it isn’t a religious state.

Now it is true that this happens on every Sabbath in places where observant, religious Jews live in large majority: parts of Jerusalem, highly religious towns like Tzfat (Safed, Zefad, whatever) and many others: but on a regular Sabbath in Tel Aviv Friday night traffic is bad and the restaurants serving pork or shell fish are full to overflowing (some of them like to combine pork, prawns and dairy products in one dish to break as many of the Kosher rules as possible in one go).

On Yom Kippur, however, everything stops. Non-observant Jews and observant Jews alike, just hide the car keys. For sure, if your kid falls off his bike or your wife goes into labor and needs the hospital nobody (from both those communities) would think twice about driving the car to the hospital.

But on Yom Kippur the non-religious Jews just organize their lives such that they don’t need to drive.

For sure most of them will not fast, and they probably stock up on downloaded movies or DVD’s because the state TV channels shut down (but there’s plenty of other cable channels).

But they just don’t DRIVE their cars. The air smells good, the visibility gets better and from sundown to sundown the streets are full of people strolling or cycling along 10 lane highways. People have found a way to organize their lives that for just one day a year, nobody drives except for emergencies.

I left my apartment to have a look last year and I saw one pickup truck and 3 policecars moving. Slowly. Through the crowds of children on bikes on roads equivalent to the M1 or the London North Circular.

Below is a slideshow of what that looks like in Tel Aviv that I found on YouTube, there are many more videos but this kind of gives a good idea.

Slideshow Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv on YouTube

Video of streets without cars

So why is being Jewish so different when you’re in Israel. Well there has never in my recollection (and when I’ve searched) been a Jew in England who’s publicly got upset by anyone eating, even in front of him, on Yom Kippur. Jews have never, and will never I assure you, ask you to stop driving for a day. It just won’t ever happen. Even in our own country this isn’t a law, its just something the vast majority of Jews want to do because over here, it just feels right.

That is the difference between living as a Jew in England and as a Jew in Israel: here we can just BE Jewish and the calendar and the customs and norms push us into being culturally Jewish even if we don’t want to study the Torah 9 hours a day.

Jews don’t want anywhere else, we just want this one tiny little place to feel Jewish in.

Gmar Chatima Tova to you all!

Blogging will resume some time after Yom Kippur ends, tomorrow evening Israel time.

However, for 5 days now there have been riots in Acco all from an incident on the eve of Yom Kippur, well after Jewish residents had locked up their cars. It’s in all the major news outlets but they’re nearly all missing the crucial background.

The point is that any car, driving toward crowds of children riding their bikes on roads that are EXPECTED to be car free would look like a terror attack. It’s not about the kind of phony offense of religious sensibilities that even the Jerusalem Post is touting. It’s about threat to life. The rioting Jews are not religious: “… loutish Jewish youths – overwhelmingly not haredi …” (same Jpost link as below).

Muslims are trying to legitimise their own phony Muslim right not to be offended by equating it with a Jewish right and as usual the bigger picture is being missed.

If he’d driven past the people in North Tel Aviv where I am (who were picnicking in the parks) they wouldn’t have been “offended”, they’d have been pissed off that someone might hit their children.

From Jpost’s editorial today:

Just what Jamal was doing on Yom Kippur eve in a Jewish neighborhood – where virtually no cars except emergency vehicles are on the road – is in dispute. His claim is that, accompanied by his son and the son’s friend, he was picking up his daughter from her fiancé’s place. The Jewish youths say he was blasting music and smoking a nargila in an act of ostentatious provocation. The initial police report backed the youths’ version and suggested that Jamal was also intoxicated.

The last few “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” car attacks in Jerusalem have all been stopped with a gun by off duty security people or private citizens. Israelis have very little faith in on duty security services tackling Muslims. So many (even lefties) have told me that the law is not working equitably for Muslims (which is the inverse perception the rest of the world has!). Starting a riot, however, is wrong in every circumstance.

This whole incident smells like a manufactured Jihadi provocation directed from the local Mosque. I would not have been surprised if they were looking for the driver (and even his young son) to be shot (you can imagine this would be like hitting the jackpot for people who sacrifice their children).

Some comments on Israellycool about the roads in the Galil are very revealing showing that the ever increasing percentage of Muslim Arabs in the area has meant this trend (of non-religious observance of no driving on YK) has not really got going. Its the quiet Jihad but its all still Jihad in the end.

The comments at the JPost are amazing too, Israelis are really, really angry with their government and multiculturalism and this is the most dangerous place in the world to have tried this nonsense:

9. ET TU, Jerusalem Post editor?

You have misread the Acre riots. And you are clueless as to what Jews in Israel are feeling . We are afraid of these Arabs living among us. These Arabs that we are FORCED to live with . These Arabs that should be arrested for their treason against the state. They hate us and are only waiting for the opportunity to murder us. But this “mulit-cultural” nonsense is forced down our throats. the Jews are once again not even allowed to defend themselves in their own country.

As far as I can tell (people are very vague on this) there really is no enforceable law against driving, it just isn’t done. The police could stop you, but they’d just ask why you were driving, tell you to be careful and let you go. There is no religious police to enforce this kind of thing in Israel as it isn’t a religious state.

Now it is true that this happens in places where observant, religious Jews live in large majority: parts of Jerusalem, highly religious towns like Tzfat (Safed, Zefad, whatever) and many others on every Sabbath: but on a regular Sabbath in Tel Aviv Friday night traffic is bad and the restaurants serving pork or shell fish are full to overflowing.

On Yom Kippur, however, everything stops. Non-observant Jews and observant Jews alike, just hide the car keys. For sure, if your kid falls off his bike and needs the hospital nobody (from both those communities) would think twice about driving the car to the hospital.

But on Yom Kippur the non-religious Jews just organize their lives such that they don’t need to drive.

For sure many of them will not fast, and they probably stock up on DVD’s because the state TV channels shut down (but there’s plenty of other cable channels).

But they just don’t DRIVE their cars. The air smells good, the visibility gets better and from sundown to sundown the streets are full of people strolling or cycling along 10 lane highways. People have found a way to organize their lives that for just one day a year, nobody drives except for emergencies.

I left my apartment to have a look this year and I saw one pickup truck and 3 police cars moving. Slowly. Through the crowds of children on bikes.

Below is a slideshow of what that looks like in Tel Aviv that I found on YouTube, there are many more videos but this kind of gives a good idea.

Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv on YouTube

However, some of you may have heard the stories of violence in Acco this year. Of course this wide agreement among JEWS to selectively observe one of Yom Kippur’s rules and not to drive cars can be abused. As I’ve tried to explain, non-observant Jews almost uniformly observe this rule even though their usual behavior isn’t to observe the laws of the Sabbath (of which Yom Kippur is really a special case).

Arabs, on the other hand, don’t feel this need and as the streets in Jewish parts of Israel are full of children riding carelessly on streets that would normal be chock full of cars, if an Arab decides to drive through these parts, the children’s parents have a right to feel annoyed.

It’s just not something that other Jews do and if they do it, its an emergency and they are driving VERY VERY CAREFULLY (which is certainly not the norm here!)

This is the kind of background you’d never get when AP tell tales of Jews and Arabs fighting over something stupid like someone driving on Yom Kippur. Meryl Yourish picks apart the bias but without really explaining why driving in Jewish areas on Yom Kippur is such a big deal. That’s not a criticism of Meryl, I’ve never really understood or believed the no car thing here until I saw it this year with my own eyes.

Even when you read a first hand account, its not till you understand how widely observed the no car rule is that you get a feel for why fast moving cars driven by anyone, Jew or Arab, on Yom Kippur are SUCH A BIG DEAL.

Sometimes you really do just have to be there.

Blogging will resume some time after Yom Kippur ends, tomorrow evening Israel time.