The Shas campaign is brilliant. Cynical to the core, and brilliant anyway. It is one of the sharpest campaigns we have seen in the feed, with production values and writing closer to cinema than to a party broadcast, and with delicate family dynamics and real emotion invested in them.
The small moments are executed so well that even while I was tearing my hair out, I could not help admiring the craft.
In the first video, an IDF soldier comes home to a traditional Sephardi family, observant but not ultra-Orthodox, which is precisely Shas’s core electorate.
He arrives at the last second for kiddush, and the film presents the tension between Torah study and military service as something that exists outside the family.
Inside it, there is perfect harmony between the brother who fights and the brother who studies full time. “Did you study a lot this week?” “For you and for all the soldiers.” “I felt it.”
In the second video, that togetherness becomes a havdalah celebration and mutual wishes of “we made it,” tying together prayer, Torah scholars, the army, and, in the voice of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef himself, the Shas movement. Tension? Please.
In the third video, the hidden tension is finally exposed. It runs between the father, who leans toward the ultra-Orthodox position, and his traditional friend, who believes the ultra-Orthodox must enlist. You see the pain, the fight, the frustration, and finally the wordless moment of reconciliation. It settles nothing, but it is full of unity and great love.
The campaign is brilliant because, unlike amateurish propaganda clips, it has real drama, excellent performances, and an emotional pull you cannot stay indifferent to. But you cannot understand the campaign without understanding the size of the trap Arye Deri is caught in.
Shas is the only political phenomenon that manages to take votes from a public that is not ultra-Orthodox and harness them to advance purely ultra-Orthodox interests. The trouble is that in recent years, the unbridgeable gap between the ultra-Orthodox interest and the Zionist interest has risen to the surface.
At the ultimate moment of testing, when combat soldiers were crying out for help, and the number of dead and wounded climbed and climbed, Shas’s elected officials, who take pride in the high rate of service among their own voters, were forced to pick a side. And oh, did they pick.
Rabbi Moshe Maya of Shas’s Council of Torah Sages declared that today no one may enlist, not even someone who is not studying Torah. Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, the former Sephardi chief rabbi, called for draft notices to be thrown in the toilet. And Deri was recorded telling yeshiva students that not one of them should so much as entertain the thought of volunteering or, God forbid, enlisting.
Once you understand that, the newest video in the campaign is astonishing to watch. It really is the cherry on top.
The father attends a parent-teacher meeting at a mainstream state school, where he is confronted with a radical progressive agenda running through the curriculum. It all peaks when he cries out: “What will be left of us if we simply try to be like everyone else?”
Now that is a remarkable moment, because if we are asking about the future, I have a question of my own. What will be left of us if Shas keeps accumulating more power? The answer is simple. Fewer and fewer people will enlist in the army, pay taxes, and obey the law, and the Jewish state will collapse.
That video works the emotions, Jewish emotions, and beyond them the question of whether a Jewish state can survive at all. A state that Shas has refused for many years now to lift a finger for, while working hard to ensure that the ultra-Orthodox public, which it expects to become the majority in Israel, grows up neither Zionist nor economically productive.
Israel's 'woke'
So here is the unpleasant truth. Shas is Israel’s version of wokeness.
Because what is wokeness, at bottom? A complete detachment from reality in favor of self-definitions that everyone is expected to accommodate just so that nobody gets offended. A distortion of the truth in the service of an arbitrary identity.
Shas is the wokeness of the State of Israel, only with a black yarmulke instead of purple hair. A party that quite often acts and speaks in terms more extreme than its Ashkenazi counterpart, United Torah Judaism.
A party whose leaders come out against the IDF and call on young men to defy the institutions of the state if those institutions dare to draft them, and to flush their draft notices down the toilet. A non-Zionist party, through and through.
And yet this same party feels perfectly free to produce a video about the future of the State of Israel and about the return to our land, or to call itself part of “the Right,” for no reason beyond the fact that it can.
And just as wokeness collapses in on itself, simply because the facts do not care about your opinions, the same thing will happen to Shas in the end.
It does not matter how badly you want Shas to be part of the right-wing bloc, the national bloc, or the religious-Zionist bloc. It simply cannot be, because it is not Zionist. Its actions weaken the State of Israel and undermine its very capacity to exist. Those are the facts.
It does not matter how they define themselves, how tightly they cling to their identity, or how many correct words they say. In the end, reality exists, facts exist, and those facts don’t care about anyone’s feelings or Deri’s brilliant campaign.
The writer is the CEO of the Ribo Center.