Berkley Center

On my commute home from work, the bus broke down on the highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Tired and eager to get to a lecture on women and yeshiva (the study of Jewish texts), I gloomily hopped off the bus, perched myself on the highway barrier, and waited for another bus to retrieve me and the other Israeli travelers. Luckily, this happened in no time, and I boarded the next bus.

In Israel, there is no concept of a queue (one of the cultural differences I'm still having trouble—and bruises—getting used to), so my fellow stranded passengers stampeded onto the bus. I was one of the last to trickle in, and alongside me was a religious woman with a very young baby. As there was only one seat left on the bus, I gestured for her to take it, but her eyes just widened and she continued to stand.

The bus was filled with the normal array of Israelis: Arabs, teenagers texting and passing out to music, a mélange of religious men and women, and their obviously secular counterparts (a duo of tattooed, bald men sat together near the front, and a group of rowdy university students near the exit). The man with the available seat next to him was an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He was sitting in the front with his legs sprawled and his hat on the seat beside him.

I had forgotten. Religious Jewish men avoid sitting next to women as part of their practice of shomer negiah, literally meaning "observant of touch," but widely known as the Orthodox Jewish custom of men and women avoiding all physical contact. This includes everything from hugs to handshakes, but sitting next to a member of the opposite sex is okay according to biblical and rabbinic law. Even so, many men and women avoid doing so because they find the potential physical contact to be a temptation, a reminder of the sexual world they try so hard to avoid.

The passengers were able to do some Tetris-like rearrangements so the woman could sit next to another woman, and the man had another man sit next to him. The problem was solved after about five minutes, but a vehemently secular man (one of the bald ones) couldn't help but express himself. He was extremely angry that the entire ordeal had to occur in the first place; in his eyes, it was disrespectful to deny a seat to a woman, especially a young mother. A young religious man came to the defense of the older Haredi, and the very familiar religious-secular debate commenced.

Israel doesn’t have a constitution, and today's main domestic issue is figuring out whether or not the country is truly a Jewish state in the religious sense. Sure, the bus wasn't a religious bus—but was it a purely secular bus? Lately, the news has been covering the sensitive issue of women having to sit in the back of the bus per the request of religious men.

There is no "back of the bus" Rosa Parks-esque connotation here, yet many people still find it disrespectful to have the women and men separated in such a way. The rapidly growing religious population is creating a major religious-secular divide in all aspects of Israeli life: education, army service, legislature, and even bus rides. Israel is a very dynamic country, but reconciling its dynamism politically has become a real problem.

This also begs the question of whether or not Israel should be putting in time and effort to define whether or not it is a religious state. Sure, this ambiguity causes a lot of controversy, but would a formally legal secular-religious delineation solve or exacerbate the current situation? Perhaps remaining vague leaves more room for positive dialogue, and therefore for progress in the right direction.

Either way, the bus kept on moving. But the ride would have been much smoother (as would Israel’s diplomatic and domestic relations) if the religious-secular divide were solved.