The Café Destroying Jerusalem

There is something deeply unsettling about a society in which a person can be accused of “destroying Jerusalem” simply for wanting to drink a quiet cup of coffee, while being made to feel that perhaps there is no longer a place for them in Jerusalem—or even in Israel.

For three consecutive Saturdays, police barriers have been needed to protect Jerusalem from coffee. The danger is a small café open on Shabbat in an inner courtyard off Agripas Street, where protesters have returned week after week to demand that the business close.

Their slogan is admirably direct: “Stop destroying Jerusalem.” One must respect the scale of the diagnosis. Jerusalem has survived conquest, siege, destruction, occupation, partition, religious war and several thousand years of human certainty about the will of God, but it may apparently be defeated by an espresso machine.

Calling this an incident would make it pleasantly forgettable. Three consecutive mobilizations are not an incident; they are an attempt to establish a rule. The rule is that one community’s observance of Shabbat may determine the time of everyone else.

The protesters are not being forced to enter the café, purchase anything, work or abandon their religious discipline. No one is opening a nightclub in Mea Shearim and demanding that its residents dance. The café exists outside their communal space and serves people who have chosen to spend Shabbat differently.

The issue is therefore not the right to observe Shabbat, because that right is not under threat. The issue is jurisdiction: the claimed authority to decide how other Jews must live because they happen to inhabit the same city.

A religious commandment ordinarily places a demand upon the person who accepts it. Work ceases, movement changes and the ordinary availability of the world is suspended through self-restraint. Outside the café, that relation is reversed: the commandment is no longer carried by the believer but delivered to the stranger.

Shabbat then ceases to be a discipline imposed upon oneself and becomes a border imposed upon others. Holiness is no longer produced by........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)