The Lord spoke at creation: “Let there be light” – and Israel’s right-wing religious government now wants to guarantee this for all citizens, even in the dark hours of Shabbat. In the future, the particularly pious should also be supplied with “kosher electricity” so that they don’t have to do without the blessings of modernity on the rest day. A corresponding pilot project was passed by the cabinet at the beginning of the week, and the ultra-Orthodox government parties are satisfied. In the opposition, however, one sees the country drifting further in the direction of a Jewish theocracy.
The topic of the kosher stream leads physically and even more metaphysically into a complicated matter. As is well known, the use of electricity on the Shabbat is strictly forbidden. According to halacha, Jewish law, no fire may be lit on this day, and this also means that no circuit may be closed by the flick of a switch.
In the meantime, however, resourceful minds have invented many things that are supposedly pleasing to God, which also make life more comfortable on the seventh day of the week. Timers that are programmed before Shabbat regulate everything in the house from the lights to the air conditioning. The fact that the electricity can be used thanks to these little tricks can also be explained by the fact that it is generated anyway. For example, to keep life-sustaining measures going in hospitals. When it comes to life and death, the Shabbat prohibitions are suspended.
However, not everyone in the ultra-Orthodox camp, who make up around 15 percent of the population, wants to follow this logic. Around 30 percent of them, it writes Jerusalem Post, generally avoid the power grid on Shabbat. Their reasoning: It is forbidden to profit from the work of another Jew on the rest day. Anyone who needs electricity therefore turns on their own generator, before the rest day begins, of course.
For the sake of religious clarity, the United Torah Judaism party entered the latest coalition negotiations with a simple demand: all electricity plants in the country should be shut down on Shabbat. The outcry among the secular was so great that Benjamin Netanyahu had to hastily assure that his new government would also have electricity in Israel seven days a week.
In return, however, the ultra-Orthodox defied him in the coalition agreement with the pilot project for kosher electricity. A storage facility is now to be built near Bnei Brak. The electricity is produced outside of Shabbat and automatically fed in via a separate network on the rest day.
The equivalent of around 30 million euros are initially planned for this. But the opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman has extrapolated that billions would ultimately be needed to ensure that the ultra-Orthodox communities were supplied with kosher electricity in this way. This is “a madness on the way to the halakhic state”. The kosher stream is likely to once again fuel the eternal dispute between religious and secular Jews in Israel.