The Hametz Law and Supreme Court coercion

The Hametz Law passed its second and third readings in the Knesset on Tuesday, just in time for the Passover holiday that begins on the evening of March 5. The actual name of the legislation is the Patients’ Rights Bill but because its main sponsors hail from Orthodox parties, detractors insist on denigrating it as an act of religious coercion.

That the opposite is the case makes no difference to those Israelis engaged in a soft coup against the ruling right-wing government. Most haven’t bothered to read the letter of the law, let alone pause to contemplate its spirit.

Not that doing either would alter their hysterical objections. After all, the parliamentarians who fought against it are fully aware of its contents and that hasn’t stopped them from presenting it in a pernicious light.

What the law does is grant hospital directors the authority to determine which special arrangements are needed in their individual institutions to guarantee that patients who wish to observe kosher-for-Passover dietary restrictions are able to do so.

Though all medical centers in the country have kosher kitchens, Passover poses a special challenge for patients. Unlike the rest of the year when observant Jews refrain from non-kosher food, this weeklong holiday involves abstaining from hametz (leavened products), as well. To add an extra complication, it also entails the removal of all hametz from one’s home and dining vicinity.

This requirement is difficult to fulfill in a hospital, which has non-Jewish or secular patients and staff, in addition to visitors bearing various edible goodies that contain hametz. Until recently, the issue was dealt with tacitly and through mutual respect.

Hospitals requested that employees and others not bring hametz into the premises and the status quo was honored. As it happens, a whopping 70% of Israelis eschew hametz on Passover in any case, regardless of their level of religious observance. This is why even non-kosher establishments ask patrons during the holiday whether they want matza instead of bread with their meals. And it explains the odd phenomenon of Israelis, during the week of Passover, partaking of cheeseburgers (a huge kashrut no-no) in unleavened buns.

WHICH BRINGS us back to the new legislation and the special arrangements that hospital administrators deem necessary for enabling their patients to observe Passover properly. According to the law, “these include, among other measures – once alternatives have been considered – establishing protocols banning or limiting the entrance of hametz into the hospital building, in full or in part, during the holiday.”

The law further stipulates that “in determining [the above], the hospital director will take into consideration the patients’ rights and needs and may also take into consideration the needs of accompaniers and employees.”

Finally, as per the bill, each hospital must post its own Passover guidelines on its website or if it doesn’t have one, on that of the Health Ministry and will hang signs listing the instructions in the building. An administrator who decides to prohibit or limit the entry of hametz is at liberty to delegate the task of informing visitors of the directive to a staff member.

The country’s hospital honchos responded with a yawn and a shrug. All said that they’d hang signs but wouldn’t have their security guards inspect bags for hametz.

It’s a good policy since those guys are supposed to prevent the entry of guns and bombs, not monitor purses for leavened contraband. In other words, virtually nothing has changed in practice.

Nevertheless, Opposition leader MK Yair Lapid lambasted the legislation, accusing the coalition of having dismantled the Passover holiday. He claimed that “more and more people are saying, ‘Ok, they’re trying to coerce me, so the answer is no because I have rights and Judaism will not be forced on me.’” The new law, he moaned, will double and triple the number of Israelis with that attitude.

His reaction didn’t come as a surprise. Prior to the bill’s passage, he’d issued a similarly baseless warning. “We don’t have to ask ourselves what will happen if this law passes,” he said. “We know what will happen because it happened when the original hametz law was enacted in 1986. When I was a child, no one, including completely secular people who did not keep kosher, even thought of eating hametz in public during Passover, out of respect for tradition and the understanding that you don’t want to insult your neighbors who are traditional Jews.”

By the following year, he asserted, “people were having barbeques on the beach; two years later, people were eating hametz in every park; and three years later, restaurants remained open because people don’t like it when religion is forced on them.”

The effect of the current bill, he admonished the religious MKs who sponsored it, will be the flooding of hospitals with leavened goods on Passover and the desecration of the holiday in Israel. It’s funny how he tried to make it sound as though he had their best interest and that of Israel at heart.

LESS AMUSING is his refusal to acknowledge the real culprit * behind the controversy that led to the legislation in the first place: the Supreme Court. But Lapid wouldn’t dare tarnish the hallowed judiciary that he and his comrades-in-arms are battling in the streets to protect from government reforms.

What he and his fellow breast-beaters conveniently omit for political purposes is that the whole mess began with a February 2018 petition to the High Court of Justice by Adalah-the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel against the “degrading practice of humiliating patients, employees and visitors who do not abide by Jewish dietary laws.” The final ruling, handed down by the Supreme Court in April 2020, was that hospitals don’t have the legal authority to ban hametz during Passover.

Thanks to the bench, which ordered the state to pay Adalah NIS 25,000 shekels in court expenses, the longstanding status quo of the very sort that Lapid wistfully recounted from his childhood was breached.

The explanatory notes of the Patients’ Rights Bill address this travesty as follows: “The meaning of [the Supreme Court] ruling is that the majority of the citizens of Israel, who keep kosher during Passover, are not able to receive medical treatment or stay in hospitals... For thousands of years, since the exodus from Egypt, the Jewish people have observed the Passover holiday and its laws. Even in difficult and dark times, such as the Holocaust and the Inquisition, when Jews were forbidden from performing commandments, with genuine self-sacrifice, [they upheld the prohibition] of not eating hametz during Passover. There is no reason for patients in the Jewish state not to be able to keep kosher during the holiday.”

“This bill is unnecessary and I say this on behalf of the Knesset members who submitted it,” declared United Torah Judaism MK Moshe Gafni. “After more than 70 years in which the country’s hospitals were run peacefully and quietly, the [courts] enraged us [by ruling] that a hospital director doesn’t have the authority to intervene in this matter... [and] determined that the granting of such authority must be enacted in law.”

So now it is.

Passover is the story of freedom from bondage. The irony is as escapable as the analogy is apt.