Cognitive Dati Dissonance Dystopia

It has been troubling me there is a growing dissonance between dati life as experienced at the level of everyday living, and ‘dati-ism’ as writ large in the public life of the nation as a whole

In our local community, Migdal Haemek, our family is privileged to participate in religious Zionist, Chabad Haredi and traditional Mizrachi communities. In our naive oleh chadash ways, we do not like to be pigeonholed as one or the other – we are Jewish, full stop, and all these communities (among others) are expressions of different pathways to the same place, their diversity enriching the totality of what it means to be, and what is the lived experience of being Jewish.

What we see across all three communities, without exception, is unremitting chessed; people behaving towards each other with respect and compassion; people trying to help each other with an ahavat yisrael that does not distinguish between religious and secular; people having a high level of acceptance, mutual respect and non-judgmentalism inside an arc that always bends towards unity.

However, in the public life of the nation as a whole, we see ‘dati-ism’, if i may call it that, being the alliance of religious and traditional parties that now form the government, being portrayed as authoritarian, uncaring, reckless, destructive, corrupt and even evil.

How can this dissonance be explained?  Better still, how can this disconnect be bridged?