Not Everything Is Black and White
Over the past few weeks, I have found myself thinking about the growing tensions between different segments of Israeli society, particularly between the Haredi and Hiloni communities.
The louder the debate becomes, the easier it is to view people as labels instead of individuals.
A few weeks ago, my cousin and her husband were visiting Israel, and I spent Shabbat with them. After Shabbat, we were waiting for our driver to pick us up.
When he arrived, he briefly stopped in the road before pulling over. Before he could fully move his vehicle, the cars behind him began honking aggressively.
The driver immediately started repositioning his car, but one man was furious.
He rolled down his window and began shouting. The driver apologized and moved further over. The man became even angrier. The driver apologized again.
What struck me was not the traffic inconvenience. It was the response.
The driver was a Haredi man with peyot, soft-spoken and humble. The kind of person who would rather say “I’m sorry” than argue, even when he believed he had done nothing wrong.
Yet the anger kept coming.
As the furious driver finally sped away, he responded to the apology with an obscene gesture.
Moments later, another driver passed and sarcastically thanked the Haredi man for “leaving so much room” on the road.
I remember thinking: What did that accomplish?
What value was added by humiliating another person?
Nothing.
The entire episode lasted only a few moments, but it stayed with me. I couldn’t help wondering whether people were reacting to the situation itself or to what they thought the driver represented.
A few weeks later, I joined a tiyul to Tiberias with a group of women, many of whom I had never met before.
During lunch, each woman introduced herself and shared a little about her life. One woman told a story from the months following October 7.
In her community, women organized meal deliveries for families whose husbands had been called up for miluim. Week after week they cooked, packaged, and delivered food.
Not because anyone asked them to.
Not because they wanted recognition.
Simply because fellow Jews needed help.
But they didn’t stop at preparing meals.
Alongside the food, they included handwritten notes and personalized cards. A few words of encouragement. A bracha for safety. A message letting the family know that someone was thinking about them.
The food nourished the body, but the notes nourished the heart.
For the women receiving the meals, those messages became just as meaningful as the food itself. They felt seen. They felt supported. They felt connected to people they had never met.
Eventually, someone suggested bringing together the women preparing the meals and the women receiving them.
The recipients wanted to know who had made the salad they loved every week. Who had prepared the chicken their children looked forward to. And who had written the notes that arrived with such warmth and encouragement.
Faces were finally attached to names.
What began as meal deliveries became friendships.
Those relationships continue today.
To be clear, the lesson from these stories is not that every Haredi person is kind, thoughtful, or considerate.
Of course not.
Just as not every Hiloni person is kind, thoughtful, or considerate.
There are wonderful people and difficult people in every community. Haredi and Hiloni alike. Religious and secular. Young and old.
The problem begins when we stop seeing individuals and start seeing labels.
When one person’s behavior becomes our justification for judging an entire community.
When we paint thousands of people with a broad brush because of a single experience, a headline, or a stereotype.
That isn’t fair to Haredim.
And it isn’t fair to Hilonim.
The Haredi driver I encountered that evening does not represent every Haredi Jew. The women preparing meals for miluim families do not represent every Haredi woman.
Just as the angry motorists I witnessed do not represent every secular Israeli.
They are individuals.
And perhaps that is the point.
Every person deserves to be judged by their own actions, their own character, and their own choices—not by the assumptions we attach to the group they belong to.
As a newer olah, I have been surprised by both the tensions and the extraordinary acts of kindness I encounter in Israeli society.
We live in a time when it is easy to see the world in black and white.
To place people into categories.
To assume we know who someone is because of how they dress, where they live, or which community they belong to.
But life is rarely black and white.
There is a great deal of gray that we need to open our eyes to.
The gray is where we discover that a Haredi man can respond to anger with humility.
The gray is where women quietly prepare meals and handwritten notes for families they have never met.
The gray is where human beings live.
Perhaps if we spent less time viewing one another through labels and stereotypes and more time seeing the person standing in front of us, we would find that we have far more in common than we think.
As children, many of us were taught a simple principle: treat others the way you would want to be treated.
Perhaps Israel needs that reminder today more than ever.
Not everything is black and white.
There is a lot of gray.
And it is time we opened our eyes to it.
