I'm at the airport that was named for an atheist in the country whose leaders like to call "the Jewish State." However, I see no evidence of that here. I have passed hundreds of people. I saw three yarmulkas and not a single woman who appeared to be religious in any way. The yarmulkas were on guys would not appear religious at all if you took the yarmulkas off of them. And it took a while before I saw them. I looked and looked. The stores and restaurants are like those of any airport. The airport displays feature a little local artwork, nothing about religious Judaism. To my mind, the ubiquitous flags don't count as that but rather as a display of secular nationalism. When I pulled off my cap for the passport checker woman I received the frown that secular Jews in Israel give when they see a religious person. It was the same at the security checkpoint. When I put on my tallis and tefillin to daven Schacharis at my gate, I felt like I would have felt in Idaho or Munich or anywhere that one feels like a weirdo for adorning himself in that strange religious attire.
The trainride to the airport was the same, not a religious person in sight.
We'll see what happens on the plane. Maybe it will be like my aliyah flight 10 years ago when I expected to see a plane full of religious people but saw maybe 2 or 3. That was unfortunately my first taste of waking up from the trance cast upon me and many others like me by shameful people like Hershel Schacter, Marc Shapiro, Aaron Rakeffet, Yisrael Reismann, Aaron Cohen, Yitzchak Breitowitz, Berel Wein, Yitzchok Berkowitz, Joel Zeff, Zef Leff, the entire staff at Nefesh b'Nefesh and countless other rabbis who possess not an ounce of Yiras Shemayim, common sense, or basic human decency in spreading fairy tales about life in Israel, the so-called Jewish state. Then there are all the foolish baalei batim whose names I won't mention even though I should because they are just as guilty, especially if they ever lived here. What a pack of clowns. You will find far more religious Judaism in New York than you will in Israel, and sufficient amounts in more affordable and polite parts of the Americas, Europe, and Oceania. You don't need to come here. Don't come here. The entire enterprise is a fraud.
Negative Commandment 299
Misleading Advice
"You shall not put a stumbling block before the blind"—Leviticus 19:14.
It is forbidden to mislead another. I.e., if one person approaches another and requests advice in an area in which he, the questioner, is unfamiliar, it is forbidden for the responder to deceptively offer damaging counsel.
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