The Rabbi and the Deeds

Among the pilgrims who gathered on Thursday at the engagement party of Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto's son, the main attention was directed at the representatives of the ruling party: a Minister of Defense who left a cabinet meeting on the day two soldiers were laid to rest, the Speaker of the Knesset, the Minister of Culture, and even the Minister of Crocodiles came to pay their respects to a man who was convicted by his own admission of giving a $200,000 bribe to a senior police officer and served a year in prison for it. Well, they have primaries on their minds and also a personal example: the Prime Minister and Chairman of the party himself met the Rabbi in Washington a year ago and received from him a "special blessing for the peace of the people and the state, out of spiritual responsibility and enlightened leadership." It was not reported whether they also discussed other common issues, for example, the experience of dealing with a bribery charge.

Although one should not underestimate the intensity of the stench spread by the connections between a dubious figure and very senior political officials, at least there is no surprise in this. In contrast, another special guest at the festival caused many eyebrows to be raised: the head of the Mossad until recently, Dadi Barnea. The latter, who led from the security establishment's side the astonishingly ambitious move of attempting to topple the regime in Iran, was seen hugging the Rabbi, holding his hand, sitting with him at a table (on which a bottle of fine whiskey was placed), whispering with him (the Rabbi covering his mouth with a gesture that would not shame a soccer player before taking a free kick), and even cooperating (with noticeable embarrassment) with the Rabbi's efforts to sweep him into a dance to the sounds of the highly ironic song playing in the background, "The Torah of the Lord is perfect."

Presumably, a master spy like Barnea knows that there is nothing perfect about a man of many deeds like Rabbi Pinto, and the stain that stuck to him does not wash off so quickly. "I made the Torah a tool to dig with, which is worse than a bribe," Pinto explained to the parole board, "I used my status as a Rabbi in connection with all these things." And here, miraculously, his status still gives him access to one of the heads of the pyramid during tectonic events, whose part in which the Mossad needs to be examined: from the degree of responsibility for October 7 to the mess in Iran. Who knows, maybe it will turn out that the Kurdish militias did not conquer Tehran because the Mossad did not consult with Rabbi Pinto first.

Although Barnea is not an elected official and today is not a public servant, the sight of him mingling with a man who "corrupted and corrupted," in the words of Judge Oded Mudrik, who sentenced Rabbi Pinto, is disturbing and burdensome: first of all because of the wonder of what Barnea has to look for in this rotten environment, and also the dangerous and humiliating message he sends across the entire system, as if one of the most serious corruption scandals in the country's history had been erased from memory, in which a Rabbi gave a bribe to a senior police investigator and then went out to a dirty battle that ended in the suicide of the late Nitzav Ephraim Bracha. It seems that Barnea, who also did not wait too long before jumping headfirst into business with the company "Ondes," does not understand how disappointing it is to see him sharing the same low standards with figures like Israel Katz and Amir Ohana. And if a cooling-off period is not relevant, it is better to say that you have a cold.