Shas’s top rabbi calls national anthem ‘stupid’

The ultra-Orthodox Shas party’s leading rabbi attacked Israel’s national anthem Sunday, calling it a “stupid song.”

Speaking at conference of the Sephardic religious party in the southern city of Netivot, Rabbi Shalom Cohen, president of Shas’s Council of Torah Sages, told a story about the installation ceremony of Yitzhak Nissim as chief rabbi of Israel in 1955, when Cohen was sitting next to Shas’s founder, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

The crowd stood and started singing “Hatikva,” Israel’s national anthem. “I thought, ‘They’re crazy,’ and I didn’t stand. The rabbi stood,” said Cohen.

According to the Cohen, Yosef told him he had said the “Aleinu” prayer while everyone was singing. “An honest man, he didn’t want the stupid song to affect him,” Cohen said to applause and laughter.

Cohen also attacked the national religious movement, blasting its members for sending their young men to the army, and hinting that they were comparable to Amalek, the biblical nemesis of the Jewish people.

After the speech came to light, Shas responded by playing up Cohen’s Zionist credentials. “No one can teach the Torah scholar Shalom Cohen, who grew up in the Old City of Jerusalem his entire life, about Zionism, and how one should relate to Israel.

“It is his right and responsibility to think that the sources of Israel’s Torah, which accompanied the People of Israel for thousands of year, and which speak about the yearning and the return to Zion, are ten times more preferable than a song written in recent decades.

“We respect every person for the way he chooses to connect to Zion. What is important is the fact of the Jews’ connection to their homeland, and not the way it is done.”