To the protesting questioner,

There is no absurd assumption here. It is absurd in your eyes, but not in the eyes of the religious public, which is part of the state. The secular Zionist vision is not the same as the religious Zionist vision. You are not the only one in the world. When the state was founded, there was a public here that did not want to fund Sabbath desecration with its tax money. That’s all. And beyond that, it is also legitimate in the eyes of that public that certain aspects of Israeli public life preserve the tradition of the Jewish people (and in that public’s eyes this also has spiritual-religious significance, although Rabbi Michi disagrees).

In Britain too there is enormous public funding for the royal family because it is connected to English nationality (and after all, England is the core of Britain). In fact, there is no country in the world where this is not the case. In the United States, prostitution is illegal not for progressive reasons, but for quasi-religious ones (moral ones—of aesthetic morality, meaning a life that is not unrestrained). In France too, aspects of ancient French nationhood are preserved with public funds. And not only funding—there are surely also laws that restrict French public life in ways somehow connected to French nationhood, culture, and tradition.

What is more, in the special case of the Jews, in practice one sees that the less tradition there is, the more Jewish national identity is emptied of content (people start defining a Jew according to immediate self-interest), and after that comes disloyalty to the Jewish people, or worse, a progressive anti-national identity in general and an anti-Jewish one in particular.