Just another ploy

With regard to “Opposition pans approval of grocery-store bill as ‘religious coercion’” (December 5), so now it’s called “religious coercion.” What do we have if Shabbat is taken away? We have a people like any other – and we aren’t like any other.

We gave the world the day of rest. This concept was given us at Mount Sinai when we received the Torah.

Next week it will be Hanukka, and everyone, religious or not, lights Hanukka candles. What we are celebrating is the fact that we beat the ancient Greeks. What did they want? To take away our Shabbat.

But the bottom line is why wait for Shabbat to go shopping? Aren’t six days of the week enough? It’s just another ploy to turn this country into the world that so many of us left behind in coming here. JUDY FORD Petah Tikva

According to the Ynet news website, when the government decided to allow enforcement of the closure of supermarkets on Shabbat, it prompted Defense Minister and Israel Beytenu party leader Avigdor Liberman to cry that Theodor Herzl had not been religious. I loved Education Minister and Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett’s response: “Without 3,000 years of Shabbat, there would be no Herzl.”

I wish, however, to make it clear that I believe Herzl to have been a true Jewish hero. Despite the fact that he was not an observant Jew, he burned himself out for the Jewish people, his beloved people, and died at a very early age. This is known as mesirut nefesh (giving one’s all, even to the point of self-sacrifice), and that is the stuff of which true religiousness is made. DAVID HEIMOWITZ Kfar Saba