Tiberias is Not Tel Aviv, and Never Will Be. So What's Happening in the Capital of the Galilee?

In recent months, Tiberias has been making headlines, but probably not for the right reasons. Last weekend, a groundbreaking initiative was reported - the launch of public transportation on Shabbat - a red flag for the mitzvah-observant Jews in Tiberias and beyond, but not only for them. Public desecration of Shabbat is a red flag for anyone who cares about this city. The residents of Tiberias, even the secular among them, are people of dignity. They have local patriotism, they take pride in their Tiberian identity, and they certainly do not want to become like Tel Aviv, because Tiberias, let's face it, is certainly not Tel Aviv, and it never can be.

Tiberias is one of the four holy cities, with a magnificent history and heritage rooted 2,000 years back. The basalt stones that adorn its walls reluctantly absorb the scorching sun of July and August, standing proudly for hundreds of years. They bear witness to different times, when Tiberias was nothing less than a local powerhouse. In the southern part of the city, just before the tomb of Rabbi Meir Baal HaNess, lies a whole city buried under wild vegetation, built by Herod Antipas 2,000 years ago. He named it after Emperor Tiberius, making it the capital of the Galilee, where commerce, economy, and culture converged.

Archaeologists jokingly say that behind every stone on the ground hides a marvelous story. In the old city, a few meters below ground, lie remnants of magnificent worlds yet to be uncovered. Historically, it is known that at a certain point, the southern city was suddenly abandoned and moved to its current location - the Tiberias everyone knows. The Tiberians of that time took with them the basalt stones and doors and built a city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The Tiberias beneath the ruins stands as a silent testimony to the neglected heritage of Tiberias. They, just like today's Tiberias, are still waiting for someone to remove the dust and halt the turmoil the city has been going through in the last three decades.

In the past 2,000 years, Tiberias has undergone a remarkable process that explains the charm of the Galilean city and the emergence of a status quo between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular, created and maintained out of love. With the revival of the Jewish settlement by Rabbi Chaim Abulafia in the 18th century, Jews from the diaspora began flowing to the city. Besides the rooted Tiberians who never wandered, Jews from Europe belonging to various Hasidic sects came to the city. Concurrently, Jews arrived from Morocco, Iraq, and so on. The close living quartered homes near the largest freshwater lake in the country forced mothers, the queens of the kitchen, to invent and combine different foods that over the years received a local twist. Their cuisine absorbed hundreds of years of history of Hasidim who came from European countries, bringing with them sweet *gefilte fish*. Jews from Meknes, Morocco, brought *couscous*. These were added to the Tiberian culinary menu alongside spices made in the Galilee, and of course, the *musht* of the Sea of Galilee that took the lead, for without it, as they say, there would be no Shabbat delight.

The residents of Tiberias created a local, human Galilean cuisine that merged and contained the emerging Jewish community and created its own communal resilience, which formed the basis for the respectful agreements between different lifestyles, today known as the status quo. The community's resilience was also its pride in its products – almost every Tiberian will tell you that in Tiberias, the Tiberian *nikud* was born, it was the first mixed city liberated by the Haganah forces in 1948, and that the nation's leaders used to visit the Hartman family hotel.

In the last three decades, the city has been undergoing a shake-up, perhaps one could even call it a revolution whose direction is still unclear. In a way, it is not surprising that the operation of public transportation on Shabbat received favorable coverage from the general media. Reporters, photographers, and journalists actually left their homes on Shabbat, left their families, and their day of rest (yes, Shabbat is a day of rest for every Jew) - to cover the item and take a free ride from Shikun D in Upper Tiberias to the promenade in the lower city as if aliens had arrived in Tiberias. Three words - pathetic, pitiful, vulgar.

The positive coverage that the initiative received from some national media outlets is a symptom of the general media's longing to align with the unspoken anti-religious/anti-Jewish line. Fake news creates a reality where it seems that the struggle for the preservation of Shabbat in Tiberias is actually a fight against personal freedoms, and vice versa. Is this really the case? Does the operation of public transportation on Shabbat express freedom and equality? If these are the lofty expressions of the values of the French Revolution - no, thank you.

Besides, who has been interested in the Tiberians in recent years? It is regrettable that only a pile of snow on the promenade, which residents enjoyed precisely on Shabbat, managed to bring the city to the forefront. If there was real concern for the Tiberians, they would write about the huge deficit the municipality has been experiencing for over five years, and the fact that there are really burning issues on the agenda, certainly more than the Tiberians' leisure activities on Shabbat or their so-called cultural world. By the way, if one of the justifications for operating transportation is the claim that some of the public cannot afford to pay for special taxis to the promenade - maybe it's worth considering ensuring jobs, instead of exciting the masses with a bus ride. After all, and perhaps before - the train should have long since been roaring towards Tiberias. And in general, go to Tel Aviv, the big city, where you can see the construction of the light rail - that's really an attraction, isn't it?