Page 115 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

the old, as a solution to everyday problems of love, family, and ¤nding a spouse,
and as a gradual process rather than a painful radical break.
Yitzchak’s road show is also a business operation with some characteristics
of an NGO, relying heavily on the cooperation of volunteers and on donations.
His Shofar organization claims to have distributed one million videos for free
in its ¤rst year, and to have sold a further million after 1996. The free distribu-
tions of videos and cassette tapes are made in the expectation that a certain
number of the recipients will then become buyers and sellers. At meetings he
invites his audience to “win” (i.e., buy) one thousand cassettes by making ten
monthly payments of one hundred shekels. If, as in one instance, he persuades
a mere twenty people out of ¤ve hundred at one neighborhood meeting to sign
up, that means the sale of ten thousand tapes in a small area.

The Mischievous Millenarian: The Use of Parables
and Myths to Subvert Of¤cial Discourse
Amnon Yitzchak claims to have distributed a million videos in one year
for free, to have sold a million a year since 1996, and to have brought one hun-
13
dred thousand returnees per year back to religion. As illustrated in the previous
paragraph, blanket coverage trawls a small number of committed activists, who
then become collectors and distributors of cassettes and propagandists for the
cause. His Hayyim Ke®ayim (Living Twice—and therefore being “born again”)
program follows up people who give their names at meetings, and gives them
cassettes. Thus the organization builds up a database of people with whom it
comes into contact, who might become more involved or donate funds. Like the
radio stations, it encourages people to put their children into religious schools
and encourages returnees on their road back to religious observance, but Yitz-
chak and his people have gone much further than the radio stations in creating
a public of their own, in the application of business principles, and in adopting
the content of American millenarian fundamentalism (Ammerman 1987). His
rhetoric also goes further than (almost) any Israeli politician would dare.
At the Jerusalem Theater Yitzchak made constant reference to his cassettes:
“I am saying this now that we are on cassette 200, but I already predicted it in
cassette 35”; in responses to the public he would say: “but have you not listened
to the last cassette”; the promotional warm-up videos already had shown his
supporters distributing cassettes for free at road junctions. The cassettes seem
to be the emblem of his operation, to own and listen to them is to belong, and
to distribute them among one’s friends and relations is to draw even closer to
his campaign of t’shuva.
Dressed in his distinctive attire, Yitzchak is his own trademark. The format
of his meetings includes an address by Yitzchak followed by questions from the
®oor. Many people want their personal problems resolved—one needs a hus-
band, the other a wife, a young boy wants to attend religious school but his
mother will not let him, and so on. Almost all the questioners—some of whom

104 David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner