Samuel Butler Was Right

Lisa has this great post today about a survey concerning phone use. The punch line was:

But the final question was definitely of the only-in-Israel variety.In the dry, disinterested tone of someone who has asked the same questions over and over without giving much thought to their significance, the woman asked me: "Are you religious, traditional or secular?"

One of the downsides of Israeli society is the fact that we're all placed into procrustean beds that go far beyond anything that Halakhah requires. We all wear identifiable uniforms (though why secularists and haredim both like black is a mystery to me). Deviation from herdlike norms is all too often excoriated. It's time to shake these labels off and allow for room to move.

Samuel Buler was right. 'Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by language -- language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. '