As we reflect on the events of our election day, Bradley Burston brings us his voting experience, sending an absentee ballot from Jerusalem, and tells us how voting is essentially a religious act:
Even for the true believer, organized religion, and for that matter, alternatives such as free markets, welfare states, global conglomerates, new media, advanced technology and sophisticated cults, have proven decidedly mixed blessings. The exhaustion of belief has yielded the Age of Whatever.
Still, there is something about voting that overpowers alienation and chronic disappointment and cosmopolitanism and cool.
…It is the Olympics made accessible for everyman. It is the heavens brought down, for one brief moment, close enough to touch.
This is what genuine religion is all about – a quietly fanatical faith in the power of ordinary people to do the extraordinary, and, using objects as workaday as paper and pencils, to redirect history.
Read his full article in Haaretz here.