Writing in today’s New York Yimes, Maureen Dowd fails to appreciate that simply because someone draws a comparison between two things, does mean that the two are meaningfully comparable. I may compare the severity of breaking my toe to someone else having lung cancer, but that doesn’t mean I should be taken terribly seriously. And Prince Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia may compare the challenges of religious oppression in his country to those in Israel, but that doesn’t mean he should be taken seriously either. Someone should tell that to Ms. Dowd.
It’s not that the Saudi’s are not making progress. They are. The fact that it’s tiny steps being taken very slowly does not detract from their significance. A child has to crawl before it can walk, and walk before it can run. And nobody refuses to celebrate those first steps because we don’t yet know if the child will one day become an Olympic runner.
In fact, the small steps taken early in any process of religious reform are always the most difficult and therefore deserve the greatest affirmation. We need to measure from where the steps are taken, not from where we may hope they lead.
It’s also not that Israel is without its problems on the religious freedom front either. I could on forever about a culture which is governed by a chief Rabbinate whose spiritual arrogance is only outstripped by its educational stupidity. In fact, the existence of a state-sponsored Orthodox-only, religious infrastructure in the State of Israel is probably the biggest hindrance to most Israeli Jews taking Judaism seriously.
As infuriating as all that is, it hardly compares to a culture in which teaching any religion other than Islam is a capital offense and in which women are regularly beaten for being immodest. But that is actually all beside the point because the issue is not who is more or less repressive.

The real issue here, the one which make Dowd’s comparison misguided at best and dangerous at worst, is that Saudi Arabia is a Monarchy and Israel is a democracy. The people of Israel choose to put themselves in the bind they are in. That can hardly be said for the citizens of Saudi Arabia, whose citizens’ spiritual lives are dictated by the King and his princes.
For a whole variety of reasons, most of them bad, the secular majority of Israel continues to give power to a small group of rabbis who do not even pretend to serve the felt spiritual needs of that majority. I wish that they would make other choices, but until now they have not done so. That may be changing, but whether it does or not, will be decided at the polls of the regions only true democracy, not because a king and his minions decide that God wills it.