One of the greatest Hillulei Hashem to come our way in a long time

So, I'm sitting in my apartment flipping through channels earlier this evening, trying desperately to find some productive way to procrastinate, when I see what seems to resemble the skyline of the Old City at twilight. Sure enough, that's what it is. I'm trying to remember what channel this is and whether I have any idea what I'm watching when the A&E logo shows up on the bottom-right of the screen, followed by a title I had to read twice: "Red Light Districts."

Over the course of the next twenty or so minutes, I went through all five of Kübler-Ross's stages of mourning, save the last.

For the first few seconds, I was in denial. "Maybe we're talking about 'red light' as in emergency. Maybe this is about terror or international crises." Nope. It was what it was, a rundown of Israel's burgeoning sex trade industry, casting the light of American cable television on one of Israel's ugliest and most shameful aspects.

Within minutes, I was seized with anger. "What the hell is wrong with that country?" I asked myself. Somehow, David Ben-Gurion's assertion that we'd know "we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew" rang all too true.

Soon, I was bargaining. "Let them only show the lighter side of Israeli prostitution," I told myself, knowing full well that no such thing exists. And, as if in answer, the program went from bad to worse, with scenes of virtually naked women writhing on some stage in Tel Aviv, images of women being solicited by the drivers of old Subarus and a tour of a ditch filled with what must have been hundreds of used rubbers, in which a young woman had been found dead a week earlier. We were told the heartbreaking story of a young woman brought to Israel from Russia, who said she knew what she was being brought to do but whose friends thought they were coming to be dancers.

Inevitably, I sank into depression. Where have we gone wrong? How is it that in the land of the Jews, the Jewish, democractic state, human beings are being traded and treated as metaltelin -- mere objects -- over which other humans can exercise ugly proprietorship for a matter of shekalim? How is it that the people who brought the world ethical enlightenment as an or la-goyim are now importing young women to satisfy the basest of their desires? How is it that a land endowed with sanctity and beauty is allowing itself to be so crassly defiled?

I stopped short of acceptance. Thank G-d, we have organizations like the Israel Women's Network, which has encouraged and supported the work of the Knesset Committee of Inquiry established to deal with the issue. Thank G-d, we have activist parliamentarians like MK Zahava Gal-On, with whom I disagree on pretty much everything, but whose activism on this issue is a tribute--albeit a sad one--to Israel.

What remains is for us to take a long, hard look at ourselves and ponder how we can help these women extract themselves from their predicament and rehabilitate their lives while, at the same time, extracting ourselves from our collective descent into moral decadence and rehabilitating a society that has tolerated this practice for far too long.