Israeli politics has been thrown into turmoil, and its delicate social fabric placed under heavy new strain, by the opening of a police inquiry into alleged incitement by a leading rabbi.
Rabbi Ovadiyah Yosef (80), the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, is under investigation because of a series of derisive remarks he has been making about a political rival, Mr Yossi Sarid, leader of the secular Meretz party and Minister of Education.
In recent weeks, Rabbi Yosef has compared Mr Sarid to the devil, to the Egyptian Pharaoh who kept the Children of Israel enslaved, and to other loathed enemies in Jewish history, and has expressed the hope that all trace of Mr Sarid will be eliminated.
While the rabbi has also stressed that he is not advocating physical violence against the Education Minister, and his aides and supporters have insisted that what may have sounded like murderous threats should be interpreted in a more spiritual context, Israel's Attorney General, Mr Elyakim Rubinstein, Orthodox himself, yesterday ruled that a police investigation was warranted.
Mr Sarid expressed satisfaction at the decision, as did several other government ministers, who said it underlined that no man, however venerated, was above the law. Ms Dalia Itzik, the Environment Minister, urged Rabbi Yosef to "show respect for the rule of law". Otherwise, she said, "we'll have no country left".
However, the decision to open the investigation has potentially dramatic implications both for the coalition government of the Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and for relations between supporters of Shas - mainly working-class Sephardim of Middle Eastern and North African origin - and the rest of Israeli society.
On the political level, both Shas and Meretz are members of Mr Barak's coalition, but it is now hard to envisage them both remaining in government. Several of the 17 Shas Knesset members want to leave now, in protest at what one Shas cabinet minister, Mr Shlomo Benizri, yesterday termed the anti-Sephardi "racism" at the root of the decision to investigate Rabbi Yosef.
Without Shas's support, Mr Barak would be hard pressed to maintain a Knesset majority on key peacemaking issues.
On the social level, the investigation of Rabbi Yosef is exposing longstanding tensions between Sephardi Jews and the establishment elite they blame for the poverty in their community, and between the Sephardi and Russian immigrant communities, each of which believes the other gets preferential treatment.