Religious and Secular thoughts about progress

Rabbis are worried about too many Jews
In a recent talk with Elinor, a TV producer, the topic of how people in Tel Aviv see themselves came up. Her friend wrote a book on how Tel Avivians turned complacent, comfortable, bordering on hedonistic. There is definitely a view that life in Tel Aviv is getting "too soft, too comfortable, too isolated from reality". What does this mean? People still struggle here, from finding a decent apartment to balancing work with life... from finding a little peace and quiet in a noisy city, to just avoiding dog poop on the sidewalk at night. Big issues to small ones, they have not gone away, just changed.
It is true that Tel Aviv has become a comfortable metropolis. It is true that Israel's central region is modern and runs well - maybe TOO WELL? (some say!) But Tel Aviv does have the same problems any large metropolis has. The city has a chronic housing shortage, but buildings are still small and personal and not crowded like European cities: Paris, Amsterdam, or Rome. Tel Aviv has a chronic parking shortage, but the city grew out of small street architecture just at the dawn of the automotive age. For over 80 years city planners were thinking about public transportation while residents prefer cars, bikes, and mopeds. Tel Aviv as a city simply changed "too quickly".
But Elinor's point reminded me of another rather extreme position we hear on the street. There is a renewed fierce verbal battle over the view of "who is a Jew". The more orthodox rabbis want to limit the official religious Jewish conversions (official state approved). This goes for both men and women's conversions. But the issue is also pushed in the other direction by more secular rabbis which want to welcome anyone who wants to live and settle in Israel.
These two issues seem to manifest the difficulty in changing view points and mind sets from the past. Thinking that life is too good for "US" is what our parents and grandparents have been hearing in Europe and in Arab countries - long before the state of Israel gained independence and was a Jewish state. The rabbis of today are still thinking and ACTING as if they were in small isolated villages (shtettles). Where bringing someone from the outside was not just strange, unacceptable, hard, but EVEN DANGEROUS! Stories of reprisals in the form of fines and even communal punishment for enticing Christians to become Jews were not strange to us two generations ago. These stories - or the isolated thinking that we hold seem to be still echoing in our minds. But we are not in rural Poland or Yemen any more. Actually we have not been there for two or three generations already.
These deja-vu thinkers are not just as nostalgic curiosities. They are actually disturbing and border on the dangerous. If we keep to our old ways of thinking we may actually hurt ourselves. If we keep to our old ways of thinking we will act accordingly and hurt ourselves. Our thinking will stop us from moving Tel Aviv and Israel as a Jewish state from forward progress. Our geographic, cultural, and historic advantages will be held back. This is what conservative, dictatorial, and religious countries are doing all around us. You don't have to look hard to find crippled countries. They come in every shape and color, they behave in every imaginable way - but basically they hurt people and the overall society.
The Tel Aviv view of change seem to come from just seeing it on the street, on people's faces, in how we live. Change just comes to us, we do not seem to plan or seek it. Some of our old politicians seem to have tried both: planning -or- stopping / ignoring. But neither one seem to work very well. It seems that people change as they see fit, when they don't, we clash.