In a few weeks, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi Shas party will celebrate the 30th anniversary of its founding. Actually, “celebrate” is a bit exaggerated — no one in Shas feels like partying these days. In fact, it would be more correct to say that the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox movement, founded almost by chance on the eve of the 1983 municipal elections, is at one of the lowest points it has known since its inception.

If its only problem was that its members were relegated to the opposition benches and forced to part painfully from the governing coalition’s cash cow, that would be tolerable. The problem is that Shas finds itself in the opposition wilderness while still in the throes of a severe leadership crisis: The party has been conducting itself without a chairman for half a year. The idea of entrusting the movement’s leadership to a trio of politicians has utterly failed. It turns out that Shas is not the Roman Empire and the scheme that worked for the First Triumvirate in 59 BC (Gaius Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus) — and even that only lasted for 10 years — does not work for Aryeh Deri, former Minister of Interior Eli Yishai and former Minister of Housing and Construction Ariel Attias. Add to this mix the simple biological fact that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the undisputed spiritual leader, is 93, and the picture is clear: Shas is in deep trouble.

We’ll start with Aryeh Deri. Ostensibly this would be the place to mention Ariel Attias as well, the third leg of the triumvirate, but Attias is already sick of the infighting that plagues the highest echelons of his party. That is the impression received by sources who speak to him. Since Attias retired from his role in the government after serving as a minister for about seven years, he has his eye to the outside world of business, and is debating whether to retire from political life. But Deri and Yishai are not going anywhere. Deri is still waiting for the moment when his comeback will be complete and he will be anointed as Shas chairman again. The forced cooperation with Eli Yishai has become a situation he can no longer tolerate. Deri holds Yishai in great contempt and still is hanging onto long-held feelings of enmity from when relations between the two were completely severed for more than a decade. Their warm hugs and demonstrations of unity of half a year ago, when it became known that a joint leadership model had been decided on, now seem ridiculous and completely detached from reality (and truth be told, it seemed so even then).

What keeps Deri going now is the hope that this insufferable situation will end in the near future. He hangs on to the hope that the chaos will cease within a short time and that he will again be declared chairman of Shas. The point is that this waiting period has extended for a long time, much more than he expected. Before the elections, he reckoned that the Shas leadership would fall into his lap like a ripe fruit. Later, when he was forced to retreat, he maintained that the whole affair would be settled immediately after the elections. Three months have passed since the elections and Deri is still waiting for the big prize (that is emerging as nothing more than a beaten political party in the throes of a deep crisis).