When Menachem Begin unexpectedly became leader of the country and word spread that he intended to continue the open house tradition, the anticipation of it became a source of matchless pleasure to the general public and an unmatched migraine to the security service. No prime minister had ever flung open his door to all and sundry before, and the people in charge of his security were at a loss as to how to handle it.
“Shabbat shalom. Come in. Have a cold drink,” cried Mr. and Mrs. Begin welcomingly, extending a hand to all visitors as they walked through the door. Many were holding housewarming gifts of cake, flowers, chocolate, and wine. Some were so awestruck they instinctively bowed and tiptoed across the threshold.
Once inside, visitors hung about gawking at the expansive living room, with its blend of old-style European and contemporary Israeli furnishings set out on rich carpets. They silently admired the crystal chandelier in the dining room, the paintings on the walls by famous Israeli artists, the solid silver Shabbat candelabras still coated with wax, and the framed pictures of the grandchildren on the grand piano. And while they stood and stared, the two Begin daughters, Hassya and Leah, and an older grandchild, circulated among them, carrying trays of juice and soda and cookies, and urging everybody to feel at home.
One skinny old man dressed in his Shabbat best, with pockets of fatigue under his eyes, and jaws and jowls drooping with mourning, peered into Mr. Begin’s face as though studying an object at a museum. He refused to let the prime minister go until he had examined a snapshot of his wife and four children, discolored and crumbling. He thrust it under Begin’s nose, gesticulating and shouting in Yiddish, that in all his years at Auschwitz, where his family was gassed, he had never let go of this photograph, and that whenever the SS searched him he stuffed it into his mouth, which was why it was so cracked and creased and smeared.
Begin clasped the man to his breast and the survivor’s voice gradually trailed away, and his eyes went misty. A silent thread of communication passed between them, calming the man immensely. He blinked back his tears and wordlessly walked away.
Next, a Yemenite with a wispy beard, tight side-curls and a white skullcap with a tassel on top stepped forward, and introduced himself as a grocer. Asked where his place of business was, he named a run-down neighborhood, prompting the prime minister to announce, “I want you to tell your customers and all your friends, in my name, that we are going to renew your neighborhood.”
“Renew? What does that mean?” The grocer was totally perplexed.
“It means our new government is elaborating a plan called Project Renewal. With the help of our Diaspora brethren – the United Jewish Appeal and Keren Hayesod – we shall eliminate all the slums of Israel, including yours. We shall restore your homes and build new ones in consultation with you, the inhabitants. It will be a cooperative effort and, b’ezrat Hashem [God willing], we shall make all our neighborhoods places where people will be proud to live.”
The grocer listened intently, trust softening his sun-blasted face, and then he abruptly bent his knee to deferentially kiss the prime minister’s hand. But Mr. Begin would have none of it. “A Jew bends his knee to no one but to God,” he reprimanded gently.
By now the place was packed, so I stepped into the garden that led off from the living room to get some air. Here, too, people were gathered, among them a driver I recognized from the prime minister’s office. His name was Rahamim, and he was in the company of a dozen or so muscular young men, all wearing T-shirts and expertly cracking roasted sunflower seeds between their teeth. Insisting I join them in their feast, they regaled me with tales of Menachem Begin’s love fest with Sephardic Jews like themselves.
It was the twilight hour, and the prime minister himself stepped out of the crowded living room into the floodlit garden, his animated features lit by a dazzling smile. His entry was welcomed with whistles and applause. Among the eager faces which greeted him was one belonging to a frail figure in a baggy suit, with the pale skin of an underfed convict and teeth the color of khaki. Most of his hair was gone except for a crescent of iron-gray bristles. He looked at least fifty, and he bowed with a stiff, brittle dignity as he clasped Mr. Begin’s hand.
Speaking in a fluent Hebrew, he said his name was Misha Lippu, an artist by profession, and that he had just been released from a Romanian penal colony after five years of imprisonment. He had arrived in Israel two days before, under the quota system which the Israeli government negotiated annually at a high price with the Romanian communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, enabling a trickle of Jews to emigrate.
All guests within earshot stood in rigid attentiveness as Begin gripped the man by the shoulders and in a tone of fervent compassion and respect, said, “Shalom Aleichem! Baruch haba! ”[Welcome! Welcome!]
Lippu lowered his gaze and compressed his lips which began to tremble in emotion, causing Begin to grip him harder, saying softly, “It’s all right Mr. Lippu. You’re among your own now. You’re home. You’re safe. No one can harm you.” And then, brightening up, “From whence your Hebrew? It’s so fluent.”
Energized by the question, Lippu wiped his eyes and explained that in his younger years he had studied at a yeshiva, and that in the penal colony there had been a Catholic priest, a Father Oradea, who knew classical Hebrew well. So they spoke it and did exercises together. “Father Oradea was imprisoned as an agent provocateur,” said Lippu, matter of factly.
“And you – what was your crime?” probed Begin.
“I was charged with being a Zionist conspirator.”
Begin closed his eyes for a moment, and mumbled knowingly, “I am very familiar with the term. And what, specifically, were you found guilty of?”
A parade of intense emotions raced across Misha Lippu’s face, and he chewed on his knuckles to get a grip on himself. “Jewish and Zionist art,” he answered flatly.
Begin was nonplussed.
Compulsively, Lippu told Begin that after he’d left the yeshiva world he’d followed his artistic calling and enrolled in an art academy. When the Stalinists came to power they enforced a proletarian style of art for which he received many commissions over many years. He became well known, and was showered with honors. This won him disdain from connoisseurs and adulation from those he disdained – the fat cats and the apparatchiks. So, in the end he gave that up and began painting Jewish devotional and Zionist themes that expressed his innermost emotions. He was warned many times to stop, but he didn’t. Under the Stalinist penal code this amounted to conspiracy against the state. And that’s what landed him in the penal colony, where he was sent into the quarries to smash rocks.
The prime minister stared back at him with watery eyes, and said, “I, too, spent time in a gulag smashing rocks.”
Dumbfounded, Misha Lippu gazed hard at Begin, and whispered, “You were a prisoner of the communists, too?”
Begin nodded, and related how, on one fine day in September 1940, three Russian security agents came knocking on his door in Vilna, and took him away. At the time he was head of Betar in Poland and, a Soviet court declared him guilty of ‘deviationism,’ and sentenced him to eight years hard labor in a Siberian gulag. His Soviet interrogator told him, “You will never see a Jewish State,” and most fellow prisoners were equally disheartening, one telling him that the supposed date of his release – 20 September 1948 – was a fiction. Nobody ever left the camps alive. But then fate intervened. In the spring of 1941, Germany attacked Russia and the Soviets concluded an agreement with the Polish Government-in-Exile that led to his release. He joined the Free Polish Forces and reached Palestine with one of its units in 1942.
“Time for Maariv ” [the evening service], somebody called out. People gazed heavenward to check that three stars were visible in the sky, this being the sign that the Sabbath day was over. A group of men assembled in a corner of the garden to pray, and while they were doing so Mrs. Begin brought in from the kitchen a thick plaited candle, a silver spice box, and an overflowing goblet of wine. The br
ief service done, Mr. Begin lifted a granddaughter onto a chair, lit the candle, placed it in the child’s hand, and as she held it aloft, raised the wine goblet and recited havdalah, the closing ceremony of the Sabbath day. Then the whole throng chanted in full-throated chorus, “shavua tov” – the words that expressed the hope for a good week to come.
As the guests were leaving, the prime minister called out after them, again and again, “We leave for Washington shortly. Please come back and visit us after we return.” And the guests, bursting with delight, called back, “We will. We will.”
“No, they won’t,” muttered the exhausted and agitated chief security officer to his subordinates. “Such a free-for-all will not happen again.To the prime minister he said, “Sir, if you want to maintain your open-house tradition, all visitors will have to register beforehand, and each will be thoroughly vetted.”
“Pity,” sighed Begin. “It’s been such a beautiful way to keep in touch with the amcha” [the ordinary folk].
Photograph credit: Courtesy of Menachem Begin Heritage Center
Mugshot of Menachem Begin, 1940, as a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp
Chapter 33
The Bible Circle
Though Mr. Begin had to forego his open house, he did open up his home to a Bible study circle which convened every Saturday evening. Approximately twenty people, among them Bible scholars of repute, would seat themselves around the couch on which the prime minister sat, and for an hour or more they would delve into some particularly attention-grabbing passage of the Book of Books. I would participate as a matter of course; being in attendance on the prime minister was part of my job.
On the first such Saturday night, held on the very eve of Begin’s departure for Washington, the chosen passage was from the Book of Numbers, chapters twenty-two to twenty-four, in which the Bible records how, in the fortieth year after the children of Israel embarked on their Exodus from Egypt, and just a few months before entering the Promised Land, the heathen prophet Balaam was coaxed – bribed actually – by the Moabite King Balak, to curse the advancing Israelites and thereby devastate them before they could devastate him. However, Balaam, impelled by God’s command, and much to Balak’s displeasure, found himself involuntarily blessing them instead.
That evening’s discussion centered primarily on the evocative verse nine of chapter twenty-three, in which Balaam foretells with remarkable prescience the future destiny of the Jewish people, predicting, “…this is a people that shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations.”
Reading the verse out loud, Prime Minister Begin gave a mild chuckle and said, “One does not have to be a mystic for the imagination to be stirred by such an improbable vision of a nation forever ‘dwelling alone.’ Is it not a startlingly accurate prophecy of our Jewish people’s experience in all of history?”
Even as he was saying this, I vividly recalled the remark Prime Minister Golda Meir had once made about how lonely she invariably felt when attending a session at the United Nations. “We have no family there,” she had said. “Israel is entirely alone there. But why should that be?”
Being a socialist, with no bent for theology, Golda Meir had made no attempt to answer her own momentous question. But now Menachem Begin was opening discussion on this indisputable reality.
“Why does the Jewish State so frequently face solitude in the family of nations?” he asked rhetorically. “Is it because we are the only country in the world that is Jewish? Is it because we are the one country in the world whose language is Hebrew? But why are there no other Jewish states? Why are there no other Hebrew-speaking states, just as there are multiple Christian states, Moslem states, Hindu states, Buddhist states, English-speaking, Arabic-speaking, French-speaking, Chinese-speaking states? In short, why have we no sovereign kith and kin anywhere in the world? In the United Nations, everybody is grouped into regional blocs, each bloc bound by a common geography, religion, history, culture, and language. They vote with one another in solidarity. But no other country in the world shares our unique narrative. Geographically, we are located in Asia, but the Asian bloc won’t have us. Our Arab neighbors see to that. Indeed, they want to destroy us. So, geographically, we really belong nowhere. And since membership in the Security Council is in accordance with regional blocs, we have no realistic chance of being elected to it. The one blood tie, the one kindred bond we have with anybody at all in the world, is with our own fellow Jews in the Diaspora, and everywhere they are a minority and nowhere do they enjoy any form of national or cultural autonomy.”
Professor Ephraim Auerbach, a rotund, semi-bald scholar of refinement, wit and brilliance, picked up the theme, citing classic commentators who suggested that the meaning of “dwelling alone,” as cited by the heathen prophet Balaam, really meant voluntarily setting oneself apart. In other words, the Jewish nation distinguished itself from other peoples by virtue of its distinctive religious and moral laws, and by the fact that it had been chosen by God as the instrument of a divine purpose within the family of nations. “In that sense, the Jewish people dwells alone of its own volition,” he said.
A woman in her fifties asked for permission to comment. She was tall and lean, her face equine, her dress and hat plain, and her eyes brilliantly intelligent. This was Nehama Leibowitz, a renowned Bible scholar famous for her immensely popular weekly Torah commentaries, composed in a highly comprehensible style. Deftly, she drew attention to the verse’s grammatical structure, elaborating upon and reinforcing Professor Auerbach’s comment, explaining that the word yitchashav, generally translated to mean ‘reckoned’ – “this is a people that shall not be reckoned among the nations” – was rendered in the reflexive form, which therefore gave the meaning, “this is a people that does not reckon itself among the nations.” And as an aside, she pointed out that this form of that particular word occurs but once in the whole of Scripture.
Professor Yaakov Katz, a slight figure with dour features and a deeply analytical disposition, broke in to refer to the eminent Talmudist Marcus Jastrow. Citing Jastrow’s Talmudic sources, Katz showed that the reflexive form of the root word chashav [reckon] signifies “to conspire,” meaning that Israel “is a people that dwells alone and does not conspire against other nations.”
Professor Harel Fisch, educator, literary scholar, and future laureate of the prestigious Israel Prize, raised a finger for attention. Stroking his goatee, he mused that in modern society the Jewish people were unique in personifying a seamless blend of peoplehood and religion, born out of the two seminal events that forged the Jewish national personality: the Exodus from Egypt, when Jews entered history as a people, and the giving of the Torah at Sinai, when Jews entered history as a nation-faith. A Jew, therefore, was a synergy of both – Exodus and Sinai. He could not be the one without the other, though many throughout the centuries had tried to keep them apart. Whether one was a believer or a skeptic, this subtle nation-faith individuality was indivisible. And since this was what distinguished the Jewish people from all other peoples, they would always, uniquely, “dwell alone.”
Another participant, whom everybody knew simply as Srulik, a bushy-haired archaeologist and Bible prodigy wearing an emerald green yarmulke which he had picked up at the door, provocatively remarked that whichever way one interpreted Balaam’s prophecy, it stamped the Jewish people as an eternally abnormal nation within the family of nations – and that this flew in the face of the classic Zionist creed, which expounded that Zionism’s aim was to normalize the Jewish people so that it could become a goy k’chol hagoyim – a nation like all other nations. Indeed, the central thesis of the Zionist thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the Labor Zionists, was that once Jews possessed what every other normal nation possesses – a land of their own – they would automatically become a normal nation within the family of nations. And the consequence of that, so the classic Zionist theory held, would be that anti-Semitism would wither and die. Well, it hadn’t wi
thered and died. On the contrary, the very existence of the Jewish State was often a cause for anti-Semitic prejudice, and this, surely, cast a shadow on a fundamental article of Zionist faith.
To which Dr. Chaim Gevaryahu, chairman of the Israel Bible Society, added that he wondered what led those brilliant secular Zionist founding fathers of yesteryear to predict so confidently that Jewish self-determination would, of itself, lead to national normalization and put an end to anti-Semitism. Indeed, once Jews became a normal people they would cease being Jews. But that could never happen, because nothing could ever put an end to anti-Semitism. In fact, one thing to be learned from the biblical portion under review was that the so-called prophet Balaam was the archetypical anti-Semite. His whole intent was to curse the Jews, not to bless them. The blessing was God’s doing, not his.
Irresistibly, the prime minister plunged in once again, expanding on the uniqueness of the Jewish national identity, saying, “As Professor Harel Fisch has pointed out, other peoples are multi-religious; other religions are multinational. But we Jews are one and the same – religion and nationhood both. And as Professor Auerbach and Professor Leibowitz have indicated, we have forever maintained this distinctiveness by refusing to assimilate into other nations. It all began with the father of our nation, Abraham of Ur of the Chaldees, who, at the age of seventy-five, deduced the eternal truth of the One God, and bolted the idolatry of his parental home in order to worship Him. Hundreds of years later we see his descendents, by now an enslaved people, again embarking on a God-commanded journey – the Exodus from the idolatrous land of Egypt – again in order to worship the One God. In both instances their destination was Eretz Yisrael, there to fulfill their religious-national destiny. Never in Jewish history was this identity severed.” Then the line of his mouth tightened a fraction showing he was about to draw a practical conclusion: “And since there can be no separation between nation and faith, this means there can be no total separation between religion and state in the Jewish State.”
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 43
