Daniel Gordis has written a new book entitled Menachem Begin: The Battle For Israel’s Soul. What makes this book different from a number of other biographies is Gordis’ underlying thesis that Menachem Begin was Israel’s most “Jewish” prime minister. In order to understand why observant Jews related so much better to Begin than to any of Israel’s other leaders – and to perhaps find a way to resolve today’s imbroglio – I will review a number of significant events in Begin’s life that give us an idea of his “Jewishness.”
* * *The town of Brisk is famous in frum circles as the home of the Soloveitchik dynasty of rabbis. That was indeed an important part of Brisk, but it was not all of it. Many different movements and ideologies vied for the loyalty of the youth of Brisk when Menachem was born, in 1913, and throughout the 1920s and 30s. There were the very pious, of course, who looked upon Zionism as a danger to traditional Jewish life. And there were those who went all the way to the other side, such as the Hashomer Hatza’ir movement, which taught its members to revile religious practices and admire communism.
Menachem Begin was a product of his times, but he was never one who revolted against his religious heritage. He was also not someone who could be called a strictly observant Jew. Let me begin with a story that was told in his home and is significant in understanding his outlook.
In 1904, years before Menachem Begin was born, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism died, and Zev Dov Begin, one of the leaders of the Brisk kehila, wanted to hold a memorial service in the main shul. Rav Chaim Brisker said no and locked the shul. Menachem Begin’s father and his friend, Mordechai Schneidermann (whose grandson Ariel Sharon would later play a powerful role in Menachem’s life) broke the lock of Rav Chaim Soloveitchik’s synagogue to conduct a service in Herzl’s memory.
Does that mean that Begin’s father was not respectful of the Rav? When Begin visited the United States as prime minister, he visited the great rabbis of the Agudah in Rav Moshe Feinstein’s home. He also paid a call on the Lubavitcher Rebbe and held a meeting with Rav Yosef Dov Solovietchik, who insisted on coming to meet Begin, not the reverse. Rabbi Soloveitchik reminded Menachem Begin of the incident in which his father had disobeyed Rav Soloveitchik’s grandfather. The Rav told him that, in the family, they said that this was the one and only time the elder Begin did not follow the Brisker Rav’s guidance in regards to the kehila. Menachem used to tell another story of how his father and the Rav were walking together, and an anti-Semite began harassing the Rav. Zev Dov Begin took his walking stick and hit the gentile over the head. He went to jail, but he was proud that he stood up for the honor of a Jew.
A number of Jewish schools existed in Brisk. Menachem did not go to the cheder; he also did not go to the secular Jewish school. He went to what we would call nowadays a Modern Orthodox day school. It was for frum children, but the curriculum included both religious and secular studies. After elementary school, he attended a Polish high school and refused to take a Latin test on Shabbos, much to the amusement of his classmates. He told the teacher, “This is my belief, and I won’t write on the Sabbath under any circumstances.” The teacher gave him an F, but when Menachem still refused to back down, the teacher relented and gave him his typically high grade.
Zev Dov also taught his children a love for Tanach (Bible). Menachem once recalled, “My father knew the Bible by heart, almost the entire thing. He and the three children loved a sort of family Bible contest. One of the children would recite a verse from the Torah, the Prophets, or the Writings, and our father would complete the chapter from memory.”
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The Zionist movement comprised various ideologies. The dominant Labor Zionists were socialists, who wanted to create a “new Jew” built around the glory of labor and the ideals of socialism. People like Ben Gurion and Golda Meir had little if any involvement with Jewish observance. The religious Jews naturally recoiled from those who denied and belittled the basic beliefs and practices of our Torah.
Menachem Begin did not belong to that strand of Zionism. He joined the Betar at the age of 13, and became enamored of its founder, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whom he always referred to as “Mori verebbi,” my teacher and rebbe. Jabotinsky was convinced that the Zionist leadership under Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion was too weak and too passive. The Revisionists, as they were called, may have had the same ultimate goals as the mainstream Zionists, but they were more militant and wanted to achieve their goal by force, if necessary, rather than depend on the good will of the gentiles. (Jabotinsky was tragically prescient in his calls for Jews to leave Europe, which he felt would soon erupt in flames.)
The Revisionist youth movement was known as Betar. The word Betar has two meanings: It was the name of the last fortress in the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Romans in 135 C.E. (near the present-day city of Betar). Betar is also a synonym for Brit Trumpeldor, named for Yosef Trumeldor, the Russian Jew who helped Jabotinsky establish the Jewish Legion in World War I. As he lay dying defending Tel Hai in the Upper Galilee in 1920, Trumpeldor’s last words were, “Tov lamut ba’ad artzeinu – It is good to die for our country.” No short phrase could have better captured the Revisionist’s commitment to Jewish military power, self-defense, and national pride, nor struck the Zionist establishment as so dangerous. Jabotinsky and his organization were pariahs to the Ben Gurion types, but Menachem Begin was Jabotinsky’s most loyal and dedicated disciple, although they did have many disagreements on tactics later on, as Begin became the head of Betar in Poland.
Nothing in Revisionist Zionist ideology denigrates frumkeit. Many members were not observant, but religious Jews felt more comfortable in a movement that did not want to forget the past and make a “new” Jew. The ideal was for a Jew to have pride and stand up for his dignity. A phrase in modern Israeli parlance explains the difference between the Zionism of Ben Gurion and that of Begin: “Mi-Tanach el Palmach – from the Bible to the Palmach (military organization).” Ben Gurion studied the Bible but skipped over the 2,000 years of exile as a dark chapter better forgotten, and resumed the story with the rebirth of Israel on its own land. Begin, on the other hand, looked upon Jewish history as a continuum. He was not merely an Israeli; he was a Jew.
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In the interests of space, I will skip over the well known stories of Begin’s arrest and internment in Siberia (which Begin described in his book, White Nights), his arrival in Palestine during World War II as part of the Free Polish Army, and his assumption of the leadership of the Irgun. I will also not dwell on the bombing of the King David Hotel, the sinking of the Altalena, or the fierce debate against German reparations that got Begin tossed out of the Knesset.
The fact is that Begin was a wanted man during the days of the British Mandate, and was later ignored and demeaned by Ben Gurion, who led the nascent State of Israel. Ben Gurion so hated Begin that he never referred to him by name. If he had to answer him in the Knesset, he would refer to him “the member sitting next to Dr. Bader.”
I cannot skip over two stories from the bloody revolt staged by Begin’s Irgun and its ally, the Stern Gang, against the British. Unlike the Hagana, the pre-state defense organization, which suspended their fight against the British while World War II was going on in Europe, the Irgun was committed to armed struggle to open the doors of Palestine to any Jews who could escape. They looked upon the British as enemies who had to be driven out by force. Begin was declared an outlaw, and a bounty of 10,000 British pounds was placed on his head, which was a lot of money in 1944. Begin went into hiding, in plain sight. Moving his family to a dilapidated street in Tel Aviv, he assumed the identity of “Rabbi Sasover.” He wore a hat and grew a short beard and went to shul morning and evening and sat in on the Gemara shiur. No one in the shul imagined that the timid rabbi was the arch-terrorist Menachem Begin.
During this time, two men were awaiting execution in Jerusalem. Meir Feinstein had been arrested following an attack on the Jerusalem railway station. Moshe Barzani, a Lechi (the British called it the Stern gang) fighter, was found with a hand grenade. Merely carrying a hand grenade was a capital offence. Feinstein and Barazani were determined to take some British soldiers with them. It was the biblical model of Samson, who had vowed to “perish with the Philistines.” The two wanted to die in the model of “our ancient hero.”
A hand grenade was smuggled in inside a hollowed out orange, but there was a last minute problem. The British brought a rabbi, who promised to return in the morning to be with them when their end came. The two fighters couldn’t carry out their Samson plan, because they didn’t want to kill the rabbi with the British. So that evening, in their cell, after the rabbi had gone to sleep elsewhere in the prison, Feinstein and Barazani hugged each other; together they sang “Adon Olom” until one of them detonated the hand grenade they had placed between them. I will come back to this later. It is vital to the Begin story.
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In the interest of space, I am going skip all of the years that Menachem Begin and his party were in the “loyal opposition,” as it is called in the parliamentary system. He was in the opposition for 29 years! Gordis quotes the Israeli historian Anita Shapira, who believes that Begin is the only leader in the history of democracies to have lost eight consecutive elections only to win the ninth.
In the dismal aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the mood in Israel changed, and the Labor party was gradually losing its hold on power. Little by little, other parties arose that chipped into their lead. Yigael Yadin led a new party, DMC, the Democratic Movement for Change, which took away enough votes from Labor to put Likud, led by Begin, in the lead and give him the first chance to form a new government. Now the world got to see Begin, not as a terrorist, not as a political gadfly, but as prime minister, and this scared the daylights out of many Israelis. The Sefardim danced in the streets but the socialist Ashkenazi elite mourned the end of Israel as they knew it.
Begin did not join the dancing in the streets. Instead, he donned a kippa and recited the Shehechiyanu blessing. Israel had never witnessed such an act by a high-ranking politician. When a reporter asked him shortly after the results were announced if there was anything in particular he wanted to say, he said he wanted to thank his wife, Aliza. He then quoted from memory the verse in Jeremiah 2:2: “I recall with favor the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride; how you followed me in the wilderness, in an unsown land.” But, Begin altered the last line, saying “…lechteich acharai bamidbar, be’eretz zarua bemokshim – Y ou followed me in the wilderness, in a land sown with land mines.”
The book’s author, Daniel Gordis, in a speech I heard on YouTube, made the point that only a person who is very comfortable and fluent in the Tanach can take a pasuk and change it in that way for emphasis; it is part of his “Jewishness.” Just hours after the election, a reporter shoved a microphone in front of Begin’s face and asked him in what style he would be prime minister. Begin paused for a moment at the odd question and then responded simply, “In the style of a good Jew, a Yehudi tov.”
If I were to summarize in a few sentences the difference between Begin and those who came before and after him, it would be that Menachem Begin was a Jew, not an Israeli. He did not seek to build a new Jew; he sought to provide a haven for his people. He did not reject religion in favor of socialism, he considered Judaism and Zionism to be one and indivisible.
* * *
I will now skip to the visit of the Egyptian prime minister, Anwar Sadat and the subsequent peace negotiations under the guidance of President Jimmy Carter. Carter thought Begin was a “psycho.” In fact, Begin did not behave like the ordinary politician or head of state. He often subjected Carter and his staff to long, emotional lectures about the Holocaust and sweep of Jewish history. Carter didn’t understand Menachem Begin at all. To him and his men, Sadat was a visionary; Begin was a Jew, a “Pharisee,” a figure much reviled in the Christian New Testament as pedantic and unwilling to see the big picture.
Begin was unwilling to consider Palestinian autonomy. The mere notion of dividing Jerusalem was unthinkable to him. He also refused to discuss the settlements. Sadat and Carter misread him completely. They did not understand that, to Begin, either Jews have a right to Eretz Yisrael or not. He was willing to discuss Sinai, because that is not Eretz Yisrael, but he would not to discuss giving up one inch of the land he believed G-d gave to his ancestors. Carter’s team personally disliked Begin, and called him an “inverted sabra,” soft on the outside and tough on the inside.”
In desperation, Carter convened talks at Camp David, which Begin called a “concentration camp deluxe.” Carter gave Begin a warning – that Camp David was “an opportunity that may never come again.” On Israeli television, Begin answered President Carter: “Our people lived thousands of years before Camp David and will live thousands of years after Camp David….If we are told that this is the last chance to arrive at peace, we shall not agree. There are no last chances in life.”
I believe that Begin was the quintessential Jew. Can you even imagine any other Israeli prime minister doing what Gordis describes in his book?
Even more bewildering to Carter was Begin’s resolute refusal to even discuss the issue of dividing Jerusalem. When Carter broached the topic, Begin related the story of Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, the eleventh century Jewish scholar who was pressured by the archbishop of Mainz to convert to Christianity. Rabbi Amnon asked the archbishop for three days during which he would consider, but immediately regretted having done anything at all that might be interpreted as his even considering such an unthinkable act. When he did not appear…he was dragged in by guards….he asked that his tongue be cut out, since it was with his tongue that he had expressed doubt of his everlasting commitment to Judaism…. In his last moments, he recited the a prayer called Unetaneh Tokef, and then he died…Carter understood. Begin was making it clear that he would not make Rabbi Amnon’s mistake. Carter shared the story with Sadat and the issue of Jerusalem was dropped.
* * *
In summation, Begin was twice elected prime minister. He proved to be a good leader in many aspects. He wasn’t the best in terms of economics, but he was determined on matters of defense. If you read The Prime Ministers, by Yehudah Avner, you will see that the reason Begin chose to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor a short while before the elections for his second term was that he wanted to prevent another Holocaust. He saw everything in Jewish terms, and this is what motivated his decisions. To Begin, Israel was a haven, and Jews would never again be like sheep led to the slaughter. Avner recently told Gordis that the entire time that the pilots were flying to bomb the nuclear reactor until they came back, Menachem Begin was pacing back and forth in his office reciting Tehilim (Psalms) by heart.
Another incident comes to mind that demonstrates Begin’s profound Jewish sensibility. Just before the election, in which Begin was running for his second term as prime minister, there was a huge Labor party rally in Tel Aviv. A TV comedian, Dudu Topaz, made fun of the Sefardim, who were Begin’s main constituency. He called them chakchakim, a slang term for cockroaches. The next night, a rally took place in the same square for Menachem Begin. I remember seeing a video of the rally a number of years ago at the Menachem Begin Museum in Yerushalayim. Begin got up in front of a crowd and said, “I never heard this term before. In the Irgun, we did not know the difference between Jews, Feinstein was an Ashkenazi, Barzani was Iraqi, and together they died.” He then screamed: “Lochamium! Achim! Yehudim! – Warriors! Brothers! Jews!” That in a nutshell, shows why the underclasses loved Begin and eventually brought him to high office. Many years later, Menachem Begin left instructions that he did not want to be buried on Mount Herzl with the important leaders of Israel, he wanted to be buried next to Feinstein and Barzani on the Mount of Olives, and so he is.
Begin, following his teacher Jabotinsky, believed in hadar, which can be explained by a similar term I once heard from Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, zt”l, of the Mir. A Jew is a nichbad, an elevated human being; he does not do things that are beneath him. Hadar is a similar concept, and it means that a Betar soldier is a ben sar, an aristocrat, not a benoni, a common person. That may also explain why Ben Gurion wore short pants and sandals, while Begin wore a suit and a tie. These two men were very different, and their “hashkafos,” their ideologies, were as different as night and day.
Israel would not exist today, according to Daniel Gordis, without these two great leaders. Though they were very different from one another, the one thing they had in common was that neither cared for wealth. Begin lived and raised his three children in a one-bedroom apartment in Tel Aviv. When he later left office, he had no place to live, and some supporters from Canada bought him a little apartment in Jerusalem where he lived with his daughter Leah, who, much to her mother’s chagrin, never got married.
Menachem Begin suffered from mood swings that could be called manic depressive. When he lost it, he really lost it. Towards the end of his term in office, Begin became depressed. His wife Aliza, his rock, was very ill with asthma from her life as a heavy smoker. He had trouble focusing at cabinet meetings and was a shadow of his former tough self.
In addition, he had been duped by Ariel Sharon, who, as was pointed out, was the grandson of Zev Dov Begin’s friend in Brisk. Sharon tricked Begin and the cabinet into approving the war in Lebanon, which became a quagmire. Things started to go wrong, and many soldiers died in what many felt was a war of aggression, not of pure defense. Crowds picketed Begin’s home, and he took it very personally. A survivor of the Holocaust, he could not accept being called a killer of Jewish boys.
Finally, Begin made the decision to go to the U.S. for important meetings, while Aliza was in the hospital. She died while he was in Los Angeles. When told, his anguished words were “Lama azavti otah – How could I have abandoned her?”
That was the end, really. Begin held on as prime minister for a while, but he had sunk into a deep depression and finally he told his cabinet, “I cannot continue any longer.” It should be pointed out that he was on lots of medications for heart disease, diabetes, and other ailments, and the combination of drugs may have contributed to his mood. He retreated to his apartment and was cared for by his single daughter, Leah. He also had a married son and a married daughter who were very close to him. Only they and a very few close associates ever got to visit him after that. Carter asked to meet with him on one of his interminable visits to the Middle East to teach the parties how to make better decisions. Not surprisingly, Begin did not want to see him and declined.
In his book, B’Mechitzasam, former Knesset member Rabbi Shlomo Lorencz tells this story: After his surprise election as prime minister, Begin was visited by a delegation from the Agudath Israel Party. As is customary in Israel, they were willing to give their support to his government in exchange for financial support for the Chinuch Atzmai school system. As an opening gambit and not expecting to get it, they “demanded” that their schools get 70 percent of their funding from the government. Begin looked at them and said no. They were astounded and asked him why he said no. He answered, “Why should your schools only get 70 percent? They should get 100 percent, like all the other schools in Israel.”
Yehudah Avner told me in a personal conversation last year that Begin did this because he wanted them to join his coalition. But, it is more than that. Unlike the Labor party, Begin genuinely revered the religion of Israel and the Torah that was taught in Chinuch Atzmai, even if he did not live that life totally.
Rabbi Lorencz continues: The delegation went to Rav Shach and told him what Begin had offered. They were astounded and very happy. Rav Shach told them that they should not take the 100 percent. With the wisdom of a gadol hador, he told them that Begin would not be the prime minister forever. Once Chinuch Atzmai closed down their fund raising apparatus, they would be defenseless against future governments. Maybe in the future, there would be an Israeli government that would cut off funding if the Torah schools did not modify their curriculum to meet the standards imposed on them by the Ministry of Education. Rav Shach told them to take the 70 percent. It must be pointed out that it was under the government of Menachem Begin that the financial support for the chareidi community grew by leaps and bounds. The rapid increase in the population of chareidim and their ability to sustain themselves is a direct result of the hashkafos and actions of the most Jewish prime minister Israel ever had.
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How does all this apply to current events? I think that if Israel had a prime minister with the ideals of Menachem Begin, he would be better able to work out some modus vivendi between the frum and non-frum. The current impasse – whereby many chareidim feel alienated from the government, and the rest of the populace feels resentful of a segment of the country whose lifestyle and values they do not understand or appreciate – needs some mediation. If Begin were around, he would find a middle path and make both sides believe that he understood their legitimate concerns.
I recently heard Rav Simcha Hakohen Kook, Chief Rabbi of Rechovot, speak at the yeshiva. He remarked that the current government, despite what it says, never came and sat down with the gedolim and tried to work something out. They totally did not understand the way the chareidi world works and thought they could impose their values on them. Menachem Begin may have had similar end results in mind – I cannot say – but he would have come to the rabbanim with derech eretz and kavod (respect) and tried to work out something that would satisfy both sides. I do not know if he could have succeeded, but he would have tried.
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Menachem Begin was formed by his life’s experiences of growing up in Poland between the two World Wars, imprisonment in the USSR, loss of his family in the Holocaust, and leading the underground revolt against the British with tactics that were very effective but roundly condemned by the mainstream leadership of the yishuv. After 1948, Begin formed and led a political party that was loyal to him, even though he lost eight elections in a row. He was an inspiring speaker who rallied the lower economic classes, the Oriental Jews, and others who were not part of the elite class of secular Ashkenazim who controlled everything in Israel. He endured ostracism and unbridled hatred by David Ben Gurion. (Many years later, in an interview, Yitzchak Rabin did not deny that his orders, when firing on the Altalena arms ship, were to kill Begin.) Despite this, Begin never wavered from his belief in democracy and the rule of law, even as he was maligned as a fascist and an incipient dictator. When he was called to testify by the Kahan Commission investigating the Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Beirut, of which he had no prior knowledge, he was asked his name and replied “Menachem ben Zev Dov veChasia Begin.” He was a loyal son of this father and mother, a Jewish Jew his whole life – not dati and certainly not chareidi – but nevertheless, a Jew through and through.
Chaval al de’avdin velo mishtackchin – Woe to us that he is gone and there is no one to replace him.
