April 21, 2008: Rabin and Peres – Bitter rivals who shared a dream

By Michael Regenstreif

On April 10, I was at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre’s screening of Rabin-Peres: Everything is Personal, a fascinating documentary film that examines the lifelong, often bitter, rivalry between two great Israeli leaders: Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated while prime minister in 1995, and Shimon Peres, also a former prime minister, who is now Israel’s president.

Rabin, born in 1922, was a sabra. He grew up in Tel Aviv, attended the Kadoori Agricultural High School and joined the Palmach in 1941. By 1947, Rabin was chief operations officer. He was in charge of army operations in Jerusalem in the 1948 War of Independence.

By 1964, Rabin was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It was under his command that Israel achieved what was probably its greatest military victory by swiftly winning the Six Day War in 1967.

In 1968, Rabin began his post-IDF career as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. He was first elected to the Knesset in 1973 and became minister of labour. In 1974, he became leader of the Alignment Party and succeeded Golda Meir as prime minister.

Peres was born in Poland in 1923 as Szymon Perski. His family immigrated to Palestine when he was nine. A kibbutz leader, Peres joined the Haganah in 1947 and was given the responsibility, by David Ben-Gurion, for arms purchases and personnel. By 1953, he was director-general of the Ministry of Defense.

Peres was first elected to the Knesset in 1959 and held a number of cabinet positions. Eventually, Peres became leader of Alignment after Rabin stepped down in the wake of a currency scandal in 1977. Peres lost the 1977 election to Menachem Begin and Likud.

Rabin, the military hero, was Israel’s native-born, fair-haired boy. In comparison, Peres, the bureaucrat, was an outsider, a newcomer with a Polish accent. And even though Peres performed vital functions in Israel’s defence, he was never seen as the war hero Rabin was.

Rabin and Peres were rivals in the Alignment and Labor parties. Both served when the other was prime minister and they were in the cabinet, and they faced off against each other in several leadership campaigns marked by personal bitterness toward the other.

Only in a robust democracy would you see such a personal rivalry within the same political party among competing personalities with similar goals for their country. Watching the film, I was reminded of some other bitter intraparty rivalries, some of which also lasted for years. Perhaps the most obvious example from recent Canadian politics was the long rivalry between former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

South of the border, we’re currently witnessing what has turned into a very bitter battle for the Democratic Party presidential nomination between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two politicians whose platforms and points of view on almost all issues – including their support for Israel – are remarkably similar.

Like the long rivalries between Rabin and Peres, and Chrétien and Martin, the Clinton-Obama fight is mostly about differing personalities and personal egos rather than differing visions for their society.

Despite their personal enmity, Rabin and Peres were on the same side and shared the vision of Israel at peace with the Palestinians. When Rabin was assassinated – not by an Arab terrorist, but by Yigal Amir, a right-wing, religious Jew out to destroy the peace process they had worked so hard to further – you could see in the film that Peres, too, was figuratively shattered by Amir’s bullet.

Rabin, one of Israel’s greatest warriors, did not lose his life on the battlefield fighting an enemy. He was murdered by one of his own people, one of our own people, who did not share the dream of peace that we all should be reminded of every time we say, or hear, the word shalom.

Hopefully, that dream, shared by Rabin and Peres, by the residents of Sderot who visited us in Ottawa recently, and by so many others, will sooner than later become a reality.

April 7, 2008: The journey begun by Moses continues

By Michael Regenstreif

Passover is one of the most inspirational holidays on the Jewish calendar. It is when we remember the slavery the ancient Israelites endured in Egypt, and celebrate their struggle for freedom and the exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, the great liberator. The Passover Haggadah tells us that each of us, like everyone in the generations that preceded us, must view ourselves as personally moving from the bondage of slavery to freedom.

Generations of Jews are not the only people who have taken inspiration from the biblical legend of Passover. In the middle of the 19th century – not so long ago in the annals of human history – Africans stolen from their homelands, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, were enslaved in the United States of America, a country whose founding principles include the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal.” In their struggles for liberation and freedom, the African American slaves took inspiration from stories in the book of Exodus that we celebrate and relive every Pesach.

As the African American struggles for equality continued into our own time, particularly during the post-Second World War civil rights era that peaked in the 1960s under the leadership of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., African Americans continued to find inspiration in the Passover legend.

Knowing their own history, and drawing on the responsibility for Tikkun Olam – healing the world – Jews were among the most important allies of African Americans in the civil rights movement. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of many Jews who marched tirelessly with King. When three young civil rights workers – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen in Mississippi in 1964, two of them happened to be Jewish.

Last year I did a feature length magazine article for Sing Out!, the leading American folk music journal, about my friends Kim and Reggie Harris. Kim and Reggie, who are married, are African American singers who specialize in singing the inspiring songs of the Underground Railroad and the civil rights movement. A few years ago, they collaborated with their friend, Rabbi Jonathan Kliger, the spiritual leader of Kehillat Lev Shalem, the Jewish congregation in Woodstock, New York, on a CD called Let My People Go: A Jewish and African American Celebration of Freedom.

The theme of the album is established with an opening medley of “B’Chol Dor Va’Dor,” a song taken from the Haggadah that stresses the importance that every generation know the Passover story and apply it to their own time, and “I’m On Way,” an African American spiritual that repeats the lesson that every generation must know that it is part of the ongoing struggle for true freedom.  Through the rest of the album, in more Haggadah songs, more spirituals and a number of contemporary compositions, the common Jewish and African American themes of freedom and liberty are celebrated.

During an interview for the article, Kim told me their collaboration with Rabbi Kliger grew out of a friendship that included celebrating seders in the Kliger home.

“We sang the traditional Jewish songs and then we’d also sing a lot of the civil rights freedom songs,” she said.

Kim went to explain more about how African Americans found inspiration in the biblical legend of Moses and the Israelites’ exodus from enslavement in Egypt.

 “As people from different tribes were brought over to the United States, the masters were saying they needed to adopt Christianity. But the Christianity the masters were trying to get the slave people to adopt was a Christianity that condoned slavery. The Christianity that slave people formed for themselves was against slavery. They formed their own theology and sang their own songs and a lot of them have themes from Exodus.”

Around the same time that Kim and Reggie Harris collaborated with Rabbi Kliger, the Klezmatics released a concert album called Brother Moses Smote the Water, on which they collaborated with African American gospel singers Joshua Nelson and Kathryn Farmer, in an equally impressive performance that also celebrated Jewish and African American songs of freedom, most connected to the Passover story.

The wonderful songs on those CDs do remind us of the relevance of the story of Moses leading the Children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt thousands of years ago to our own time in a world that still knows slavery. Until freedom reigns in every corner of the world, the journey begun by Moses continues.