I should have written this years ago while the idea was still fresh and I was still young. I think of it now because times are tough for me and my people, and so rather than give in to despair, the better choice is to think back and remember one of the best days you ever had – and that would be Montreal, when the State of Israel’s First Chief Rabbi, Rav Yitzchak haLevi Herzog came to visit.
It was a tremendous event…and for us kids enrolled in Yeshivas Merkaz HaTorah, it was like a Shofar blast from Sinai.
This was 1951, if I’ve got it right, and if i don’t, please don’t catch me on the details. The event is what counts, and so we were told to come dressed in our finest.
So if you doubted that the miracle of 1948 actually happened, here, on Sunday, comes the proof, a touch of Mashiach.
The Yeshiva was decked out in Israeli flags and so were the streets and boulevards leading to it, and the older boys among us who had fought in the war were given special seats along the table. But it was getting late and there was no sign of Rav Herzog. People began to worry. Had we been dreaming?
What a letdown this would be.
Our Rosh Yeshiva was the Torah giant Rav Pinchas Hirshprung, famed for his remarkable memory. By the time he was 13, in Galicia, he knew the entire Talmud by heart.
No one ever said the same thing about me, then or now.
The event was scheduled for the outdoors, and it began to drizzle, and Rav Pinchas remained calmly in his study – studying.
Was he worried? Not at all. Neither was my father, Noah, himself a high-level Torah scholar, who saved his family from the Holocaust.
“Don’t worry,” he kept saying.
Back in May, 1948, Father wept when he saw a picture of an Israeli soldier.
Father knew Rav Pinchas and studied with him occasionally, and both men held the Rebbe in Brooklyn in the highest regard.
What’s this? Sirens? Good sirens or bad sirens?
What a sight! A cavalcade of the shiniest automobiles, and leading the procession, like a king with his court, Rav Herzog, Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel.
I can still hear the Hatikvah for this great man.
He spoke only for about 10 minutes, but it was enough. Something about him exuded the Israeli spirit of confidence and vigor.
People like this pushed back six Arab armies.
People like that are today’s IDF, on the air, land and sea.
No. It wasn’t a dream. It was all true. So true that today’s President of Israel is Isaac Herzog, grandson of Israel’s first chief rabbi, who visited us that day in Montreal.
(note: Rav Kook was Chief Rabbi of British Mandate Palestine (that is what it was called and there was no group claiming to be Palestinians), before the Jewish State was established. He died in 1935)
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.