Israeli society owes a debt of gratitude to Yair Lapid - comment

Lapid then was tasked with forming a coalition. He could have tried – and possibly could have succeeded – to put together a coalition in which he would be prime minister, or in a rotation deal, to take that position first. Lapid was willing to put his ego aside and offer the first two years of a four-year rotation to Naftali Bennett.

This alone would hardly suffice in the nasty nitty-gritty of the political scrimmage. To this act – let us say – of pragmatic nobility, he also brought an uncanny know-how.

His coalition spans Left (Meretz) to Right (Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope and Bennett’s Yamina), and for the first time, an Arab (Islamist!) party. To accomplish all this in 21 days and even slot in the ministries and other roles to the various parties is almost unprecedented. Perhaps not since the great coalition-maker, Levi Eshkol, has any Israeli politician succeeded in duplicating such a feat.

Lapid is a man of many talents. He has written novels, children’s books, a play and TV dramas. He was a newspaper reporter and columnist and hosted major TV programs. For the four years prior to entering politics, he was the host of TV Channel 2 Friday evening’s highly-rated weekly news roundup.

As a newspaperman and TV personality he interviewed so many politicians that he surely must have learned to separate the wheat from the bull excrement. He had the personality and charisma to found a party, Yesh Atid.

His father, Tommy Lapid, was a brilliant man of many seasons, again mainly in the media. He eventually entered politics and became a cabinet minister and close supporter of Netanyahu.

As a result, I contend, TV news is often just a good show, and interviewing is an attempt to embarrass, fluster or butter-up the interviewee and thus not to be taken seriously. Hence, I for one, do not see these shows.

Now that is a personal bias. And since I do not watch these shows, as once I did from time to time, I may be totally unfair to some of our interviewers. By the way, the same for radio hosts, who unfortunately I occasionally listen to in the hope of being surprised.

But there is worse to confess. Let me begin with that wonderful teaching by not one – but two prophets – Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) and Yehezkel (Ezekiel).

Both taught a major lesson, which for a time even the mafia honored: You must not punish a child for the sins of his father! The prophets put it in farmer’s terms so that the ordinary person in that agrarian world could understand: when parents eat sour grapes, are the children’s teeth set on edge? Just as nature doesn’t make that blunder hereditary, so obviously God won’t permit the sins of the fathers to be visited upon the children.

I met Tommy Lapid once more at the Israel Opera when he was already a cabinet minister in the late 1990s. To his credit, I was happy to see that he had brought his young grandson along, an early introduction into world culture.

But I could not forego a snarky, “So Tommy, you have become ‘an important man.’” Again to his credit, he looked highly discomfited, as if to hint, “but we both know who we really are!”

Now, my abject apologies to Jeremiah and Ezekiel. I try hard to comply with our people’s teachings regarding human relations, and here I failed miserably. And, Yair Lapid, my sincere and deep apologies for misjudging you for all the wrong reasons.

Now you have shown wisdom, foresight, political ability and national responsibility. Your brief service under Netanyahu as finance minister for about a year convinced you he had to go. You are Tommy Lapid’s son in the best sense, but you are also Yair Lapid, your own man. As head of the opposition, you have had years of experience as shadow foreign minister/prime minister.

Above all, you demonstrated true patriotism and the ability to put national considerations above personal and party matters. This, Yair Lapid, gives you the status of a statesman-in-the-making. In addition, your refusal to insult even those who truly deserve the insults earns our respect for your endeavors to restore a decent level of discourse without the coarseness. Chapeau for all!

Now let us restore our chapeau to our head for we are about to deal with rabbis. If I were to say that I never received a school or university diploma, I never studied math or science or English, I would be considered ignorant. If I were to declare that all this is nonsense, I would be considered a human shell empty of all familiarity with the great rabbis of our history.

Certainly Rashi and Rabbenu Tam and Maimonides knew a number of languages, and much astronomy and other science of their time. In each century there were such paragons of knowledge.

In recent years, there was Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik who, I have been told by some of his students, could have been an atomic scientist so well-versed was he in physics and mathematics. Chief Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog held a doctorate in science. Rabbi Menachem Schneeron, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Berlin and later received a degree in mechanics and electrical engineering in Paris and continued studying mathematics at the Sorbonne.

In plain English, if I were to call science and math “nonsense “ (excuse me, Professor Einstein), I would deserve the title, “Idiot First Class.”

If I were a chief rabbi who said this, would it be terribly disrespectful to say I had earned that distinction?

In addition to the new Bennett-Lapid government, we also are witnessing the entry of a new president in place of the beloved, Ruvi Rivlin.

Now to celebrate these changes, let us lift a glass to our new government and especially to our new president, the namesake of his grandfather, a great chief rabbi. Success to you, President Isaac Herzog! In Hebrew: Yehi haNasi! Long live the president of the State of Israel!