Gentleman Abroad

Mike Huckabee’s background opened the discussion with Rav Landau.

“He’s a great protector of the Jewish People and the State of Israel,” Rav Hofstedter introduced the ambassador. “He also knows the importance of the Torah. On the yahrtzeit of the Chofetz Chaim he has written articles about the importance of civil speech in the public realm.”

Huckabee’s support for Israel is a well-advertised fact, regularly reinforced by his fiery pro-Israel interventions. When, two days after the Bnei Brak meeting, French president Emmanuel Macron made a surprise declaration of intent to recognize a Palestinian state, Huckabee’s response was uncompromising.

“Macron’s unilateral ‘declaration’ of a ‘Palestinian’ state didn’t say WHERE it would be,” he tweeted. “I can now exclusively disclose that France will offer the French Riviera & the new nation will be called ‘Franc-en-Stine.’ ”

So far, so well known. But the ambassador’s penchant for quoting Jewish sources — beyond the obvious Scriptures — is less widely known. In fact, by virtue of his friendship with Rav Hofstedter, he has come to speak of the Chofetz Chaim on regular occasions. In a 2018 Fox News article, he wrote of a “day of prayer in honor of Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, who devoted his entire life to promoting respect and civility and cautioning about the evils of gossip.”

In his gentlemanly way, Huckabee didn’t put a foot wrong. Even when referencing religious texts, there were no jarring reminders of disputed theology that might have set teeth on edge.

In opening remarks to Rav Dov Landau, he strayed far from standard diplomatic territory, venturing into shared Biblical faith and saying that he wanted to express his thanks for “the Jewish People’s steadfast faithfulness to the Bible.”

Eyes twinkling, Rav Dov Landau gestured his thanks as he read from cue cards of the ambassador’s respect for Jewish scholarship and staunch support for Israel during the ongoing war.

“I want to express my gratitude to President Trump and the American people for their support for the Jewish People, particularly in this last war,” the rosh yeshivah responded, reading aloud from the notes that he’d prepared.

Then Rav Landau turned straight to the second purpose of the visit: the draft controversy. With the governing coalition on a knife edge after the failure to pass a law ensuring a draft exemption for yeshivah students, the leader of Israel’s yeshivah world wanted to ask for the US government’s intervention.

“It’s important to me to tell the honored ambassador of the dire straits that the Torah-observant public finds itself in, as the justice system has sent out arrest warrants for yeshivah students for the sin of studying Torah.

“The Torah and only the Torah has guarded us since becoming a nation and throughout the exile. Any harm to those who study Torah damages the entire Jewish People and harms its right to exist as a people. It also damages the whole world, as it says [Yirmiyahu 33:25], ‘Were it not for my covenant day and night, I wouldn’t have created heaven and earth.’ ”

Diplomatic Dance

Listening carefully during this monologue — aware that the most delicate issue of the visit was coming — the ambassador stilled slightly before answering diplomatically.

“Thank you, Rabbi,” he said. “As an ambassador I do not find it appropriate to get in the middle of any controversy within the Israeli government. However, I do understand that as important as it is to have soldiers, you must also have scholars who remind you who you are and why you’re here, and soldiers to protect and keep that which G-d has given.”

Within minutes of being uttered, the ambassador’s fairly self-evident words were causing a minor tizzy in Israel’s hyperactive media, alert to any taking of sides over the fraught issue. Once again, it was a storm over nothing. Huckabee was essentially restating the consensus inside the government. Even the proponents of a significant draft for yeshivah students agree that some students will be exempt.

But the importance of the exchange lay in Huckabee’s active role among the Israeli right. While it’s true that he often does so discreetly, the ambassador has very much involved himself in Israeli politics.

As he himself referenced a few minutes later in the home of Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch, Mike Huckabee made a crucial intervention on the eve of the Iran war, calling Rav Hirsch to persuade him that the Degel HaTorah party shouldn’t bring down Bibi’s government at such a sensitive time.

Or take his unprecedented show of support at Bibi’s trial a few weeks ago, when he appeared at the prime minister’s side waving a Bugs Bunny toy in a clear show of contempt for the proceedings within the court room. Taking his cue from his boss Donald Trump, who has inveighed against what he regards as a farce of a case against Israel’s war-winning leader, the ambassador himself has enthusiastically stirred the pot.

After decades of visits to Israel — where he has acted as a tour guide, especially in Yehudah and Shomron — the ambassador is widely trusted across Israel’s right. In the runup to the war, he essentially took on the role of shadchan, to prevent the breakup of a coalition that is largely in sync with the American right.

It was that highly unusual position that was essentially the subtext of the meeting. While officially, the ambassador disavowed any intention to wade into the quagmire of Israel’s internal debate, behind the scenes is different. Although he merely remarked that it needed King Solomon to solve the draft issue, having heard directly that the yeshivos are a red line, Huckabee might well advise other members of Bibi’s coalition that they have to find ways to work with those principles.

Beyond the survival of Israel’s yeshivos, the Slabodka rosh yeshivah was intent on driving home a message of gratitude.

Raising his arms and gazing into the distance, Rav Landau concluded by speaking with conviction about the role of America in the world and how it impacts the Jewish People. For those who know his typically terse speech, the verbosity was a sign of the importance that he attached to the encounter.

“I want to give a brachah to the president and the ambassador and the American people,” he said. “To the American nation, which is a malchus shel chesed, a force for justice and good in this world.

“They establish truth and what’s right in the world,” he said with unusual intensity. “Thank you,” he concluded in heavily accented English.

Flanked on the way out by his beefy bodyguards as he passed the Landau family’s kitchen, the ambassador and his entourage had a chance to take in the extreme modesty of the senior rabbi’s home. Simplicity doesn’t begin to describe the way in which the rosh yeshivah — now well  into his 90s — fulfills the dictum in Pirkei Avos that a Torah scholar should eat only “bread dipped in salt.”

Seeing the peeling paintwork and furniture that belongs in a museum dedicated to 1950s Israel, Huckabee might well have reflected that there are no mega-millions in being the octogenarian leader of the yeshivah community — but that Rabbi Landau’s leadership is no less forceful as a result.

Meeting of Minds

A few steps further down the hill, the home of Slabodka’s other rosh yeshivah, Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch, was no less austere — the only concession to luxury some glasses of water on old-fashioned coasters — but the welcome was in English.

Speaking in his soft, dignified way, the Brooklyn-born Rav Hirsch opened by saying that the conversation on the eve of the Iran war had proved very useful.

“Were you here during the war?” he then asked the ambassador.

“Yes, and I never felt in danger, even though I had to go many times to the shelter,” Huckabee told the rosh yeshivah. “I told friends back home that I was in the most important city in the world, and that if my life ended in Jerusalem, my next move would be a local one.”

That gallows humor prompted a smile from Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch, and then the conversation turned to the post-Holocaust rise of the yeshivah world both in Israel and America.

“How many students are there, and how long has this institution existed?” the ambassador asked of the Slabodka yeshivah.

The rosh yeshivah replied with the numbers: about 500 on the campus, plus satellite branches. Then he added a short explanation of Slabodka history, involving the split that took half of the students to what became the Chevron Yeshiva in Eretz Yisrael back in the 1920s.

“The reason that half of the yeshivah had to leave Lithuania long before World War II,” he said pointedly, “was to avoid the military draft in Eastern Europe.”

There was a silence in the room as Rav Hirsch’s point sank in — that total dedication to Torah study isn’t a new policy, and that yeshivah students will remain in the yeshivah no matter what.

After a moment, the visitor replied with his previous statement about the importance of scholars along with soldiers. Then the conversation devolved into a discussion about the rise of the postwar yeshivah community. It made a fascinating scene as an intelligent, fair-minded outsider got to hear about the remarkable growth of the Torah world from one its most prominent leaders.

Told that in Lakewood, New Jersey, alone, there are many thousands of yeshivah students, Huckabee replied with a question for his host.

“It’s beyond human comprehension. What caused the growth?” he wanted to know.

In his patient way, the Slabodka rosh yeshivah replied with a few succinct words. “After the war, G-d left us with some extremely great rabbis, especially in Israel and America,” he explained. “They were way above everyone else in stature and they raised the generation.”

Rav Hofstedter added that the sudden growth of new Jewish wealth postwar was part of the mysterious way that G-d had intervened to enable the rise of a new observant community. Turning to Rav Hirsch, Ambassador Huckabee noted his view that such a startling revival was inexplicable in natural terms.

“The Holocaust survivors came to America with only the clothes on their back, and within a short time became leading scholars, surgeons, scientists, with an outsize proportion of Nobel Prize winners,” he said. “There’s no way to explain that fact except spiritually — it’s all the more reason to believe that the Jewish People is a special nation, and that this country is not just another place on the geopolitical map.”

It’s that Biblically infused view of the world — one that unabashedly sets the Jewish People on a Divine pedestal — that sets this particular ambassador apart.

On issue after issue, he sounds like the Reagan-era Republican that he is. He declares himself a Zionist, talks of the Judeo-Christian roots of the West, of its tradition of individual responsibility that isn’t shared by collectivist societies.

But it’s precisely that throwback-vibe to his very genuine rhetoric that is a warning about the future. Because Mike Huckabee is a member of a dying breed. Among young evangelicals — the group whose rock-solid support undergirds Republican backing for Israel — support for the Jewish state has fallen off a cliff as younger people adopt the Palestinians’ narrative. The ambassador was asked: What explains the shift, and how can it be reversed?

Huckabee doesn’t contest the problem, which he says is pronounced among under-forties. But for a phenomenon that he sees as spiritual in nature, he sees no panacea other than the metaphysical.

“Younger generations have not embraced Scripture as truth,” he says. “Many have been educated in universities that have been financed by billions spent by Middle East study programs to brainwash them into anti-Semitic viewpoints.

“I hope we can start reclaiming them, and I think that the only way is by taking young leaders to Israel for them to see the reality of what goes on here. Because it’s dangerous not just to Jews but to Western civilization and the world if we rebel against the law of G-d, His existence and directions.”

In a sign of the unusual meeting of minds between the rosh yeshivah and non-Jewish diplomat, Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch took out his American passport, noting the many expressions of religious faith stamped on its many pages.

“America has always been a religious country,” he said of its history of success — now threatened by growing secularism.

The last word belonged to the rebbetzin. As the ambassador and his entourage passed the small kitchen on their way to meet a group of American yeshivah bochurim outside, she asked to convey a message.

It turned out to be emblematic of the fascinating encounter between America’s most faith-fueled ambassador and the humble aristocracy of the Torah world.

A daughter of previous rosh yeshivah Rav Mordechai Shulman, the rebbetzin (who insisted that she wasn’t a rebbetzin, just the wife of a rosh yeshivah) moved from Bnei Brak to America in the early 1960s to marry. She then remained in the country for five years while Rav Moshe Hillel learned in Lakewood, where he was a close talmid of Rav Aharon Kotler.

Hence, Rebbetzin Avigayil’s mostly fluent English.

“I have American citizenship, as did my father,” she began, “and so I know the old America. It was a good country.

“President Trump survived death by a millimeter. He must be scarred, and he must also know that he survived only because of G-d!”

“He has a chance to bring back the old America,” the rebbetzin finished her unusual appeal. “He must do that!”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1072)