Israel's President Isaac Herzog retraces his family tradition of leadership

With reporting by Yossi Elituv and Aryeh Erlich
Photos: Elchanan Kotler

While half of humanity tuned in to watch Queen Elizabeth being laid to rest a few weeks ago, one Israeli had a ringside seat.

As one of the more than 500 foreign dignitaries in attendance, President Isaac Herzog had an unforgettable view of the somber pageantry. But unlike other world leaders around him, for Herzog there was something personal about the unfolding scene.

As the son of a British Army officer, grandson of an Irish chief rabbi, and great-grandson of Scotland’s most prominent rav, the event represented the closing of multiple circles with Britain and its rulers.

“Our family traces its lineage to Rashi, and through him to King David via Hillel Hazakein,” says Herzog.

“When my father visited England as Israel’s sixth president in 1984, my parents had the opportunity to dine with Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle. During the meal, my mother Aura told the Queen about that lineage. The Queen smiled and related a legend about the British royal family’s own descent from King David.”

It was Israel’s first lady who got in the last word, though.

“Welcome to the family,” was Aura Herzog’s quick-witted response.

“Given that family history,” Isaac Herzog tells Mishpacha, “when I sat there with a kippah as the three Psalms that the Queen herself had chosen for her own funeral were read, it felt like the closing of a circle.”

Spend a few minutes with Israel’s president, and chances are that you’ll hear a story like this about one of his illustrious forebears, rabbinic or political.

This particular royal anecdote, though, is telling for what it says about the family’s own self-image. That’s because the Herzogs are Israel’s closest thing to a royal dynasty — and Isaac himself is something of a princeling.

After leaving the wartime British army, the president’s father, Chaim Herzog, was first an IDF general, then a Labor Party politician before serving as Israel’s president. His younger brother Yaakov was a brilliant Israeli diplomat and a talmid chacham, who was offered the post of British chief rabbi in the 1960s. Chaim’s brother-in-law was the famed foreign minister, Abba Eban.

The current president’s grandfather Rav Yitzchak Isaac HaLevi Herzog — the nascent state’s first Ashkenazi chief rabbi — was revered across the spectrum as one of the gedolei Yisrael, who took a leading role in post-Holocaust rescue and the rebuilding of the yeshivah world.

To top off that formidable résumé, Isaac — widely known as “Bougie,” a childhood nickname — was head of the Knesset opposition as Labor Party leader until 2018, and his brother Mike is now Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

That deep familiarity with the upper echelons of Israeli life and his own emollient nature made the left-leaning Herzog a natural choice for the presidency, despite the country’s growing traditionalism and right-wing orientation.

Since taking office last year, though, he’s emerged as a multi-faceted leader.

With foreign governments reluctant to engage with the weak Bennett-Lapid duumvirate, Herzog stepped up to take a far more active diplomatic role than the normally-ceremonial post allows. Israel’s ongoing opening to Turkey’s volatile President Erdogan, for example, was helped along by an open line between the two presidential offices.

The pictures with politicians displayed on shelves across one wall of the president’s study in the Beit Hanassi residence in  Jerusalem’s Rechavia neighborhood tell the tale of a life on first-name terms with world figures.

President Obama’s megawatt smile sits next to a photo of Turkey’s Erdogan with trademark glowering mien, and a polite equivalent from Germany’s former leader Angela Merkel.

But while that political career has been distinguished, there’s no mistaking President Herzog’s passion — his family history.

As he flips between the various seforim and political histories authored by his ancestors, making repeated trips to pluck more volumes off the shelves, he’s not just lost in the past.

For Isaac Herzog, his family’s brilliant yet confounding mix of religion and politics — together with his own admiration for the yeshivah world and pride in secular attainment — is the reality he lives.

It’s why, in the throes of a political crisis underpinned by competing visions of the country’s identity, President Herzog feels that he can be the national reconciler.

“I draw from all the previous generations — particularly my grandfather Rav Herzog — a deep worry about a rending of the national fabric and the need to promote unity.”