A Soulful Journey

I will never forget the moment. It was years ago. I have been invited to a banquet at which the guest of honor was Menachem Begin. It was a very special moment because it was Begin's first visit to Washington as Prime Minister of Israel. Mr. Begin was in a mellow, nostalgic mood. He began to reminisce on how far he had come in life to being prime minister of the Jewish state, how we had witnessed the death of his father and brother at the hand of the Nazis, how he had been imprisoned by the Soviet authorities, how he have been hunted by the British in Palestine, how Ben-Gurion have rejected him as a partner in Israel’s government, how election after election he and his party had lost. And now he was in the prologue. And with tears in his eyes, he turned to his wife, Aliza, and quoted the Prophet Jeremiah in saying Zacharti Lach Chesed Nu’urayich - “I remember the kindness of your youth.”   He was a big man now, but not too big to remember all that his wife had been throu...