Closing the circle of the Herzl dynasty: between the lines of history books

The relationship between a grandson and his grandparents is one of the wonderful riddles of modern family psychology. It is not a simple blood kinship of parents and children, which is often filled with daily friction and tension between authority and rebellion; the relationship with grandparents is distilled into moderate love, compassion, and a sense of wonder of supernatural continuity. Grandparents are the first ambassadors of the past in the grandson's world. Through them, he touches the roots that preceded him, listens to stories created before he was born, and draws identity and an anchor.

When the visionary of the state, Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl, wrote in his will that he requested that all his family members be brought for burial in the future Jewish state, he did not formulate just a procedural instruction or a family gesture. Herzl understood that the national home is not only a shelter for life, but also an eternal heritage for the generations that preceded us. By bringing the bones of his grandparents, Shimon Leib and Rivka Herzl, and interring them yesterday in the "family plot" on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, a double historical and human circle was completed: a circle of a grandson returning kindness and love to his grandparents, and a national circle gathering into its bosom the roots from which the vision grew.

The grandfather, Shimon Leib, did not wear crowns and did not hold noble titles. He was a synagogue gabbai. Many of us know the typecast and tend to dismiss it casually, but the role of the gabbai encapsulates, even today, a deep awareness of communal responsibility, concern for public needs with faith, and the preservation of a national ember: criteria that are completely logical when we come to choose our leaders.

Shimon Leib served as a gabbai in the synagogue of Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai, who already in the first half of the 19th century, one hundred years before the establishment of the state, demanded Jewish sovereignty and national revival. "A man as the solution to his dream," the rabbi defined the work plan for redemption — and perhaps from these words Herzl's future vision was born. Between the benches of the synagogue in Zemun, Serbia, in the meeting between simple faith and groundbreaking thought, the consciousness and responsibility that the gabbai's young grandson absorbed sprouted.

"History is not always written in history books," President Isaac Herzog said yesterday in the ceremony tent. With the simplicity of these words, the president aptly described the white space that exists forever between the actions and major events that are etched in stone: the family contexts, the small gestures that are forgotten in the blink of an eye, the environment, the education, the consciousness — the music of chance that shaped Herzl to be a "modern Moses," in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Herzl, like Moses, formulated a national vision from that same consciousness: leadership that does not get stuck in the passing moment, but one that thinks in generations, carries the bones of the past to the land of tomorrow, and draws its validity from the quiet roots planted by the grandparents.

A wonderful symbol of this was present at the burial ceremony today (Wednesday): the two coffins of the grandparents were covered with the original parochet (curtain) that covered Herzl's coffin on the journey from Vienna to Jerusalem in the summer of 1949. The piece of fabric, woven in Austria in 1936, disappeared after the funeral procession and reappeared in the Jewish Agency warehouses in Tel Aviv only after 70 years.

This is a philosophical reminder that history and collective memory do not truly disappear: they wait patiently under the cover of time and resurface at the exact moment to remind us who we are, where we came from, and where we are heading.