U.S. President Joe Biden lingered on stage as Chicago’s United Center quickly emptied on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. It was past midnight in the Windy City, and the president, whose speech was pushed past primetime, was not only exiting the convention stage, but time was winding down on his time in the political spotlight.
But the night’s event wasn’t done yet. The man known as “Biden’s rabbi,” Rabbi Michael Beals of Temple Beth El in Newark, Del., and Cindy Rudolph, senior pastor of Oak Grove African Methodist Episcopal Church in Detroit, delivered the benediction.
It was, Beals subsequently told JNS over the phone, the largest crowd in front of which he has ever stood. And there were two distinct groups.
There was the physical community (kehilla) in the room, which “was huge but not well behaved,” he told JNS, of the people filing out of the room, talking among themselves or otherwise ignoring what was occurring on the stage.
And then there was the other kehilla, “millions of people, which you just have to have emunah (“faith”) that they’re there,” watching remotely, Beals said.
A longtime Delaware-based rabbi, whose path has intersected the president’s during both mournful shivas and joyful simchas, told JNS that he had to resist the rabbinic urge to shush those who weren’t paying attention and say, “Hey, I’m speaking about Hashem (God) here. Where are you going?”
“I just had to breathe and do my shtick,” he said.
Beals delivered the priestly blessing, alternating between Hebrew and English and incorporating elements he said belonged to the personalities and traits of Biden (gratitude), Vice President Kamala Harris (freedom) and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (joy).
When he began chanting the blessing, “that totally changed everything” and stole attendees’ attention away from the rideshare apps they were using to schedule their return to their hotels, according to Beals. He heard more people respond “Amen,” as he urged the crowd to do, to the third and final blessing.
‘At his father’s table’
Beals told JNS that Harris would be “great” for Israel. Still, he thinks that Harris—Biden’s junior by 22 years—doesn’t bring the same perspective about the Jewish state that Biden does, having seen the existential crisis Israel faced in 1973 when he met with then-Prime Minister Golda Meir.
“Joe says he’s been a Zionist from the get-go because that’s what he lived at his father’s table,” Beals told JNS.
Biden has often claimed that his father used to talk about antisemitism at the dinner table, as well as about the “sin” of the world community in failing to protect Jews during the Holocaust.
“We’ll never see anything like that again,” Beals said, of Biden’s personal connection to the horrors of Jew-hatred.
Harris “can’t speak that same experience,” according to Beals, who said that most other politicians have mostly grown up with a very strong Jewish state and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden has a unique “sense of empathy” for Israel, he said.
“That sense of empathy—Biden brought something else,” he said.
He called Biden a metziah—Yiddish for a “great find.”
Beals met with and spoke with Biden at the White House in April as part of a Delaware delegation that visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Biden had left a trilateral meeting with the leaders of Japan and the Philippines. “When he heard the Delawareans in the house, he dropped what he was doing,” Beals said.
Biden arranged for his fellow Blue Hen State residents to sit in the Oval Office, which was Beals’s first time in that iconic room.
“When I got to see the desk where he makes decisions, and I got to see where he sits, and these busts of Eleanor Roosevelt and Cesar Chavez and Robert F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and Harry S. Truman, it blew me away,” Beals said.
“A lot of these people are Zionists,” he added. “These are his go-to people.”
Biden often talks about his affinity for Israel but rarely discusses his Jewish family. All three of his children married into Jewish families, and he has three grandchildren who are Jewish according to halachah.
JNS asked Beals why Biden hasn’t discussed this aspect of his family, especially amid rising Jew-hatred. Beals told JNS that he has never had a direct conversation with Biden about it.
But he noted that Biden is following the guidance of the Talmud.
“It says that if you have skin in the game, you have to pull yourself out because you might be tainted,” Beals said.
He figures that Biden feels that combating antisemitism is “an American value, and all Americans should feel that way.” Biden “wouldn’t want to complicate it with, ‘Oh, well you have family, so that’s why,’ because it might cheapen it,” Beals said.
“I think he wants to make sure he’s doing this because every American should feel that way,” he added, “because it’s the right thing.”
Did you catch the beautiful Hebrew blessings delivered at the end of the DNC last night?
Today Rabbi Michael Beals proudly wore teffilin at The DNC! You can do the same at Chabad's expo booth at #213! pic.twitter.com/A2pKTRlqeu— Avraham Kagan (@RabbiKagan) August 21, 2024