What ‘Biden’s rabbi’ thinks of the president’s Israel visit this week
Then-Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden with Rabbi Michael Beals and his wife, Dr. Elissa Green. Courtesy of Rabbi Michael Beals
This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Rabbi Michael Beals has known U.S. President Joe Biden for 16 years. He has met Israel’s new prime minister, Yair Lapid, just once, during an AIPAC convention held ages ago in Washington.
But based on that initial impression, Beals is confident the two men will hit it off spectacularly when they meet for the first time as leaders of their respective countries on Wednesday.
“I’m over-the-moon excited about this,” says the spiritual leader of Beth Shalom in Wilmington, in a telephone interview. “If President Biden had to meet any prime minister on this trip, I’m so glad it’s Yair Lapid. Joe and him – they’ll be like golfing buddies. There’s going to be great chemistry between these two.”
All of Biden’s three children are married to Jews, and he has myriad Jewish friends and supporters. But within the president’s Jewish milieu, Beals holds special rank: He’s “Biden’s rabbi.”
It’s not a title Beals, who is nearly 60, gave himself. “I would never have thought to do that,” says the Conservative movement rabbi. It was the president himself who anointed him as such and, as Beals recounts, it happened several years ago during a High Holy Day reception Biden hosted while serving in his previous role as vice president.
“He suddenly looked around the room and asked, ‘Where’s my rabbi? Where’s my rabbi?’ And all eyes locked on me,” Beals says. “He then caught sight of me and said, ‘Oh, there’s my rabbi.’ So that’s how I officially became his rabbi.”
While he was standing in line at that reception to take a photo with Biden, a friend approached Beals and suggested that now it was “official,” he should offer to bless the then-vice president.
“So, when my turn came around,” the rabbi relays, “I asked Joe whether he would like a blessing. And he replied, ‘Would I ever!’ He bowed his head, I put my hands on his forehead and recited the priestly benediction. He just loved it.”
That was many years after the two men first met. Their initial encounter took place not long after Beals moved to Wilmington, at a shivah call for one of his congregants: a woman named Sylvia Greenhouse. “The shivah was being held in a housing facility for senior citizens in the city of Claymont, where Biden grew up,” the rabbi says. “I had trouble finding the place – it’s pretty out of the way – but Biden, who was a senator at the time, showed up on his own. There was no driver with him and no aides. He entered the room, put on his black kippah and sat in the back.
“I approached him and asked him what had brought him to this shivah, and he said that this woman had donated $18 [considered a lucky number in Judaism] to every one of his election campaigns since he first ran for office in 1972. He was there, he said, to pay his respects and say thank you.”
This is a story, Beals says, that he shares with all the “naysayers,” as he calls them, who have written off the Democratic politician over the years because he is either too old, too male or too white. “It speaks volumes about his character, and I think character is something very important to consider when you’re thinking about how to vote.”
‘One-way’ relationship
Tensions between Israel and the American-Jewish community have been running high in recent years over disagreements concerning matters of religion and state. The Conservative and Reform movements, which account for the vast majority of U.S. Jews, have been particularly enraged about the Israeli government’s refusal to recognize conversions performed by their rabbis, and its refusal to upgrade the egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall, as had been promised in 2016.
Just last week, the leaders of the two movements sent a strongly worded letter to Lapid, urging him to take action against the ultra-Orthodox groups responsible for ongoing violence against non-Orthodox worshippers at this Jewish holy site.
Although he would rather not speculate about what issues the U.S. president might bring up in his discussions with Lapid, Beals says he does not believe they would include the treatment of non-Orthodox Jews in Israel. “I don’t think he will talk about the things that separate us,” he says. “Knowing him, he’ll prefer to talk about the things that unite us.”
Beals describes his relationship with the president as pretty much “one way.” That is to say, Biden is the one who has done most of the reaching out. As an example, he notes, when the president’s son Beau died of brain cancer in May 2015, Biden – himself an observant Catholic – reached out to Beals and asked him to represent the Jewish community at the funeral.
Of late, however, this dynamic has changed somewhat. Leveraging his connection to the most powerful man on Earth, Beals recently reached out to Chanan Weissman, the White House liaison to the Jewish community. He asked that the president intervene on behalf of one of his congregants, whose request to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return had been rejected by Israel.
That congregant was Jared Armstrong, an American basketball player who had signed a contract with Hapoel Haifa last year based on the assumption that, as a Jew, he could easily obtain citizenship in Israel. But Israel’s Interior Ministry said it did not recognize the Black Jewish community in Philadelphia in which Armstrong was raised and required him to convert. Beals was the rabbi who subsequently converted him. However, the Interior Ministry refused to recognize this conversion on the grounds that it did not meet its standards.
Beals’ lobbying campaign appears to have borne fruit: Last week, Armstrong was notified that his request for citizenship had finally been approved. His conversion is still not being recognized, but Armstrong was given citizenship under a clause that allows the interior minister to exercise discretion in cases that don’t meet the usual criteria, but where the state has a “special interest.”
“I didn’t think Israel would want this to be a stumbling block before the trip,” Beals says. “I wasn’t the only person pushing his case, so I can’t say what actually worked in the end – but certainly the timing of this decision is no coincidence.”
Beals has recently taken on the case of another Black Jewish convert whose attempts to be recognized under the Law of Return have failed. Originally from Baltimore, David Ben Moshe converted through the Orthodox movement and is now married to an Israeli woman. Israel has thus far rejected his application for citizenship on the grounds that he has a criminal record.
Before converting, Ben Moshe served time in prison for possession of drugs and firearms, but was released early for good behavior. He was recently invited to Beals’ synagogue, where he detailed what the rabbi describes as his “Kafkaesque” story.
Ahead of Biden’s Mideast trip, Beals says he has been working behind the scenes to see if the U.S. president might grant Ben Moshe a pardon for his offenses, paving the way for this Jew by choice to become a full-fledged Israeli citizen.
What makes Biden tick
Born in San Francisco, Beals was employed as a pulpit rabbi for seven years in Los Angeles before relocating to Delaware 18 years ago. His wife, Dr. Elissa Green (“whom I adore”), is the director of veterinary medicine at the Delaware Humane Association, from where the Bidens have adopted several of their pets. The couple has two daughters: Ariella, 21, and Shir, 18.
The last time the rabbi saw Biden face-to-face was on January 19, 2021 – the eve of Inauguration Day. Beals met him at New Castle Airport to give him a farewell blessing before he headed out to Washington for the official ceremony. In April, in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Bidens hosted a screening of HBO movie “The Survivor” at the White House, and Beals was among a select group invited. He couldn’t make it, however, because he had a shivah to attend.
“I heard that Joe asked why I wasn’t there. And when he heard it was because of a shivah, he quickly understood,” Beals recounts.
To understand what makes Biden tick, the rabbi says, he would advise his upcoming audiences in Israel to learn a bit about the culture of the president’s home state.
“Here in Delaware, we have something called the ‘Delaware Way,’” he explains. “No matter which way an election goes in our state, on Inauguration Day, both the Republican and Democratic candidates ride together in a carriage and then symbolically bury a hatchet. This is the milieu that Biden comes from. It’s about working together for a common good. It’s something very Delawarian.”
And then he adds, “Unlike the cult of personality that can lead to fascism and of which there is a big fear, I believe, both in Israel and the United States.”
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