Shimon Peres: The man who owned his dreams

They came from everywhere. A few days before the funeral all the major hotels in Jerusalem were cleared of tourists to make way for the foreign dignitaries  and their delegations that were arriving from seventy countries. Most of the people came in a caravan of buses. On my bus sat young people from one of the left-wing kibbutzim .  In the front of that same bus sat three Charedim.  These were people from two different worlds both going to the same place. When the service began this anomaly continued. There was, on the one hand, eulogies from Prime Minister Bibi Natanyahu , and Yuli Edelstein,disciples of Jabotinsky, and on the other hand a eulogy from Amos Oz, a leading figure  of the peace camp extolling the virtues of Shimon Peres.

So what was it about Shimon Peres that evoked such admiration and touched and united so many people from so many distant parts of our planet?

I had the privilege of knowing him for more than 30 years as Minister of Defense, Prime Minister and President. Although my personal politics are more conservative than his, I have never believed that greatness should be confined to a single party, or ideology – Harry Truman was a great democrat while Winston Churchill was a great conservative. For this reason I have always felt that every Jew walks taller because of Shimon Peres's extraordinary accomplishments on behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.  Whenever I would hear him speak, I would always think of the biblical Joseph, that young lad who would never stop dreaming about changing reality. He was often mocked by his elder brothers, but in the end, the Torah reminds us it was those dreams that saved the Jewish people.   How much poorer would Israel be without Peres' dream that Israel must become a nuclear energy power?  Can you imagine how much greater the threat would be without Dimona?  How much poorer Israel would be if not for his rapprochement with post WWII Germany, without his dream to resettle and make the Negev blossom?

In 2007, I had arranged a meeting for Jeffery Katzenberg and Jerry Seinfeld with him in Jerusalem during Chanukah. At the meeting, President Peres reflected on their visit: “Gentlemen, not all miracles are in the Bible. You are visiting Israel. The whole country is a miracle! We have no oil, no water, but look at what Israel has accomplished. If this would have happened in the time of the Bible, it would have been included as one of the great miracles.”

Everybody dreams, but Shimon Peres' greatness was that he owned his dreams. He may not have been in the synagogue every day, but he fulfilled to the fullest the Psalmist vision that when we return to Zion we should return only as dreamers and visionaries. Nobody did that better than Shimon Peres.

Rabbi Marvin Hier is the Founder and Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance.