Last week we heard a series of speeches and interviews about the "old" father of the nation.
The memory of David Ben-Gurion, raised at the annual state memorial service at Ben-Gurion College in Sde Boker, today usually evokes feelings of gratitude and love from the happy ones for Israel's prosperity, despite all the problems and against all odds.
There is, rightly, a very broad Jewish consensus around his character.
While there are still with us some of those whose path was opposite or different from his own, and they carry with them the bitterness of the vanquished, but that voice fades.
It is not easy for Jews to accept authority, thank God.
Therefore, there will always be criticism, justified as well as less justified, of what he did in his long leadership from the 1930s to the 1960s, including the years of the historic crackdown and the long and heroic struggle after the Holocaust.
But from our point in time, there is no doubt about its greatness.
The treatment of Ben-Gurion gradually became a litmus test for Zionism: hostility toward it usually reflected a negative attitude toward the Jewish and democratic state.
And it is gratifying to see that almost all the successors of his historical rivals in the broad Zionist camp feel reverence for him.
Although Ben-Gurion was a man of flesh and blood, his great figure is a very important source of inspiration for Israel.
This is a good development, but it also carries with it the danger of blurring historical truth and exploitation.
Ben-Gurion is gradually becoming a ravine that everyone wants to define.
Hanging in his name are members of the social left and the right of achievement, secular and religious, opponents of withdrawals and proponents of division into two states, supporters of the supremacy of the judiciary and demanding a balance between the governing authorities.
In almost every interview, the trivial question "What would Ben-Gurion say or do?"
People want to learn halakhah from him, and more misleadingly - to teach their own halakhah according to it.
It makes sense to ask his position on values like sovereignty, liberty, sharing or equality, but there is no point in asking how one can “think” to fulfill them now.
Fulfillment conditions inevitably change and require critical thinking.
This is Ben-Gurion's spirit.
One of his most important biographers, Shabtai Tevet, devoted an entire book to a failed justification of the claim that Ben-Gurion was a devout supporter of the division of the land. True, Ben-Gurion supported the division, but this was a position for the time being, given the circumstances of the crisis of the period. Such recruitment attempts began at the end of Ben-Gurion's life. At the end of the war in 1967, he hurried to declare that only Jerusalem should be united in our sovereignty and withdraw from the rest of the "territories," and then the "pigeons" in the labor movement clung to the margins of his mantle. After he was brought to the Golan, he declared that sovereignty should also be established in it, and in answer to a later question, he continued and demanded that Hebron be kept in our possession. Now take advantage of his "hawkish" words in the labor movement. But there was no value then to these declarations of an old man, and all the more so that today there is no value in speculating on his "opinion." Those who seek "Ben-Gurion decisions" in one direction or another seek nothing but to manipulate the minds of human beings.It is Ben-Gurion's legacy that we examine with a realistic eye and in depth the conditions of our lives and manage them wisely and in the light of a vision. No less, but also no more.
Similarly, the debate over Israeli statehood: does it mean superiority to the judicial system, or a balance between the authorities?
One can pull rhetorically at Ben-Gurion's sleeve in any direction, because he was the great builder of the democratic representative authority in Israel, the one that the Supreme Court and the State Attorney's Office threaten;
In his day, the independence of the judiciary was established, which is also an essential characteristic of a democratic regime.
We have recently seen a trend to take over the Ben-Gurion brand "statehood" in favor of the supremacy of jurists.
This is a blatant and serious deception of the public.
The desire to hang on a tree as tall as Ben-Gurion does not justify distortion, and it is also harmful in another way: it harms the ability of Israeli society as a whole to draw inspiration from it.
