On a cold January day in 1940, David Ben-Gurion rode down
to the Kalia Hotel by the Dead Sea, where, at the lowest land
point on the globe, he devoted some thought to the way he
would appear in the book that some future biographer would
eventually write about him and his colleagues, founders of the
State of Israel. He imagined a “young, intelligent, and good
biographer.” Obviously, that biographer would discern the
founders’ “weaknesses, flaws, and shortcomings”: none of
them had been “ministering angels and seraphs and cherubs,”
Ben-Gurion wrote. But would he be able also to respect them
and grasp the historic significance of their achievements?
Would he perhaps even realize how much he’d missed by
coming to know them only after their deaths?1 Ben-Gurion
was often preoccupied with death.