With the latest round of Israel’s perpetual polls almost upon us, and the circus that is American democracy striking up a comical accompaniment, we may find ourselves contemplating Judaism’s perspective on democracy. One chapter of Judaism Reclaimed explores the question: Can the Torah be said to idealise any particular form of governance?
In a perceptive piece of political philosophy which reflects earlier tensions and disagreements among key commentaries, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (Netziv) suggests that the Torah’s perspective with regard to the practical implementation of its command to appoint a king is deliberately ambiguous. The passage containing the command to appoint a king is introduced with the following statement:
When you come to the land that Hashem your God is giving you, and you have inherited and inhabited it, and you say “I will appoint for myself a king like all the surrounding nations”. Surely appoint a king for yourself …
Netziv understands that this verse makes the mitzva conditional upon the approval and request of the nation (“and you say “I will appoint””); only under such circumstances is the Sanhedrin commanded to appoint a king. He then proceeds to evaluate different forms of societies and political climates: in some situations a monarch is necessary to unite and lead a nation, while at other times the people are unable to handle the power of a king and such appointment would be sakanat nefashot (forbidden as dangerous). For this reason, even though appointing a king is a mitzva, it is not an absolutely and permanently binding commandment, because its suitability depends on the political situation of the nation. Authority can only be centralised under a single monarch and dynasty when the people themselves seek a king, having recognised the benefits that this can bring.
The Torah’s recognition that not all societies and eras are equally suited to a strong central monarchy raises a further question as to whether the Torah actually endorses any particular political system as an ideal. It would seem to follow from the majority position among the commentaries, which regards the appointment of a king as a positive commandment, that the Torah’s favoured form of government is a monarchy. Nonetheless it is hard to ignore the strong arguments presented by Abarbanel which draw upon biblical precedent (the Jewish kings, with few exceptions, were overwhelmingly deemed as failures) and his personal experience of the vastly superior system of governance of the Italian republican city-states when compared to the monarchies of Spain and Portugal. Abarbanel goes so far as to compare the mitzva of appointing a king to the mitzvah of yefat to’ar, describing it as a concession to human weakness which must be contended with and guided.
The innovative approach of Netziv allows us to integrate the positions of both sets of Rishonim, with the majority view representing the ideal position of a worthy and righteous king, working in conjunction with a prophet in order to advance the religious, economic and security interests of the nation. A number of Jewish kings (for instance David, Yehoshaphat, Asa, Yoshiyahu and Chizkiya) stand out for their record of uniting the nation behind strong religious programmes and upholding justice. It is hard to imagine that the national repentance drives of Yoshiyahu or Chizkiya would have been so effective had they not been established and managed by the strong authority of the king. And it is unlikely that the achievements of Shlomo’s earlier years on the throne, in which knowledge of God became widespread among the Jewish people and spread to neighbouring countries, could have occurred in the weak federal system that had existed at the time of the Judges. Indeed, the lack of a monarch is blamed several times in the penultimate chapter of the book of Shofetim for the calamitous social, religious and political failings of the era such as the Pilegesh beGivah and the ensuing civil war.
While recognising that the Torah does appear to endorse monarchy as an ideal, practicality and pragmatism demand that we heed the cautionary words of Abarbanel and Seforno, who highlight the pitfalls of centralising absolute power within a monarchy. Just as Netziv points out that not all communities and nations are suited to the imposition of a kingship, we too can comment that not all kings are worthy recipients for absolute authority over nations.
We may be led to conclude that, despite the Torah’s apparent preference for a strong monarchy as an ideal, we are certainly not bound to seek a return of such an institution in an era in which dictatorships are overwhelmingly synonymous with oppression, and when there is no prophecy to guide the appointment of a king and his subsequent conduct. In the final chapters of Hilchot Melachim, Rambam describes how the righteous Messianic king will unite the people of the world around God’s truths and goals, and the Jewish people will then fully be able to realise its mission as a ‘light unto the nations’. Until then, we are left with the advice of Winston Churchill, who stated that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” – a truism that some current politicians seem intent on pushing to its outermost limits.
(The chapter proceeds to analyse and provide examples of fundamental distinctions between the Torah’s conception of monarchy, which must function within the Jewish legal system and under prophetic instruction, and the absolute monarchies of surrounding ancient countries which routinely enslaved and oppressed their subjects).
First posted on Facebook 29 February 2020, here.
