This is the 27th Shoftim, although it’s only the 26th time we’ve been together. Back then, it all began with a Sforno at the beginning of the Parasha in which he points out that we are resuming the list of Mitzvot from last week. But these Mitzvot take it to another level. We are no longer dealing with the Mitzvot having to do with the masses. Now we are dealing with leadership.
The Parasha speaks about kings and judges, priests and prophets, and the Sforno says that much of communal life depends on them. As they succeed, everyone succeeds, and as they fail, everyone goes down.
The Minyan then had never had a full-time rabbi, so I used the Parasha to lay out the job description. I spoke about the rabbi’s job as encompassing aspects of all four -- that there was an aspect of unity brought by the king; that there was instruction in the law which comes from a judge; that there’s a chance of a rise in Kedusha from the priest. In terms of the prophet, there wasn’t going to be much of seeing into the future, but the prophet’s job is to make sure that we don’t just comfort the afflicted but also afflict the comfortable. That too can be the rabbi’s job. At that point, I had been in the job for a few days. We were just starting out. Now it would be interesting to evaluate according to these criteria.
Over the years, I became intrigued by something else we learn from this presentation. The four functions are separated. They are supposed to stay in their lanes. There will be judges who are prophets, like Shmuel. There will be kings, like King David, who are prophets. But there are not supposed to be priests who are kings. In fact, the heroism of the Chashmona’im notwithstanding, there is a criticism in Chazal for the way they tried to usurp the kingship.
It is tempting to find in this separation a precursor to the separation of powers in political thought after the Renaissance. It was Baron Montesquieu who the Founding Fathers drew on in sketching out the separation of powers. He in turn had drawn on the ancients, the Romans, for his model and not the Torah. He was not part of the movement in the 17th century which is called Hebraism. In the 20th century, Hebraism came to mean the transformation of foreign phrases or names into Hebrew. For decades, Israel required anyone who represented the State abroad to Hebraicize their names. It’s how the name “Krieger” becames “Yariv,” or “Grun” became “Ben Gurion.”
But Hebraism several centuries earlier meant something else altogether. In the 17th century, it meant a return to the Torah and its commentators for guidance in creating political ideals. This “return” was not by Jews, but by non-Jews, mostly Protestants thinkers who were trying to figure out the contours of a post-monarchy republic. Beit Midrash last week and this coming week is about this fascinating moment and its aftermath. But the separation of powers does not stem from this.
But back to us today. At this time of year, it’s important to understand that leadership roles belong to everyone. What I said all those years ago doesn’t just apply to the rabbi. We don’t have a vicarious system where the rabbi stands in for everyone. We all have the same responsibilities. There isn’t anyone who doesn’t have a role to play in unifying the community. And everyone has something to teach, and a responsibility to seek out holiness. It can be reckless to appoint oneself to afflict the comfortable, but we all are called on during Elul to at least focus a critical eye on ourselves. How well we come out of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur will depend on how well we’ve performed with this job description for ourselves.
