Rabbi Avi Grossman Weighs In on Some Recent Articles
Posted two weeks late, so I added some links…
Reading that article from RYYJ, wherein the author points out that the creation of the State of Israel did not achieve the Zionist goal of a state that could protect the Jewish people, I respond by saying Exactly, because it all comes down to leadership. The state is only as good as its leaders, which is why the prophets always focused on the particular Judge or King who was in power, and he is credited or faulted for whatever the people did as a whole.
About the American Thinker response to Pinker, even if no taxation is a theoretical-halachical ideal (achieved by the greatest Jewish leaders in history like Moses and Samuel who never took anything from anybody), the halacha allows the king to take a 10% tax on (basically) income because most leaders will not live up to the Mosaic standard because they are human.
My experience tells me that if Democracy is the ideal system of governance (or at least of deciding on who governs) the Torah would have prescribed it for us. But it did not, and despite the Kotzker blogger’s recent article asserting that the adoption of p’suqei d’zimra was in response to the fall of the exilarchs, we have, since Davidic times, held up his type of monarchy as at least a romanticized if not fully realized ideal system worth reinstating. (Consider that if on a weekday, one were to not pray for Davidic restoration, he would not fulfill his obligation of daily prayer.)
Rather, despite our best efforts to create fair socio-political systems, we find that most, whether on the level of the nuclear family to superpowers and empires, devolve into some form of dictatorship, one man who consolidates power, with the only difference between say, the Pax Americana presidents and obvious tyrants being that the former eventually left office voluntary and oversaw systems that allowed the people to live and conduct their business relatively freely. Indeed, a society constituted of people who practiced the Torah as an all-encompassing law (without foolish, man-made additions) would approximate a libertarian utopia, but more so, our sages realized that because in the end there is only man, the best we can hope for is that the dictator is benevolent. A David and not a Herod. That opinionated rasha, Christopher Hitchens, who was wont to point out his own monarchy’s faults, aptly observed that “Monarchy is a hereditary disease that can only be cured by fresh outbreaks of itself.”
In his own cynical way, he was saying that when we are left with the type of dictator we can’t stand, the best we can hope for is that the next dictator will be more palatable. That is why the halacha declares that monarchy should solely be granted to kosher Davidians, ones who have the necessary moral character and follow the Torah that teaches them to remain humble, to not run after wealth, physical pleasures, and power, and to limit their work to maintaining (Torah) law and order and national security.
On the practical level, I agree with what you wrote in response to RYYJ
In the end, the only thing that stopped the shelling of Israel’s northern cities was the United Nations. We needed the gentiles again for our safety…)
No, the physical insecurity is rather due to lack of Bitachon in the Master of the World, and cravenly trying to appear Goyishly “moral”, due to anti-Zionism
on a philosophical level.
On a practical level, this means that the prime ministers, etc., should have used their God-granted capabilities to fight back. Which is the ideal and historical Jewish response. To put our trust in the Lord, to pray to Him and fast, and then go out and win the milchemet mitzva.
