Who Should Rule?
Theology, Politics, and the Once and Future Liberal
When Moses charged us with the Teaching as the heritage of the congregation of Jacob. Then He was king in Jeshurun, when the heads of the people assembled,
the tribes of Israel together. (Deuteronomy 33:4-5)
“He was”—that is, the Holy One was [king].—Rashi
“A king”—this is a reference to Moses…and Rabbi Yehuda Halevi says king refers to the Torah—Ibn Ezra
I. Political Theology
Political theology is the study of the relationship between politics and theology. The core insight of the field, established and popularized by Carl Schmitt, and extended today by Giorgio Agamben, is that all political views presuppose a theology, a view on God and the nature of divine authority. Even atheism is a theology. There is no flight from metaphysics, any more than Adam and Eve can hide from God in the Garden of Eden.
More radically, political theology is founded on the insight that political institutions inevitably borrow from a rich theological vocabulary and religious universe even when they are unaware of it, or even when they are opposed to religiosity. Schmitt’s example is that “the state of exception” in politics and law is a kind of secularized form of “the miracle” in theology.
Without going as far as Schmitt, Spinoza and Burke both popularized the concept of “civil religion,” the idea that religiosity could not be displaced by the state, but had to be co-opted by it. The pledge of allegiance to the flag, mandatory in American public schools, is one example of civil religion. Presidential inaugurations not only contain a “swearing in” on the Bible, but are organized around the same kinds of “collective effervescence” that Durkheim claims define religious cults. “I voted” selfies are rituals on a spectrum with shaking lulav and etrog. Religion can be tamed, but religiosity cannot be abolished, even by the most resolutely anti-religious.
It is the relationship between theology and politics, divine and human power, on which the Torah’s final parasha, V’zot Habracha, turns.
II. Who is King?
The final chapters of the Torah which we read this week are composed of poetry. While poetry is the soul of language, and the most primeval form of human expression, it is also notoriously difficult to understand, fundamentally ambiguous. Poems reach for sense, but often mean most through evocation. One ambiguity in the Torah’s final poem is the referent of the word king. Does king refer to God, Moses, or, as Yehuda Halevi suggests, Torah itself? The theological and political implications of each reading contain worlds of difference.
If God alone is king, then human legitimacy is always relative, tempered. Sure, God can confer legitimacy to earthly representatives, but human politics remains a mostly “fallen” endeavor. In the reading that says God is king, I see two opposite, but mutually enforcing positions. One is anarchy, the other is theocracy.
If God alone is king, the state is fundamentally problematic. Idolatry is the worship of human sovereignty, the conflation of religion and politics, the subordination of holy ideals to what is practical. It is this anti-statist position that we see in the Israelite revolt against Pharaoh and which we see continue in the Torah’s largely deflationary view of Kings. With the exception of King David, most kings become totally complacent and idolatrous.
On the other hand, if God alone is king, you might come to the conclusion that politics is only legitimated if it serves this absolute monarch, hence theocracy. The language of divine sovereignty is not so much anti-statist as it is anti-democratic and anti-liberal. There is no secular space, no right to privacy, in a world where God rules everything. Divine law, with its emphasis on obligation, has little respect for the modern concept of rights.
If Moses is king, by contrast, what we have is more of a bottom up theory of political legitimacy. Moses is legitimate even though he is imperfect, but his legitimacy depends upon his teaching, his relationship with the people, not upon anything innate in him; Moses is not ruling by “divine right”; he is simply serving his term in office. God may have one view of how things should go, but, within certain constraints, the power is in Moses’s hands, in his interpretive discretion. Note how the text says that Moses or God became king only when “the heads of the people assembled.” You could argue that it is the gathering itself that confers legitimacy on the teacher. Thus, Moses is distinguished from the tyrant in that he responds to the needs of the people rather than imposes his will upon them.
If Torah is king, as Halevy suggests, the possibilities are most radical. The Torah as king metaphor leads theoretically to the possibility of decentralized authority, making each person an agent in a composite “reading” that has no single author. Torah becomes a kind of blockchain on which all of our interpretations and lives make their permanent mark. To say that Torah is king is to say that wisdom rules—not through coercion, but through emergence.
While the language of kingship may be alienating to our modern, democratic ears, it is helpful to remind ourselves that Hobbes, the founder of the concept of rights, was a monarchist, who believed that only a single sovereign could save us from ourselves. Locke established the right to revolt against the king, thus influencing the Declaration of Independence’s line, “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another…” But even he did not think monarchy was an inherent impediment to liberalism. Rousseau, another leading light of liberal “contract theory” imagines a Law-Giver who embodies the “general will” of the people. His theory of democratic legitimacy does not eschew the concept of a single sovereign. Traces of monarchy remain in any concept of the executive. “Separation of powers” offers a check against the possibility that the executive can become corrupt or illegitimate, but not against the executive function itself.
The Avritcher Rebbe (1765-1840) notes that “King [me-le-ch] is made from the same letters that spell la-ch-em (for you).” In making this associative, linguist connection, he shows a modern sensibility, not unlike Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, that makes divine legitimacy dependent upon human acceptance of it. A famous Midrash in the Sifrei suggests that God cannot be king unless we coronate God. “If you testify to me, then I am; if you do not, then I am not, as it were.” Kabbalistic theology suggests a circular relationship between God as Creator and God as created, God as cause and effect of human longing. If Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, could call God a projection it is only because Kabbalah first understood the creative and poetic agency of human language and worship, to create God. The difference between them is in their evaluation of the projection, with Kabbalah seeing it as praiseworthy. God wants our projections. Rachmana liba baei—the Merciful One desires our desire (even when it is guided by false belief or just imaginative fancy).
From this point of view, the kingship of God, Moses, and/or Torah, is not absolute. Kabbalah equates the divine attribute malchut, kingship with us, k’nesset yisrael, suggesting that divinity is expressed through humanity, not in opposition to it. Our grappling with the difficulties of governance is reflective of a divine grappling in heaven, as it were. “As above, so below.” This doesn’t get us to liberalism, but it suggests that our various attempts to solve the human condition through political organization express not only our longing for God, but God’s longing for us. Expressed in Lurianic terms, the dysfunction of human politics is emblematic of God’s own brokenness. The healing of society through politics is thus part and parcel of liberating God, as it were, from the shells which entrap God. Politics is not a necessary evil, but the holy of holies.
History seems to move on a pendulum between the anti-messianic realism of the first view and the messianic idealism of the second.
III. Is Torah Liberal?
Is the Torah a liberal document? If it were, why has it not prevented human slavery for thousands of years? Why did it take a women’s suffrage movement to argue that women also have a right to vote? Why did it take “secularism” to introduce us to the concept of liberal democracy? To be sure, many great religious thinkers have read the Torah for humanistic inspiration, including abolitionists, but, as Luther notes, “The devil can also quote Scripture.” While abolitionism made slavery formally illegal, it has not put an end to exploitation and domination.
In any given historical moment, people who disagree fundamentally about morality and politics are reading the Bible to justify their sense of what’s good and right. We all think we have “God on our side,” as Bob Dylan says. “While the owl of Minerva takes flight with the settling of the dust,” in the present moment we can’t know whether we are in the right or the wrong, but only a few of us dare to assume, as our default, that we are in the wrong.
The Torah itself does not seem to be the historical driver of liberalism. On the contrary, “religiosity,” not just in Judaism, but in many religious traditions, tracks with a suspicion of, if not hostility to, liberal democracy. Rabbinic authority is, in its self-conception, aristocratic, based in a noble lineage, not dependent on voting and popularity contests.
On the other hand, the Torah certainly seems to be against tyranny, from its opposition to Pharaoh, to the Tower of Babel, to its own, wayward Israelite kings whom it excoriates with prophetic clarity. If liberalism is fundamentally about the incontrovertible dignity of the individual, it seems that the Torah is, on some foundational level, liberal.
It seems honest to say that the Torah, as a historical text, contains both liberal and illiberal tendencies. And that as a living tradition, both liberal and illiberal readings of the Torah have some authenticity.
IV. The Contradictory Foundations of Liberalism
We could go further, though, because liberalism is 1) not without its own contradictions and 2) not purely secular.
Despite being founded on a separation of Church and State, and despite the Deism of thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and the atheism/pantheism of Spinoza, liberalism is an outgrowth of a culture whose foundations are Biblical as much as Greek. Secularism itself would not be possible without a Biblical foundation. And you could argue—and some do—that monotheism is itself a proto-secularized movement relative to pagan superstition, a half-way house on the way from many gods to none.
John Stuart Mill is famous for popularizing “the harm principle”: I can do whatever I want, so long as I’m not harming anyone else. But the reality is that part a) and part b) are in fundamental conflict. There is no way not to harm others by affirming our own liberty. Thus, liberalism is always in conflict with itself, as to what constitutes a good standard by which to limit liberty for the sake of saving society from harm. Perhaps all religions are theoretically liberal, but have very high thresholds when it comes to applying the harm principle. For example, for the sake of saving society from harm it is necessary to publicly stone the Sabbath violator.
V. The Open
No matter who is king—and it seems important that the Torah itself can’t answer this definitively, but rather leaves it open—the Torah teaches that authority requires our collaboration and gathering. Kingship is opened up in relationship, as the “between,” not as some faculty that rests in a single person or entity. Second, the Torah’s care for the individual ensures that no gathering can be final, because dissent and the expression of difference are core to human dignity. While Moses may have been “king” in the moment of the gathering of the tribes, we know that, from a historical point of view, these tribes would not get along (if they ever did), and that most today would be “lost.” Unity is an ideal that is at odds with human difference. Perhaps this is why Halevi makes Torah king. While the text is fixed, the way we read it, and find ourselves in it, is not. Torah study becomes a model for the kind of openness that we seek in the world, but cannot find. Commentary is our haven in a world that seeks to reduce us to a group, seduce us with a bottom line.
Come and learn. There is room in this open text to hold us as an open people, to hold us open in the pen, as people.
Chazak Chazak v’nitchazek. May we go from strength to strength.
Shabbat Shalom and Moadim L’Simcha,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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