The Jewish Political Tradition – Authority V 1: Volume I: Authority (Jewish Political Tradition Series) - Softcover

Walzer, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300102011 ISBN 13: 9780300102017

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2004

Synopsis

This book launches a landmark four-volume collaborative work exploring the political thought of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present. Each volume includes a selection of texts―from the Bible and Talmud, midrashic literature, legal responsa, treatises, and pamphlets―annotated for modern readers and accompanied by new commentaries written by eminent philosophers, lawyers, political theorists, and other scholars working in different fields of Jewish studies. These contributors join the arguments of the texts, agreeing or disagreeing, elaborating, refining, qualifying, and sometimes repudiating the political views of the original authors. The series brings the little-known and unexplored Jewish tradition of political thinking and writing into the light, showing where and how it resonates in the state of Israel, the chief diaspora settlements, and, more broadly, modern political experience.

This first volume, Authority, addresses the basic question of who ought to rule the community: What claims to rule have been put forward from the time of the exodus from Egypt to the establishment of the state of Israel? How are such claims disputed and defended? What constitutes legitimate authority? The authors discuss the authority of God, then the claims of kings, priests, prophets, rabbis, lay leaders, gentile rulers (during the years of the exile), and the Israeli state. The volume concludes with several perspectives on the issue of whether a modern state can be both Jewish and democratic. Forthcoming volumes will address the themes of membership, community, and political vision.

Among the contributors to this volume:
Amy Gutmann
Moshe Halbertal
David Hartman
Moshe Idel
Sanford Levinson
Susan Neiman
Hilary Putnam
Joseph Raz
Michael Sandel
Allan Silver
Yael Tamir

About this title

About the Author

Michael Walzer is UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Menachem Lorberbaum is senior lecturer in the department of Jewish philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Noam Zohar is senior lecturer in the department of philosophy at Bar Ilan University. Yair Lorberbaum is lecturer in the faculty of law at Bar Ilan University. All four editors are research fellows at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Jewish Political Tradition

VOLUME I Authority

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2000 Yale University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10201-7

Contents

Table of Contents for Volumes I-IV...................................................................................xiForeword DAVID HARTMAN..............................................................................................xiiiPreface and Acknowledgments..........................................................................................xviIntroduction: The Jewish Political Tradition MICHAEL WALZER.........................................................xxiThe Selection, Translation, and Presentation of the Texts MENACHEM LORBERBAUM AND NOAM J. ZOHAR.....................xxxiiLaw, Story, and Interpretation: Reading Rabbinic Texts MICHAEL FISHBANE.............................................xxxixList of Abbreviations................................................................................................lviVolume I. AuthorityIntroduction.........................................................................................................3Chapter 1. Covenant: God's Law and the People's Consent..............................................................5IntroductionBiblical CovenantsCovenant and ConsentThe Scope of Covenantal CommitmentChapter 2. Revelation: Torah and Reason..............................................................................47IntroductionNatural Law, Reason, and Revelation: Classical DiscussionsRevelation, Morality, and Ritual: Modern StrugglesChapter 3. Kings.....................................................................................................108IntroductionBiblical Views of MonarchyThe Constitution of MonarchyCritiques of MonarchyThe Realm of Torah and the Realm of PoliticsChapter 4. Priests...................................................................................................166IntroductionIn the Bible: Holy PriestsThe Second Temple: Ruling PriestsFrom Priests to SagesChapter 5. Prophets..................................................................................................199IntroductionThe Prophetic CallingProphecy as Political ChallengeGod's Word: Truth, Falsehood, and InterpretationA Medieval Prophet: The Abulafia ControversyChapter 6. Rabbis and Sages..........................................................................................244IntroductionCustodians of the LawBeyond ProphecyAuthority of the Oral LawMedieval Arguments: Karaites and RabbanitesModern Concerns: Halakhic Innovation and Rabbinic AuthorityChapter 7. Controversy and Dissent...................................................................................307IntroductionMajority and MinorityThe Individual: Knowledge and ResponsibilityThe Rebellious Elder: Institutional AuthorityLiving with DisagreementMedieval Arguments: The Value of UniformityModern Disputes: The Problem of AuthorityChapter 8. The Good Men of the Town..................................................................................379IntroductionTalmudic FoundationsJustifying the Kahal's Authority: Early AshkenazRestricting the Kahal's Authority: Early SpainDeveloped Doctrines of the KahalThe Kahal and the RabbiChapter 9. The Gentile State.........................................................................................430IntroductionLegitimacy of Non-Jewish AuthorityModern Disputes: Civil and Religious LawChapter 10. The State of Israel......................................................................................463IntroductionLegal and Political ContinuityReligious Significance of the StateA Jewish and Democratic StateGlossary of Names....................................................................................................525Glossary of Terms....................................................................................................545List of Commentators.................................................................................................555Index of Biblical and Rabbinic Sources...............................................................................557Index of Names.......................................................................................................5565General Index........................................................................................................571

Chapter One

Covenant God's Law and the People's Consent

Introduction

Biblical Covenants

Acceptance of the Torah

1. Exodus 19:7-20:18

The Covenant at Sinai

2. Exodus 24:1-8, 12-18

The Covenant at Moab

3. Deuteronomy 29:1, 9-28; 30:11-20

The Covenant at Shechem

4. Joshua 24:1-28

The Forced Covenant

5. Ezekiel 20:1-6, 10-22, 30-38

Pledging a Renewed Covenant

6. Nehemiah 9:1-8, 24-26, 30-37; 10:1-40

Commentary. Bernard M. Levinson, "The Sinai Covenant: The Argument of Revelation"

Covenant and Consent

Grounds of Obligation

7. Mekhilta Derabbi Yishmael, Bahodesh 5, 6

"A Forceful Disclaimer Regarding the Torah"

8. BT Shabbat 88a

God's Bound Subjects

9. Sifre Numbers 115

Commentary. Michael J. Sandel, "Covenant and Consent"

Offering the Torah to the Nations

10. Sifre Deuteronomy 343

The Scope of Covenantal Commitment

Individual Responsibility

11. BT Sotah 37a-b

The Covenant: Meaning and Intention 12. BT Shevu'ot 29a-b

Future Generations

13. Isaac Abravanel, Commentary on the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy 29

Freedom and Necessity

14. Judah Loew (Maharal of Prague), Tiferet Yisrael, Chapter 32

Covenant as Social Contract

15. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Chapters 5 and 17

Introduction

Many of the central issues of modern consent theory are already posed in biblical and Rabbinic literature. Reading these texts, one has to keep reminding oneself that their authors were not consent theorists and that a covenant with God is not the same thing as a social contract. Contract and convenant indeed have similar effects-creating political unity and moral obligation-and at least some of the writers represented in this chapter seem to believe that the obligation to obey God's law derives, and can only derive, from the people's consent. But God is no equal or near equal, like all the other parties to the social contract; nor do the people, when they consent, "give the law to themselves" (as in Rousseau's version of contract theory)-they accept the law as God gives it. And how free can their acceptance be, when the divine lawgiver is absolute and omnipotent?

In the different midrashic elaborations of the Sinai story, only sampled here, God is sometimes seen persuading the people to accept his law (the prophet Hosea describes him wooing Israel like a lover) and sometimes threatening and coercing them. The first is the more attractive account; the second is theoretically more interesting, for the Rabbis, or some of them, recognize that coerced consent is not morally or legally binding. So they are driven to look for some later occasion when consent is given voluntarily-and they find this only in the next to last chapter of the book of Esther, where the acceptance of the laws of Purim by the exilic community of Persian Jews is taken as a general acceptance of the law itself-for all future time (see Esther 9:27). But they surely don't imagine that Israel was uncommitted and without obligation from the days of Moses to those of Ahasuerus. If that were the case, the prophetic condemnations of Israel for failing to live up to the Sinai covenant would make no sense.

In any case, whether or not God waits upon Israel's consent at Sinai or at any other time, it is clear that he need not wait at all if he does not choose to do so: he can guarantee consent by inscribing his law not on stone tablets but directly on the human heart, as Jeremiah says he will do in the days to come (31:33). Similarly, although this is not taken up in our texts, he can guarantee rejection, as he apparently has in the past, "hardening the heart," for example, of Egypt's pharaoh. And He can compel obedience whether his commandments have been accepted or rejected, as Ezekiel makes clear in the text reprinted below. In a world of absolute power, consent is always problematic.

Nonetheless, it is a matter of considerable importance that God's revelation, according to many writers, must be received and accepted before it is morally binding. In the biblical account, this view is fairly clear, but at Sinai there is also an epiphany-a sudden, overwhelming, and irresistible manifestation of divine power. In the midrashic parables, the Sinai events take on a rather different character. In one midrash, for example, we have God bringing the Israelites out of Egypt and providing water in the desert to win their gratitude: they agree to obey his law because he has proven himself a good king. In another, by contrast, we have God carrying his law from one nation to another; he is a lawgiver who finds no takers until he comes to Israel (but why is Israel so far down his list?). And yet another midrash describes the people assembled at the foot of the mountain to listen to a reading of the law-not just the Ten Commandments but the whole of the Torah-before they accept it. The moment is certainly solemn, but now the epiphany is omitted entirely; God's frightening power is hidden, as if the people can deliberate only in its absence, which is exactly what consent theory would require.

The most striking feature of this Jewish understanding of consent is its historical specificity. Israel does not accept God's law in some imaginary state of nature but at a precise moment in its history and in a real place. To be sure, this moment (after the deliverance from Egyptian bondage) and this place (an uninhabited wilderness) anticipate many of the features of the state of nature-as Spinoza points out. Israel has neither a regime nor a territory, so it is uniquely situated for a freely enacted construction of the political world. But the point of the biblical narrative is that the people are really there; the construction is something that really happened. The people's consent is in no sense hypothetical; it is not the sort of consent that any rational person would give in idealized circumstances; it is the consent that a particular group of men and women actually did give.

They are bound only because they gave it. But they then face the precise difficulty that hypothetical consent is designed to avoid: How can they be sure that subsequent generations will find their consent comprehensible and justified and so reiterate it? The Deuteronomic account of the covenant renewal in Moab just before the crossing of the Jordan into Canaan specifies that the participants include "those who are standing here with us this day ... and [also] those who are not with us here this day" (29:14). The latter group presumably includes the unborn, all the future children of Israel. But how can they be bound by their parents' consent (or their great-great-grandparents')? Aware, perhaps, of this difficulty, the biblical writers describe periodic renewals of the covenant, not only in Moses' time but also in Joshua's and Josiah's and, at Ezra's instigation, after the return from Babylonia. The importance given to these events testifies to the centrality of consent in the biblical and then also in the Rabbinic imagination.

But how is this consent to be renewed and the obligation sustained after Israel's exile, when no such collective covenanting is possible? This is the question posed by Isaac Abravanel in a time of persecution and mass conversion, when Spanish Jewry endured a "second exile," and then by Maharal of Prague ( Judah Loew) in the late sixteenth century, when the memory of the Spanish disaster was still fresh. The answers they gave-legalistic in the first case, metaphysical in the second-reveal the long-term effects of statelessness on Jewish political thought. Although consent may still play a part in the life of the scattered communities of the diaspora, large-scale deliberation and action in common are no longer possible for Israel as a whole. (It is worth noting that consent theory emerged in the West only with the appearance of the modern state.) Perhaps Jewish writers could have worked out an individualist account of consent, focusing on the ritual celebration of holidays like Passover and Simhat Torah or on the acceptance of benefits like the law itself and the satisfaction its observance brings in daily life. But Israel's covenant is collective from the beginning, generating obligations not only between God and humankind but between every Israelite and every other, and an individualist account of this mutuality does not seem possible.

Abravanel is aware of all these difficulties, and his statement of the problem (though not his proposed solution) is a wonderfully explicit and sophisticated expression of consent theory. He isn't very convincing, however, when he goes on to argue that consent doesn't matter very much after all, since Israel is the slave of God, liberated from the pharaoh only for the sake of divine service. If that is so, why did Moses himself, and Joshua, and Josiah, and Ezra, again and again assemble the people and seek their agreement?

Maharal's argument from the "necessity" of the Torah for cosmic order looks back to the more problematic features of medieval philosophy-only a few decades before Hobbes and Spinoza set out on a new path. Arguments of this sort are very hard to understand today (we are too far along that new path). Does Maharal mean that the cosmos is somehow constituted by Israel's acceptance of the law-which cannot therefore be contingent? But he recognizes at the same time that the acceptance must appear contingent, and therefore voluntary, to the people themselves if they are to be bound by it. Mysteriously, it is both necessary and contingent. How, then, are we to account for the frequent disobedience of the biblical Israelites or for the fact of apostasy-among Spanish Jews, for example-where cosmic necessity seems to fall away entirely?

This chapter closes with Spinoza's modernist reinterpretation of the Sinai covenant. For Spinoza, the covenant with God is purely "theoretical," for each Israelite retains an equal right to "consult" God and interpret his commands. The kingdom of God is something very close to anarchy (see Judg. 21:25, discussed in [??] 3: "Everyone did as he pleased"). God can't have subjects of his own, for they would never know for certain, or at least they would never agree on, what he had commanded them to do-unless his words were delivered by some authoritative human being, who would then be their actual sovereign. Israel's polity, therefore, is effectively founded only when the liberated people "transfer" their rights to Moses as the recognized bearer of God's word. After that, individual Israelites are bound to obey Moses-and his successors. Spinoza carefully traces the succession, which lapses when political independence is lost. It would seem to follow from this analysis that there is no obligation at all in the conditions of the exile. Spinoza's argument accounts, obviously, for his own behavior, but it leaves the conviction of his Jewish contemporaries that they still bear the burden of the law spectacularly unaccounted for. Are they bound because they believe themselves bound? That would indeed be a kind of consent, though not quite the kind suggested by that extraordinary moment at Sinai when the people, standing together, committed themselves to God and to one another.

Biblical Covenants

The founding covenant at Sinai is constituted by revelation and consent, the giving of the Torah by God and its acceptance by the people. In the first of our selections, God pronounces the Ten Commandments; in the second, Moses conveys to the people "all the commands of the Lord and all the rules." In both, lawgiving is preceded by mutual avowals of covenantal commitment, with Moses acting throughout as mediator.

Acceptance of the Torah

1. Exodus 19:7-20:18

Moses came and summoned the elders of the people and put before them all that the Lord had commanded him. All the people answered as one, saying, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do!" And Moses brought back the people's words to the Lord. And the Lord said to Moses, "I will come to you in a thick cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after." Then Moses reported the people's words to the Lord, and the Lord said to Moses, "Go to the people and warn them to stay pure today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothes. Let them be ready for the third day; for on the third day the Lord will come down, in the sight of all the people, on Mount Sinai. You shall set bounds for the people round about, saying, 'Beware of going up the mountain or touching the border of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death: no hand shall touch him, but he shall be either stoned or shot; beast or man, he shall not live.' When the ram's horn sounds a long blast, they may go up on the mountain."

Moses came down from the mountain to the people and warned the people to stay pure, and they washed their clothes. And he said to the people, "Be ready for the third day: do not go near a woman."

On the third day, as morning dawned, there was thunder, and lightning, and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn; and all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses led the people out of the camp toward God, and they took their places at the foot of the mountain.

Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The blare of the horn grew louder and louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder. The Lord came down upon Mount Sinai, on the top of the mountain, and the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain and Moses went up. The Lord said to Moses, "Go down, warn the people not to break through to the Lord to gaze, lest many of them perish. The priests also, who come near the Lord, must stay pure, lest the Lord break out against them." But Moses said to the Lord, "The people cannot come up to Mount Sinai, for You warned us saying, 'Set bounds about the mountain and sanctify it.'" So the Lord said to him, "Go down, and come back together with Aaron; but let not the priests or the people break through to come up to the Lord, lest He break out against them." And Moses went down to the people and spoke to them.

God spoke all these words, saying:

I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods besides Me.

You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.

You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord your God; for the Lord will not clear one who swears falsely by His name.

Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God: you shall not do any work-you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.

Honor your father and your mother, that you may long endure on the land that the Lord your God is assigning to you.

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor's house: you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300102011
• ISBN 13: 9780300102017
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592