Democracy
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
This article could have been titled “Why Democracy, American Style, is a Non-Starter in the Middle East,” or, alternatively, “Why Democracy, American Style, Dooms Israel.”
It has long been the fashion of certain people to identify Judaism with one or another system of life in vogue at the time. Today even rabbis, as swell as intellectuals and of course politicians and Supreme Court judges, say Judaism is democratic. And whereas some emphasize the consistency between Judaism and capitalism, others identify Judaism with socialism.
These people, in their misinformed or misguided zeal to serve what they hold to be the cause of Judaism—if not their own cause—are at great pains to prove that Judaism contains within itself the elements of contemporary political thought and action. Most of those who indulge in this prattle have no clear idea of Judaic governance, let alone the place in it, if any, of democracy.
Nor have they ever made a systematic study of democracy as discussed, for example, in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, or Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses.
It seems that many Jews can earn no honor or respect unless they are able to show that Judaism is perfectly consistent with democracy. Such people do a great disservice to Judaism. They have reduced Judaism to a juggler’s bag out of which anything can be produced on demand. Meanwhile they obscure some of the moral and intellectual problems of democracy discussed, for example, in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.
As everyone knows, "democracy" literally means the "rule of the people" or popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty reduces to the rule of the majority. Suppose, however, Israel’s Muslim citizens eventually composed a majority of the country’s population. They could then dominate the Knesset and establish an Islamic state. Wouldn’t this be consistent with democracy?
Of course majority rule does not exhaust the principles of democracy. There is also the principle of freedom. Democratic freedom yields pluralism. Pluralism requires a broad-based agreement that democracy is not a body of substantive ends but a "process"—the "rules of the game" by which individuals pursue their private interests and "lifestyles." Hence democracy does not entail any particular ethnic or religious character. This is why there are no ethnic or religious qualifications for voting or holding office in any democratic regime.
In contrast, Judaism is a nationality, a prescribed way of life. In addition
to endogamous marriage laws and ethical precepts, Judaism has its own holy days, its own system of education, its own literature. And because Judaism is a nationality, only Jews can hold public office in an authentic Jewish polity. All this is quite foreign to democracy.
Furthermore, democracies separate church and state or religion and public law. Democracies not only regard religion a "private" matter, but they also insist "it is not the function of government to foster morality or family values"—which is why moral relativism thrives in contemporary democracy, while families disintegrate. The paramount function of public law in a democracy is to maximize comfort and security.
At this point people will say that authentic Judaism is theocratic. The issue here is more semantic than substantive. If "theocracy" signifies a regime ruled by a church or by priests, Judaism is not theocratic. There is no church in Judaism, neither theologically, since there is no mediation between God and the individual Jew, nor institutionally, since there is no papacy or ecclesiastical hierarchy.
But if "theocracy" is construed literally as "the rule of God," then Judaism is theocratic, for God is the ultimate source of law and authority. But what does this mean operationally? In Judaism no priesthood but only publicly tested scholarship can lay claim to any validity regarding the laws of the Torah. This means the Torah belongs to every Jew, whether he is a Kohane, Levite, or Israelite.
It means that Judaism has no ruling class. Who rules is based on intellectual and moral qualifications: those who are most learned in the Torah and the sciences receive the highest honors. Moreover, unlike the practice of any so-called aristocracy, in a Torah polity education is open to, and even required of, all members of the community.
Sounds pretty "democratic," doesn’t it?
