The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

As Israel approaches its next prime ministerial election, it is worthwhile reflecting on the subject of Kingship under a Torah government.

“When you come to the land which the Lord your God is giving you, and shall have taken possession of it and have settled therein, you will eventually say: ‘We would appoint a king, just like the nations around us,’ … you must appoint a king from among your brethren; you may not appoint a foreigner who is not one of your brethren” (Deut. 17:14-15).

Rabbi Raphael Samson Hirsch’s commentary is most revealing:

The appointment of the Jewish king is not for conquering the land and not for safeguarding its possession, altogether not for developing forces to be used externally. It is God Who gives the land to Israel, God under Whose support and help it conquered the land, and under Whose protection it lives safely in it. This [Divine] support and assistance is assured again and again in the Torah, and was stressed by Moses again and again in his exhortations preparatory for the conquest of the land. For that, Israel required no king, for that Israel had only to be ‘Israel,’ had only to prove itself the faithful dutiful People of God’s Torah, had only to win the moral victory over itself to be certain of victory over any external force against it.

The purpose of a king of Israel, and of Israel itself, is not to seek external glory but internal perfection. (more…)

Revisionist historians aside, or those who do not understand Lincoln’s statesmanship, the Civil War that broke out in America after the 1860 election was over the slavery issue. Stated more precisely, the issue was whether slavery was to be extended to the territories of the United States. At issue, along with slavery, was the Declaration of Independence and its fundamental principle of moral equality.

Lincoln understood that if slavery were extended to the territories, slave states would eventually outnumber free states, in consequence of which, the slave states could readily amend the Constitution and extend slavery to the free states. Of course, the exact opposite would happen if the territories became free states. Lincoln steadfastly opposed the extension of slavery, and this meant civil war. So it was yesterday.

Today, however, the government of the United States, with the servile compliance of the government of Israel, wants to extend slavery via a Palestinian state into the territory called the “West Bank.” I say “slavery” because a Palestinian state would be nothing less than a tyranny, and that means human servitude.

Out of ignorance or interest, the candidates in the U.S. presidential campaign have endorsed a Palestinian state even though reason and experience demonstrate that such a state would be ruled by Arab despots and thereby lead to Israel’s demise. Forgotten are the basic principles of the American Declaration of Independence. (more…)

According to one study, 97 percent of all teachers in Nazi Germany were members of the Nazi party. Many of these teachers taught the humanities, for example philosophy, literature, the fine arts. Many others taught various social sciences, such as sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology, history.

Clearly, the study and teaching of the humanities and the social sciences do not make people virtuous. We should not be surprised. For the prevailing doctrine in the humanities and the social sciences in our time is moral relativism, which holds that there are no objective standards of good and bad, right and wrong.

As for the exact sciences, such as physics and chemistry, they are more obviously “value-free” or ethically neutral. Still, how did German scientists respond to Nazism?

In Walter Moore’s Schrodinger: Life and Thought, we read: “There is no known instance in which a professor of physics or chemistry without any Jewish family ever made any open protest against Nazi activities. Even among the German intellectual elite, the scientists were conspicuously unanimous in this respect, since a few protests can be found among scholars in other fields.” (more…)

The formation of a Livni government would be a disaster not only for Jews but also for Christians.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the new leader of the ruling Kadima Party, wants to surrender eastern Jerusalem and the Temple Mount to the Arabs. She is utterly oblivious of the fact that the Temple is intended for the redemption of all people, not only Jews. If the Arabs control eastern Jerusalem, Christians will be denied access to the Temple Mount.

Strange as it may seem, the Jewish Sages have said that the Temple Mount is of greater significance to the Gentile world than it is to Israel. Listen to the voice of the disparaged Pharisees regarding the sacrifices of seventy calves during the eight days of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, and note their humanitarianism:

From Leviticus Rabbah: “If the nations of the world had known how useful the Temple was to them, they would have surrounded it with fortified camps to protect it, for it was more useful to them than to Israel.” (more…)

Accountability is a basic Jewish concept, awesome during Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur. Whereas the Torah Jew knows he is accountable to G-d, the Government of Israel is accountable to no one.

The leaders of this Government boast that Israel is a democracy. One should then expect them to be accountable to the people. But Israeli politicians are accountable to the people only on election day. Once elected they ignore the convictions of those who elected them. In the January 2003 elections, a large majority voted for parties that opposed Labor’s “unilateral disengagement” policy by giving those parties 84 (or 70% of the) seats in the Knesset. Yet, the following year, the same Knesset enacted Disengagement by a vote of 67 to 45!

To whom is a Prime Minister accountable? No one. It was Ariel Sharon that adopted Labor’s policy of disengagement law, thereby nullifying the 2003 election!

To whom is Supreme Court accountable? No one. The Court is also above the law. It makes its own laws in utter disregard of the ethics and legal heritage of the Jewish people. (more…)

A. Introduction

1. Israel is confronted by implacable foes. This is not well understood or acknowledged by many who profess support for Israel, most importantly, the President of the United States. By advocating a Palestinian state, Mr. Bush reveals that he—like countless others, including Jews—does not understand the nature of Islam, He foolishly calls Islam “a religion of peace,” even though it is obviously a religion of war, a religion whose believers have slaughtered some 270 million people since Muhammad. War or jihad has been the driving force of Islam for fourteen centuries. Islam is inherently implacable. This makes Islam an enemy of civilization as brilliantly articulated in Lee Harris, Civilization and its Enemies (2004).

2. As an implacable foe, Islam is animated by a hatred that can only be described as demonic—a hatred that cannot be assuaged, a hatred rooted in satanic evil. It is this hatred that impels Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to vow, again and again, to wipe Israel off the map. Such, however, is the moral decline of Western civilization, that the supposedly religious President of the United States allows this despot to enter the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave to address the United Nations.

3. Note the irony: the religious toleration for the most intolerant of religions in a country that excludes the Ten Commandments as well as the Menorah from the public sphere. (more…)

Overwhelmed by the treachery of the Olmert government, as well as by the impotence of the opposition parties, many Jews here and abroad despair of Israel’s future. They are dismayed by a prime minister allied with Israel’s enemies, a prime minister who lies about peace and plans to surrender Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the Jewish people, to the descendants of Ishmael.

In the midst of despair, Jews look for encouragement. Consider, first, the words of a Gentile written in the mid-nineteenth century, hence long before the Nazi Holocaust:

There is a mysterious power which rules the destiny of humanity. Once the hand of the Infinite Power has signed the decree of a nation to be banished forever from the face of the earth, the fate of that nation is irrevocable. But when we see a nation, torn from its cradle in its early childhood, and having tasted all the bitterness of exile is brought back to its land, only to be tossed again into the wide world; and that nation, during the eighteen centuries of its wandering has displayed such remarkable powers of endurance, suffer age-long martyrdom without extinguishing in its heart the fire of patriotism, then we must admit that we are standing before an infinite mystery, unparalleled in the history of humanity. (more…)

The goal of the Torah is to eliminate all forms of idolatry on the one hand, and to promote the universal recognition of ethical monotheism on the other.

According to Judaism, idolatry is the beginning and cause of every evil, be it the slaughtering of children, as in worship of Moloch, or the slaughtering of “infidels” in the worship of Allah.

The First Commandment of the Torah logically entails the Second, the elimination of all forms of idolatry. Idolatry is the worship of any created thing, including the products of the human intellect, be it a philosophic or scientific theory, a political or religious ideology, or a particular form of government.

Let us equate idolatry with “reification,” which may be defined as the postulation of any physical or mental existent, process, or law as autonomous or self-sustaining. Reification thus applies to any philosophic or scientific monism, dualism, or pluralism that attempts to explain the totality or any part of existence in terms of one or more independent or self-subsisting entities. The Torah thus rejects the exaltation of any humanly constructed system of governance. (more…)

Year after year I send this kind of message out.
Now, with catastrophe approaching ever nearer, I urge all forthright Jewish organizations to to reiterate these words:

Without God Israel is lost.

For 60 years, Israeli prime ministers have banished God from the domain of statecraft, and with the compliance of the religious parties. May there not be a connection between the absence of God in Israeli statecraft and the absence of wisdom, courage, and Jewish national pride in Israel’s government?

How is it that Israel, despite its awesome military power, appeases and retreats before a gang of terrorists, be it Hamas or Fatah? Can it be because Israel’s ruling elites are godless in contrast to Israel’s enemies, who never fail to invoke the name of Allah?

Juxtapose these Arabs and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (or his predecessors Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak). (more…)

A.  Democracy: Two Types

1. “Normative” or classical democracy: based on the idea of man’s creation in the holy image of God. This provides democracy’s basic principles, freedom and equality, with rational and moral constraints. (Freedom is not “living as you like,” and equality is not a leveling but and elevating principle. The holy nation is a “kingdom of noblemen.”)

2. “Normless” or contemporary democracy. No ethical standards. Freedom is living as you please, and equality leads to vulgarity via the equivalence of all lifestyles. (Moral equivalence: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Arafat is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.)

B.  Jewish values (derived from the Torah)

1. Emphasis on justice, kindness, modesty, creativity, reason, and due process of law. Deference to wisdom. Relating the present to the past without sacrificing creativity. (more…)

Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, August 4, 2008.

PART I.

A major cause of assimilation in Israel, as well as in the United States, is the simple fact that Israel’s system of government is devoid of any Jewish character; each branch of Israeli government conflicts with Jewish principles. Multiparty cabinet government is not only a political monstrosity; it violates the concept of a Unitary Executive affirmed in the Torah and the Talmud. (See Rashi’s commentary to Deut. 31:7, quoting Sanhedrin 8a.)

Equally flagrant, members of the Legislature, the Knesset, are subservient to their party leaders. Nothing Jewish about this. (See Exod. 18:21 and Deut. 1`:13.) To this add the multicultural, hence anti-Jewish agenda of Israel’s Supreme Court, whose rulings often violate the abiding beliefs and values of the Jewish people.

Israel’s non-Jewish and anti-Jewish system of governance therefore fosters assimilation and undermines Jewish identity—whatever that means. Under such governance, Israel’s ruling elites cannot relate their public statements and policies to the sacred sources of Judaism or to the teachings of Israel’s great rabbis and philosophers. Jewish history is eviscerated while Jews are humiliated every day by the crass and irrational behavior of their ruling elites. (more…)

In my July 21, 2008 report on Arutz-7, I said that the Torah makes nonsense of the Koran. Omitted was the following statement of Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), an expert on Islam who points out that the Koran’s references to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are “ridiculous”:

The order in which he [Muhammad] gives the prophets is interesting, for immediately after the patriarchs he places first Jesus, then Job, Jonah, Aaron, Solomon, and last of all David [Sura 4:161]. In another passage [Sura 6:84-86] the order is still more ridiculous, for here we have David, Solomon, Job, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Zachariah, John, Jesus, Elijah, Ishmael, Elisha, Jonah, and Lot! The incorrect spellings of the names of these prophets, as well as the parts which [Muhammad] assigns to them in history, proves that he had never even looked into the Hebrew Scriptures. (Judaism and Islam, p. 19.)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, July 21, 2008.

In his “Epistle to Yemen,” Maimonides tells us how the nations have tried to destroy Israel. He explains: “[Because of Israel’s unique and divinely inspired way of life], all the nations, instigated by envy and impiety, rose up against us …” In each era they employed a new method to destroy Israel and its Torah. Maimonides first mentions conquest or brute force, e.g., Amalek, Nebuchadnezzar, and Hadrian. A second and more refined method was argumentation. Thus, the Greeks sought to demolish the Torah by means of philosophical controversy.

After this, says Maimonides, “there arose a sect which combined the two methods, conquest and controversy, into one, because it believed that this procedure would be more effective in wiping out every trace of the Jewish nation and [its faith]. It therefore resolved to lay claim to prophecy and to found a new faith, contrary to our Law, and to contend that it was equally God-given [but that it superseded the Torah].” None of these methods, Maimonides points out, has succeeded in destroying Judaism or in thwarting the will of God. The Jews survived and remained loyal to their Torah.

Turning to modern times, a fourth method has been used to undermine the Torah: “biblical criticism,” which denies the Torah’s divine origin and therefore Israel as the Chosen People. Yet, lo and behold, today we are witnessing not only an unprecedented growth of yeshivas. Jews from all walks of life returning to the Torah, a convergence of Torah and science, and a burgeoning Torah-oriented population. Yes, and all this threatens Israel’s secular establishment.

So a new method had to be used to destroy the Torah. This new method—the most insidious—is called “territory for peace.” (more…)

There is no Pinchas in Israel today, no one whose paramount concern is G-d’s honor.

Pinchas was rewarded by G-d for his decisive action in killing Zimri and Kosbi. Zimri, a prince of Israel, was consorting publicly with Kosbi, a Midian princess steeped in idolatry. For his otherwise warlike act, Pinchas was rewarded with the Eternal Covenant of Peace—the Brit Shalom. How are we to explain this seeming paradox?

In his commentary on Pinchas (Numbers 25:12), Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch defines G-d’s Eternal Covenant of Peace as “a state of the most complete harmony,” and not only between man and man, but between man and G-d. He points out that, like the covenant or brit with Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov, so the brit  with Pinchas represents G-d’s decision and promise that Peace will ultimately reign over the whole world. But meanwhile, mankind, rather than act in manner conducive to the “highest harmony of Peace,” thoughtlessly hides its duty under the cloak of “love of peace.” At the same time, it condemns those mindful of their duty to G-d as “enemies of peace.” (more…)

Virtually everyone in Israel is aware of the dearth of leadership in this country as well as its dearth of water; but very few see how the dearth of one is related to the dearth of the other.

For reasons I will not go into here, our Sages held that water symbolizes the Torah. Where there is a lack of Torah there is a lack of leadership.

Indeed, when the Israel neglects the Torah, God hands the nation over not only to the lowest of leaders but to the lowest of peoples—even to a non-people like the fictitious Palestinians.

It has been reported that Hamas is demanding 1,000 terrorists now in Israeli jails in exchange for IDF soldier Gilad Schalit, who has been held hostage for two years in Gaza. Hence, let’s consider an article by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed’s on the subject of prisoner exchange in Jewish law, but only insofar as it refers to the imprisonment of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in the thirteenth century.

“Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (1215-1293 c.e.), known as the Maharam, was one of the greatest of the early Jewish codifiers. At the age of seventy he was taken captive and placed in a prison in France. Emperor Rudolf I proceeded to demand an exorbitant sum for his release.

“To understand the full significance of this act it is important to realize that almost all of the rabbis and leaders of the Jewish communities in that generation were the Maharam’s students…Even the great rabbis of the generation that followed were greatly influenced by the teachings of the Maharam. The most famous of his students was Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel, known as the Rosh, whose rulings are cited extensively in Rabbi Yosef Karo’s Shulchan Arukh. (more…)

The present writer congratulates those members of the Knesset that supported a bill whereby 60 MKs would be elected in regional districts, while 60 would be elected under the present system of Proportional Representation. This fulfills one provision of a draft constitution set forth in my book Jewish Statesmanship: Lest Israel Fall (2000)—which is not to say this book should be credited for the bill in question.

Although the bill was vetoed by the Shas Party, a member of Ehud Olmert’s coalition government, it should soon resurface as a private member’s bill. At stake is the empowerment of the Jewish people and even the preservation of Israel’s Jewish heritage.

It cannot be said too often that the law that makes Israel a single electoral district in which fixed party slates win Knesset seats via Proportional Representation has effectively disenfranchised the Jews of this country. This law has enabled members of the Knesset, especially those who become prime ministers or cabinet ministers, to violate the abiding beliefs and values of the Jewish people with impunity. A conspicuous culprit is Shas. (more…)

Part three of a series. View Part one. View Part two.

B. Neither God Nor the People Rule Israel

In Judaism there is no ruling class. In a truly Jewish community, who rules is based primarily on intellectual and moral character. Indeed, the most authentic form of Jewish leadership is that of the teacher, whose power is not political but intellectual and moral.

The fact that education in Israel is required of all members of the community precludes rigid class divisions. Conversely, Torah education is the great unifying force of the Jewish people, a people that honors scholars more than kings. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch points out, in a mature Jewish community the center of gravity lies not in any ruling class but in the body of the people. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, therefore, that the leaders of a Jewish community act consistently with the Torah when they make themselves superfluous!

See to it that the peasant behind the plough, the herdsman with his cattle, the weaver at his loom can be your judges and masters, the critics of your conduct and teaching; then at the same time will they be your pupils and friends, they will willingly and joyfully follow your teachings and regulations; they will understand and appreciate the spirit in which you speak and by which you are guided.^[1] (more…)

Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, June 16, 2008.

The origin of anti-Judaism is not, or should not be, a controversial subject. It began quite simply at Sinai, when Israel became the bearer of ethical monotheism in a world steeped in pagan polytheism.

In those days, each nation had its own god or gods and saw no reason why other nations should not have their own gods. Then, suddenly, a nation arose and proclaimed there is only one God—the God of Israel. The Torah proclaims this God as the Creator of heaven and earth, that is, of the entire universe including mankind. Since this God of Israel precludes the existence of other gods, it was only natural that Gentile nations should hate Israel. Let us probe a little deeper.

In pagan times, nations identified their gods with various forces of nature. Hence, it was not simple for them to comprehend how the God of Israel not only transcends nature but is also immanent in nature. A thoughtful person might ask: How could such a Being be one, a unity? But that is precisely what philosophers will eventually call “Absolute Being.” Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh discusses the subject in Israel and Humanity: (more…)

Part two of a series. View Part one.

A. Neither God Nor the People Rule Israel

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 ecclesiastical hierarchy.

In Judaism no priesthood but only publicly tested scholarship can lay claim to any validity regarding the laws of the Torah. This means that the Torah belongs to every Jew, whether he is a Kohane, Levite, or Israelite. A word about this classification of Jews may be helpful.

Although the Kohanim, Levites, and Israelites comprise hereditary “classes,” they are not closed. The daughter of an Israelite or Levite may marry a Kohane and her children will be Kohanim, since “class” status is patrilineal. (more…)