“I Am the Lord Your God”: Use Your Mind! When Rabbis Decide the Vote

Every one of us knows the first of the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord your God.” Yet probably only a few grasp the meaning of this vital commandment, and it is no accident that it comes first.

As I read it, the meaning of the first commandment is: Use your mind! This is the image of God in the human being, the very faculty that sets us apart from all other creatures. The Book of Genesis repeats three times that the human being was created in the image of God:

“And God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

“And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him” (Genesis 1:27).

“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him” (Genesis 5:1).

This interpretation is no modern invention. Maimonides, the greatest of Jewish legal authorities and philosophers, opens his Guide for the Perplexed (Part I, Chapter 1) by asking what the “image of God” means. His answer: it does not refer to a physical form, for God has no body. The image is the intellect, the capacity for rational understanding that distinguishes the human being from all other creatures.

In his Mishneh Torah he states: “The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of all wisdom is to know that there is a First Being” (Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 1:1). And shortly after: “Knowledge of this matter is a positive commandment, as it is said: I am the Lord your God” (ibid. 1:6). For Maimonides, the first commandment is not a command to obey blindly. It is a command to know, and knowledge is attained through the intellect, through study and personal understanding, not by accepting the opinion of another.

God thus commands the human being to use his or her own mind in making decisions and in choosing a path in life, and not to act according to the minds and interests of others.

Liberal democracy rests on exactly the same principle. It is meant to express the rule of the people, in which every eligible voter chooses according to his or her own reason, understanding, and conscience. Only then is the general will of the people expressed.

When voters are bribed, threatened, or brainwashed, or when they are organized into groups and pressured to vote according to the group’s interests or its leaders’ instructions, the democratic process suffers a grievous blow. The will of the voter is distorted, and the governments that are elected serve particular groups rather than the will of the people as a whole. That is not what democracy was established for. This is an issue that legislators ought to address, all the more so as the number of groups whose members vote according to the dictates of the group and its leaders, rather than each person’s own conscience, continues to grow.

In our country, this problem has already gone beyond all reasonable proportion. Many of the ultra-Orthodox (Haredim), of the ultra-Orthodox nationalists (Hardalim), and of the far-right groups, who together make up about 18% of the population, vote according to the instructions of their rabbis rather than through a free personal choice made by each individual according to conscience. This is a serious distortion of liberal democracy, and it produces governments that are disastrous for the country, including for the voters in these very groups.

Today, very small groups of rabbis exercise unlimited control over the spirit and the way of life of large communities. They decide for them whom and what to vote for, how to conduct their personal lives, and what their relationship with the state should be. This is a serious failure, both democratically and in its destructive effect on the social life of the country. All too often, the views and rulings of these rabbis are deeply distorted. For example:

The halakhic rulings that branded Yitzhak Rabin a rodef and a moser (a “pursuer” who endangers Jewish lives and an “informer”), which one of their disciples turned into an assassination that plunged us into an abyss, to the point of threatening a “destruction of the Third Temple” (a common Israeli metaphor for the collapse of the state (https://972mag.com/the-question-israel-still-hasnt-answered-about-rabins-murder/130481/)

• The halakhic ruling permitting the theft of Palestinians’ olive harvest (https://www.ynetnews.com/article/6uhcih3jm).

The ruling “We will die rather than enlist,” issued in wartime, during a war of obligation (a milchemet mitzvah).

Space does not allow me to list all the distorted statements and rulings of these rabbis.

Whoever entrusts these decisions to their rabbi instead of using their own mind and conscience, as though the rabbi were their God, acts against the first commandment itself. Entire communities live this way, as closed communities: their way of life is defined and directed by the views and interests of their rabbis, which harms them personally and within their families, and harms the general way of life in the country. The irony is especially striking, since it was Maimonides, whose rulings are studied in every yeshiva, who saw the intellect as the image of God in the human being.

Every person in these communities, and indeed every person anywhere, would do well to reflect on the meaning of the first commandment.

This brings me to another saying that guides the individual and society toward personal independence and the use of the intellectual gifts granted at creation: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” It should be noted that this is not a verse from Jewish sources but a translation of the Latin Vox populi, vox Dei. In its original context it was cited as a warning against following the crowd, whose tumult is close to madness. Indeed, a crowd that follows its leaders like a herd is not “the voice of God.” Only a multitude of thinking people, each of whom decides for himself or herself, deserves that title.

When, on any matter concerning a group, a society, or a state, every person entitled to vote or decide does so according to his or her own reason and understanding, and not according to the directive, decision, or “conditioning” of another body or person, only then is the best decision reached for the group, the society, or the state. Only in this way do the shared thought and intelligence of all members of the group, the society, or the state find expression. This stands in contrast to a situation in which the head of a sect or a group decides alone, a situation marked by heavy personal biases that lead to distorted decisions.

In summary:

The first commandment, “I am the Lord your God”: Use your mind! The image of God in the human being is the intellect.

“The voice of the people is the voice of God”:  that is, a decision from heaven for the good of the group, the society, and the state, comes only when each and every person decides according to his or her own mind and conscience.