The Constitutional Ethics of National Survival

What Isaiah and Jeremiah Still Teach Israel

Every nation believes that its greatest danger lies beyond its borders.

For Israel, that belief is hardly surprising. Since its birth, the Jewish state has confronted wars, terrorism, regional hostility, and repeated challenges to its very existence. Today, public attention is fixed on Iran—its nuclear ambitions, its proxies, and the uncertain consequences of diplomacy or military confrontation. Few responsibilities weigh more heavily upon an Israeli government than preventing a hostile regime from acquiring the capacity to threaten the country’s existence.

Yet this preoccupation with external danger raises a question that is older than the State of Israel itself.

When the Hebrew prophets confronted threats no less formidable than those Israel faces today, why did they spend so little time discussing the enemy?

Isaiah lived under the shadow of Assyria, the greatest military power of its age. Jeremiah witnessed the rise of Babylon and the destruction of Jerusalem. Both understood the realities of war, diplomacy, and political power. Neither underestimated the dangers confronting a small nation surrounded by ambitious empires.

Yet neither begins there.

Isaiah opens his prophecy not with Assyria but with Judah. The nation itself stands accused. Worship continues, sacrifices are offered, religious festivals are observed, yet the prophet dismisses them as empty because they have become detached from justice. “Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” The crisis confronting Judah is therefore deeper than military vulnerability. It is the gradual erosion of the moral order upon which the nation’s life depends.

Jeremiah presses the point still further.

Standing at the gates of the Temple, he addresses people who believe they possess an absolute guarantee of national security. “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,” they proclaim, convinced that the existence of the Temple ensures Jerusalem’s survival.

Jeremiah’s response is both startling and profoundly political.

The Temple cannot preserve a nation that has ceased to preserve justice.

The prophet does not reject the Temple. He rejects the illusion that institutions, however sacred, can compensate for the ethical failures of the society they are meant to serve.

Later, Jeremiah turns to the kings of Judah. Remarkably, he does not evaluate them by military success, diplomatic skill, or territorial expansion. Instead, he asks a different question. Did they govern justly? Did they defend the poor and the vulnerable? Did they exercise power as a public trust rather than a private privilege?

Read separately, these passages appear to address different subjects: worship, the Temple, kingship. Read together, they reveal a remarkably coherent political vision.

The prophets repeatedly distinguish between institutions and the principles that sustain them.

The Temple matters.

The monarchy matters.

Political authority matters.

But none can endure if the ethical foundations upon which they rest begin to decay.

This insight deserves closer attention than it usually receives.

Modern readers often approach the prophets as religious teachers or moral reformers. They were certainly both. Yet they were also acute observers of public life. Their concern extended beyond personal virtue to the health of the political community itself. Again and again they returned to the same theme: nations become vulnerable long before they become defeated.

Military catastrophe is an event.

National vulnerability is a condition.

The first appears suddenly.

The second develops gradually, often unnoticed, as trust weakens, justice becomes selective, responsibility is unevenly shared, and institutions lose the confidence of the people they exist to serve.

Only after tracing this recurring pattern do we begin to recognize what the prophets were describing.

They were writing about the ethical foundations of public life—the unwritten commitments that enable institutions to command legitimacy and societies to endure. We might call these commitments the constitutional ethics of a nation.

The expression is modern.

The idea is ancient.

No constitution, whether written or unwritten, can preserve a free society by itself. Courts, legislatures, governments, and elections all depend upon habits of public trust that no legal document can create. Citizens must believe that obligations accompany rights, that power is exercised under law, that justice is not reserved for the powerful, and that the burdens of national life are borne with reasonable fairness.

These are not merely political preferences.

They are the conditions under which constitutional government remains possible.

This, I believe, is the enduring political wisdom of Isaiah and Jeremiah.

It also explains why their writings continue to speak with such unsettling clarity to modern Israel.

For Israel’s greatest challenge has never been simply to survive.

It has been to remain the kind of nation whose survival is worth defending.

The relevance of that question becomes especially clear at moments of national crisis.

Israel today confronts an external threat that no responsible government can afford to underestimate. A nuclear Iran would transform the strategic landscape of the Middle East. Preventing such an outcome demands military preparedness, technological superiority, first-rate intelligence, and prudent diplomacy. The prophets would have regarded these as responsibilities of statecraft, not alternatives to it.

Yet they would also have recognized a danger that military strategy alone cannot address.

A state survives because it can defend its borders.

A nation endures because its citizens continue to believe that they share a common future.

Armies can repel invasions. They cannot create public trust. Intelligence services can uncover threats. They cannot persuade citizens to accept common sacrifice. Military superiority can protect a country’s existence. It cannot, by itself, preserve the civic bonds that give that existence meaning.

That is why the prophets returned so persistently to justice.

For them, justice was not merely compassion toward the vulnerable, nor simply an individual virtue. It was the principle that bound authority to responsibility, privilege to obligation, and power to accountability. A nation remained resilient when these relationships were preserved. It became fragile when they were allowed to erode.

This insight sheds light on contemporary Israel without dictating particular political conclusions.

Every democracy experiences disagreement. Governments rise and fall. Elections produce winners and losers. Vigorous public debate is not a sign of democratic weakness but of democratic life.

The deeper question is whether citizens continue to recognize one another as partners in a shared constitutional enterprise once the election has ended.

That question becomes particularly pressing whenever the burdens of citizenship are perceived to be distributed unequally. No democratic society can expect enduring solidarity if significant segments of the population are seen as enjoying the benefits of the state while remaining substantially exempt from its common obligations. Whether the issue is military service, participation in the workforce, taxation, public leadership, or fidelity to the rule of law, the underlying principle remains the same. Shared citizenship ultimately depends upon a reasonable sense that responsibility is shared as well.

The prophets did not advocate uniformity, nor did they imagine a society free of conflict. They understood that disagreement is inevitable wherever human beings govern themselves. Their concern was different. They insisted that no individual, no institution, and no group stood above the ethical obligations that sustain the political community as a whole.

That insistence remains profoundly relevant.

Modern societies are often tempted to place ultimate confidence in visible sources of strength: military power, economic success, technological innovation, charismatic leadership, or constitutional design. Ancient Judah placed comparable confidence in the Temple. Jeremiah’s warning was not that the Temple lacked value, but that even the holiest institution could not preserve a nation whose ethical foundations were steadily weakening.

The lesson extends well beyond religion.

Democracy is not sustained simply because elections are held.

The rule of law is not preserved merely because courts exist.

Constitutions do not endure because they are well written.

Institutions remain strong only when citizens and leaders alike continue to honor the unwritten commitments upon which those institutions depend.

Israel’s future will undoubtedly be shaped by decisions taken in Tehran, Washington, and Jerusalem. It will depend upon military preparedness, diplomatic wisdom, scientific innovation, and economic resilience. No serious observer could deny the importance of these factors.

But another future is being shaped at the same time.

It is being shaped in the everyday choices of citizens: in their willingness to respect institutions even when they disagree with them; to accept electoral outcomes without abandoning democratic legitimacy; to insist that public office remains a public trust; and to recognize that rights and responsibilities cannot long be separated without weakening the bonds that hold a nation together.

The Hebrew prophets understood something that remains as true today as it was in ancient Judah.

The greatest threats to a nation are not always those that gather beyond its borders. Sometimes they emerge, quietly and gradually, within the civic life of the nation itself.

Iran may determine the dangers Israel must confront.

Only Israelis can determine the constitutional ethics by which they confront them.

A nation is ultimately preserved not only by the strength of its army, but by the strength of the principles its citizens refuse to surrender.