The Jewish Power Blog: Tristan da Runha

(In December, I started writing blog posts on TOI, irregularly, as I felt the need to try to understand our current situation better and to share that understanding with others who might find it useful and/or interesting. As it has turned out, a central theme in my thinking has been the role of power in Jewish history, thought – and current events. See for example, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jewish-power/ and https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/back-to-the-stone-age-further-reflections-on-power/. And so I have decided to step away from random reflections, and to use the blog platform for a more focused series of posts, using “Jewish power” as a lens for examining the Israel’s present reality and dilemmas, looking for connections between current experience and Jewish thought and history. Readers, if there are any, can do with these connections what they will. If you’d like to be notified of new postings (about twice a month), click “follow” at the top of this page.)

In 1925, Zev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism – the forerunner of today’s right wing Likud party – published a short novel in English, Tristan da Runha. It describes an isolated penal colony where an assemblage of vicious criminals live in peace and stability on account of simple mutual deterrence: the credible threat, “If you touch my stuff I’ll kill you.” Indeed, when newcomers suggest organizing permanent institutions – a state – they are summarily dispatched. Jabotinsky seems to be suggesting that all that matters is power. It is the balance of power that maintains the island society, not values, or morals, or institutions.

This system depends, however, on equality of power among the actors. Jabotinsky’s island has no metal resources, and importation of metal objects is forbidden. If one of the residents were to get ahold of iron, and thus acquire highly disproportionate power over their neighbors, it seems that the idyll would become a lot less idyllic (for those still in the stone age…). And we know from his other writings that Jabotinsky was well aware of the role of iron in the Israel-Philistine conflict (1 Sam. 13:19-23). So a true stable balance of power as the key to a stable, peaceful world seems, like Jabotinsky’s novel, to be a utopian fantasy. If the only moral principle is power, then, well…

If I own all the bakeries and you think that bread is too expensive, I am free to raise the price as I see fit.

If my party won a majority in the election, then we can just pass whatever laws we like.

If I have F-16s and you only have rocks and sticks, then I can do whatever I want to you, with no constraint.

The rabbis of the Talmud, unlike Jabotinsky, recognized the need for a state, an institutional framework with a monopoly on power to be used to maintain order, fairness, and peace:

“Rabbi Hanina the assistant high priest said: Pray for the welfare of the government, for without the fear of it, people would eat each other alive.” (Mishnah, Avot 3:2)

And so, in the three examples above, properly functioning states have mechanisms to prevent the monopolistic accumulation of economic power; and they have constitutions with checks and balances to protect the rights of minorities; and they subscribe to international agreements and frameworks intended to limit the freedom of the powerful to tread on the rights and aspirations of the less powerful. Of course, a quick glance at today’s headlines will reveal that these systems of constraints are imperfect, and that raw power often runs roughshod over the needs, rights, and wellbeing of the relatively powerless. And when that happens we fume, or at least wince, at the injustice of it all. That is, we sense intuitively that there is something “wrong” with this picture.

That “wrong” was a common theme throughout the Bible and rabbinical literature; for example, the prophet Amos, listing the sins of Israel:

Because they have sold for silver

Those whose cause was just,

And the needy for a pair of sandals.

[And] trample the heads of the poor

Into the dust of the ground,

And make the humble walk a twisted course… (Amos 2:6-7)

Whether from some natural intuition, or our having internalized this teaching from our tradition, it seems that we take for granted that raw power should not be the principle that governs human life. We assume that other values, like justice, and mercy, should guide a society of which we would want to be a part.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, prominent Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am claimed that the commitment to justice and mercy was somehow baked into Jewish culture. His contemporary, Yosef Haim Brenner, rejected this claim as naïve, arguing that Jews were only moral because they were powerless – and if they were to possess raw power, they would not hesitate to use it like everyone else, without regard for “higher” values. Brenner’s argument echoes the skeptical words that medieval philosopher Yehudah Halevi put into the mouth of the Khazar king in his interrogation of a rabbi about Judaism: “If you had the power, you would kill just like everyone else.” (Kuzari 1:115)

Would we? Should we? Have we? Is there really nothing more to “Jewish values” than powerlessness?

Does (should) the Jewish tradition have anything to say about the wielding of power by a polity calling itself a “Jewish state?” It is interesting to note that several members of the current Knesset are rabbis, with deep knowledge of the tradition – yet representing parties whose views on this question range across the entire ideological spectrum. So if we can’t determine this “Jewish value” by asking rabbis, to whom shall we turn? plebiscite? coalition horse-trading? Tik-tok? A vexing question. Too bad there are no more prophets (not that anyone listened to them…)