We Must Agree to Remain One Community (Shoftim)

Rabbi Yitzchak Yechiel Yaakovovitz z”l (1930–2019) served for 66 years as the chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Herzliya. A Haredi rabbi with deeply held convictions, he also understood that his sacred responsibility extended across the civic life of a diverse city. He was obligated not only to those who believed as he did, but also to those who did not.

That model feels especially important now. Too often, communities respond to people at their edges by confirming their alienation: You are not us. Yet the way forward, for the Jewish people and perhaps for every society, cannot be built through exclusion. We need ways to bring values and learning of the center to the margins, and to recognize that the voices at the margins also belong within the whole. This is not an endorsement of every belief. It is a commitment to the possibility that Torah wisdom can hold us together even when we disagree.

Parashat Shoftim asks what it takes to build a society that is just, worthy, and beautiful. Its teachings about judges, law, authority, and power are not abstract. They address the moral architecture of communal life. Among them is the Torah’s teaching about appointing a king:

“When you enter the land  that God your God is giving you,  and you possess it and settle in it,  should you say:  ‘I will set over me a king  like all the nations that are around me,’ you may set, yes, set over you a king that God your God chooses.” (Deut. 17:14, 15)

Rabbi Yaakovovitz notices something subtle in the language. The Torah speaks in the singular in two phrases from these verses: “I will set a king over me” and “You shall set over yourself a king.” The nation is addressed as though it were one person, with one voice.

This cannot mean that every member of the community agrees about who should lead. Communities rarely possess that kind of unanimity. Elections are often close. People disagree passionately about candidates, policies, and the very meaning of justice. The will of the people is never the will of every person.

Rather, Rabbi Yaakovovitz teaches that the success of leadership depends upon a deeper kind of agreement. We need not agree on the leader, but we must agree that we remain one community after the decision is made. We must recognize the legitimacy of a shared process and continue to hear our own voice within the collective, even when our preferred candidate does not prevail.

That is one of democracy’s most demanding spiritual disciplines. When we lose a vote, we have not lost our voice. We remain responsible for speaking, organizing, challenging, listening, and contributing to the common good. Disappointment must not become withdrawal. Defeat must not become silence.

The opposite responsibility belongs to those who win. Victory does not make one voice the only voice that matters. A majority receives the authority to govern, not permission to dehumanize. Those who prevail must resist the arrogance of imagining that the people who voted differently have somehow forfeited their place in the community.

Rabbi Yaakovovitz names arrogance as the danger. Parashat Shoftim warns us that power easily becomes self-justifying. The Torah therefore places limits on a king, insisting that even the highest leader remains subject to law, covenant, and moral restraint. Leadership is not ownership. Winning is not domination.

This teaching speaks urgently to democracy in Israel, in the United States, and wherever political difference approaches the edge of dehumanization. Partisan conflict within parties and between them can quickly turn a neighbor into an enemy. Once that happens, the shared voice on which civic life depends begins to fracture.

The repair begins by refusing two temptations: arrogance and silence.

If our side wins, we must remember that those who lost still belong. Their dignity, fears, hopes, and voices remain part of the body politic. If our side loses, we must remember that we still belong. Our responsibility to the community has not disappeared, and neither has our capacity to shape what comes next.

Parashat Shoftim calls us to create systems of justice. Rabbi Yaakovovitz reminds us that no system can endure without a shared sense of peoplehood. Law can determine who holds office. Only covenant can teach us how to remain bound to one another afterward.

What a gift to learn this Torah from a rabbi whose own commitments were firm, but whose sense of obligation reached beyond those who shared them. His teaching asks us to practice a courageous form of belonging: to hear our individual voices within the collective, to protect the voices of those with whom we disagree, and to reject both triumphalism and despair.

Every voice matters. The voices that win today, and the voices that may win another day. The work of justice requires all of us. So does the work of reweaving society.