What Kind of People Do We Intend to Be?
In a season when Israel’s public life will understandably command our attention, it is tempting to make politics the whole of our conversation. Elections matter. Leaders matter. The decisions made by governments can protect lives, wound lives, shape the moral weather of a society, and determine whether hope feels responsible or naïve. But Torah asks a prior question. Before it asks who will lead, it asks what kind of people we intend to be.
At the end of the sabbatical year, during Sukkot, Moses commands the people to gather for Hakhel: “Assemble the people – the men, the women, the children, and the stranger within your gates – that they may hear, learn, and revere. (Deut: 31:12)” The command is striking not because it imagines a people without differences, but because it insists that public belonging cannot be limited to those who already know, agree, or exercise power. Before there is a platform, a policy, or a vote, there is gathering. A people comes into view by learning to stand together before something larger than itself.
That is the beginning of public responsibility. Hakhel is a spiritual architecture for a serious Jewish public, asserting that no community can endure merely as a collection of anxieties, interests, or private loyalties. We need a shared moral language. We need to remember that the children are already listening, that the stranger is already within our gates, and that the future of a people is always being formed by whom it invites into (or excludes from) the room.
The Torah’s teaching about leadership is just as demanding. Deuteronomy permits Israel to appoint a king, but immediately refuses to make the king ultimate. The ruler must write a copy of Torah and read it “all the days of life, (Deut. 17:19)” so that the heart will not be lifted above fellow Israelites. In the rabbinic imagination of Hakhel, the king receives the Torah scroll through a chain of communal hands and then reads it publicly. The king is necessary, but the king is not the source. Leadership does not confer permission to escape covenant; it places a person more visibly beneath it.
This is a word Israel needs, a word every Jewish institution and our Jewish homeland needs as well. We should not demand less from leaders because the hour is difficult. Difficulty is precisely when humility, restraint, moral courage, and a disciplined loyalty to the public good are most needed. We may disagree fiercely about the means by which security, justice, and peace are pursued. But a Jewish politics worthy of the name cannot be built on the belief that power excuses us from accountability. Sovereignty is not the end of Jewish moral life. It is the arena in which Jewish moral life is tested.
King Solomon’s prayer makes the same claim in another key. Newly crowned and aware of his own limits, he asks not for riches, victory, or the destruction of enemies. He asks for a “lev shomea – a listening heart. (1 Kings 3:9)” In a culture saturated with instant judgment, that is a courageous request, one which please God to hear from a leader (3:10). A listening heart is the capacity to hear the human stakes of a decision, to distinguish between competing goods, to recognize fear without being ruled by it, and to learn from people whose experiences expose what we may have missed.
The sages say that the wise person is one who learns from every person (Pirkei Avot 4:1). That does not mean that every claim is equally true or that conviction is a failure of generosity. It means that truth is not enlarged by contempt. It means that those entrusted with communal responsibility must cultivate the humility to listen, the strength to govern their own impulses, and the honor of treating other human beings as creatures of God. A listening heart is one of the disciplines that makes Zionism worthy of the Jewish future it seeks to secure: Jewish safety, Jewish continuity, democratic responsibility, and human dignity held together.
Finally, Hakhel sends us back into the work of building. Rabban Gamliel teaches that those who labor with community should do so for the sake of Heaven (Pirkei Avot 2:2). Maimonides imagines a city that appoints charity administrators who are knowledgeable and trusted (Matanot Ani’im 9:1). This is perhaps the quietest and most radical element of the Jewish public tradition: covenant requires institutions. Good intentions are not enough. A people must build systems that make care reliable, leadership accountable, and dignity more than a slogan.
That is why the work of Jewish philanthropy matters so deeply. It is not simply the distribution of resources, important as that is. It is the patient construction of a communal capacity to respond: to hunger and trauma, to antisemitism and isolation, to the needs of older adults and young families, to Israel’s vulnerability and its possibility. As Abraham Joshua Heschel taught, in a free society some may be guilty, but all are responsible (The Insecurity of Freedom, 1966). Responsibility is not omnipotence. It is the refusal to become a spectator when another person’s life is at stake.
The purpose of the people, then, is not to become uniform. It is to become responsible. We gather so that our arguments do not become our identity. We place leaders beneath Torah so that power does not become our theology. We pray for listening hearts so that fear does not become our only wisdom. And we build institutions so that our love for one another becomes durable enough to be trusted. That is the purpose of a people: not merely to survive, but to make survival mean something – together.
