Election Day 2020

Is it possible that Election Day is finally upon us? Some other time, I’d like to write about the craziness of having these election seasons that go on endlessly—you can expect the 2024 campaign to begin in all but name about a quarter-hour after the new or not-new president is inaugurated in January—and particularly in light of the relative sanity that prevails in other countries, where political campaigns last mostly for several weeks or months. (The minimum length of an election campaign in Canada is thirty-six days, for example, but the longest on record was only eleven weeks. The candidates give a few speeches, the party publishes its platform, there are some interviews and a debate or two, then the polls open and the nation votes. Only here, where the date of the next presidential election has nothing to do with the fate of the current government, is it considered normal for people to spend two or three years campaigning for office.) Today, however, I’d like to use this space to write instead about the concept of participation in an election itself.

While perusing the corners of the blogosphere that are my regular haunts, I’ve occasionally noted the opinion put forward that the American system of government is an outgrowth of the specific kind of democracy invented (and named) by the ancient Greeks and that, therefore, it can only be supported by Jews and Christians willing to set aside what Scripture teaches us about the way people should consent to be governed to embrace a system unrelated to their own spiritual heritage. Generally written by people who know their Bible but who are wholly ignorant of rabbinic tradition, these essays are mostly the work of people who find the distinction between ancient Israelite religion and modern Judaism a triviality to be skipped past rather than a detail of profound importance. How this could or should work for Christians, I’ll leave for others more qualified than myself to puzzle out. But for Jews, the question itself of whether people guided by Jewish tradition should enthusiastically embrace or merely stoically accept the concept of representative democracy is the question I’ve been pondering in these last days leading up to the election.

It surely is so that the Bible does not envisage the ancient Israelites participating in anything like a Jeffersonian democracy. Indeed, biblical tradition imagines an ideal state governed by a king who acts solely in accordance with the law of the Torah and actually goes so far as to legislate that the king may only be seated on the royal throne when he is actually holding his personal scroll of the Law in his arms. How practical that was, or if the kings of Israel truly obeyed that injunction, who can say? But it is a stunning image nonetheless, something along the lines of our nation requiring by law that the President actually hold a copy of the Constitution in his hands whenever meeting with visitors in the Oval Office or making a public address. (That might actually not be such a bad idea, now that I think of it.) Interestingly, the king isn’t expected to be a Torah scholar who can personally puzzle out obscure point of law: in cases where Scripture does not directly address some specific issue with which the king needs to deal, a large squadron of court prophets is also imagined to be in place specifically to transmit the word of God to the sovereign on an issue-by-issue basis. So the model of which those authors I referenced above are so enamored basically features God ruling the nation through the agency of a king who gets his governing instructions from God one way or the other: either directly from his own informed contemplation of Scripture or indirectly from the squadron of house seers installed in the palace for that precise purpose.

But that ideal kingdom is not where any of us lives today. Yes, it is certainly so that Jews who say their prayers in the traditional mode give voice daily to the hope that the messianic era will feature just such a king of the House of David empowered to rule over the Land of Israel in the mode described just above. But in our pre-redeemed world, the footfalls of the messiah have yet to heard even in the distance. For better or worse, we are—for the moment, at least—on our own.

I suppose it could be possible to argue that the kind of democracy that has evolved as the basis for government in these United States is thus merely an attractive stop-gap measure that traditionalists should support until the aforementioned footfalls become audible in the distance. There is, however, a rabbinic idea that actually corresponds precisely to the notion of participating in an election to choose a national leader. And that suggests to me a way to frame voting in a national election as a personal decision fully in sync with tradition.

In Jewish law, the concept of agency guarantees individuals the right to appoint agents to act on their behalf. When put baldly like that, it sounds almost banal. But behind that apparent banality is the legal force that enables the individual to act profoundly in ways that would otherwise be either impossible or, at the very least, impractical.  For its part, the Talmud speaks about the concept of agency in absolute terms, going so far as to say that “the agent of an individual is legally empowered to act as though he or she were the individual him or herself.” There are exceptions, of course. For one, the Talmud makes clear that “the concept of agency is inoperative when the agent has been appointed specifically to commit a sin.” In other words, you can’t escape the consequence of wrongdoing by appointing an agent to commit the deed for you. So you can avoid the need to travel to a different locale by appointing an agent to marry your future spouse on your behalf or to act “as yourself” in divorce (or any) court, but you can’t escape the consequences of murdering someone by hiring a hitperson to pull the trigger. Nor was this “just” a regular feature of classical law in ancient times: it appears, at least in the broad way it was construed by the ancient sages, specifically to be a feature specifically of Jewish law. (The second exception, however, regards the commandments themselves: it is not deemed legally possible to hire an agent to fulfill obligations to God. You cannot, therefore, appoint someone to say the Shema for you or to put t’fillin on during morning prayers as though that person were you. Nor can you appoint an agent to eat matzah for you at the Pesach seder or to dine in a sukkah or to hear the shofar blasts during Rosh Hashanah.)

That set of ideas creates an interesting framework for considering the role of the individual in a republican democracy, because it leads directly to thinking of elections as opportunities for individuals to appoint as their agents the individuals they wish to see lead the nation forward. That we do this collectively—i.e., as a kind of contest in which the winner becomes the agent of us all—is just a function of the fact that no nation could function if each individual were to appoint his or her own congressperson or choose personally to serve him or herself. For practical reasons, then, we do this as a group…but the basic principle that underlies the effort is           still that, by voting, we are appointing individuals as our agents to represent us in the Congress and to serve as President. We send them not to commit sins that we don’t want to sully our own hands by undertaking (that wouldn’t be allowed) or fulfill our own spiritual obligations to God, but specifically to act on our behalf to ensure the security of the nation, to guarantee justice for all its citizens, to create a safety net into which people unable to care adequately for themselves may fall, to oversee the education of our children, to care for our veterans, to guide our nation to its rightful place of leadership in the forum of nations, to watch over the planet and prevent humanity from irrevocably soiling its collective nest, and to guide our nation into solid, mutually beneficial alliances with other countries. By casting my vote on Tuesday (and, yes, I am planning to vote the old-fashioned way: in person and on Election Day), I understand myself to be participating in a national effort to appoint the individuals who will lead the nation forward.

Because I think of our representatives in Congress and as the President as agents appointed by myself (and several hundred million others) to act on our behalf in the world, I feel a concomitant freedom to inform those people regularly how I wish them to act and what I wish for them to attempt to accomplish.

It sounds a bit passé these days to refer to members of the Congress or to the President and Vice President as servants of the people, but the way the word “servant” is used in that expression comes close to what I hear in the Hebrew shaliach, the standard word for “agent.” So, to answer those who feel that participation in representative democracy is by definition an act undertaken outside the concept of tradition, my answer is that there really couldn’t be a more traditional way to think about governance than by imagining the citizenry banding together to appoint an agent to do their bidding and lead them forward.