Bibi Agonistes

There are lots of different ways to spin this week’s events in Israel.

There’s the positive, non-cynical way. The leader, having plans for the future that he knows with some degree of certainty the Supreme Court will veto, seeks preemptively to neuter the Court by introducing legislation that will, among other things, make it possible for the Knesset to override such a decision by the Court with a simple majority. And since the Prime Minister’s coalition by definition has a majority in the Knesset, that basically means that the Knesset can act as it pleases without any need to placate even the nation’s highest court. But the nation will not have it. Demonstrations break out that disrupt everything. When the Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, calls for a pause in the effort to pass the P.M.’s legislation so the nation can calm itself, Netanyahu fires him. And that leads to even more massive demonstrations. Tens of thousands of Israelis descend on the Knesset. Massive demonstrations in Tel Aviv close down the Ayalon Highway, a major artery. When the National Labor Union, the Histadrut, calls for a strike, the effect is even more amazing. Universities close because there are no teachers to teach. Israeli embassies all over the world, including in Washington, close because the staff is on strike. Hospitals across Israel cancel all elective procedures and treat only those whose lives are in actual danger. Outgoing flights from Ben Gurion are cancelled because the staff needed to guarantee their safety is not present. Suddenly, chinks in the formerly united coalition begin to develop as several important government ministers signal their eagerness to do what it takes to calm the situation before the pot boils over even more violently.

And then, because, in the end, Bibi is nothing if not a savvy politician, the announcement comes that the plans to reform the relationship between the Supreme Court and the Knesset will be put on hold so that thoughtful dialogue can ensue. Bibi, it turns out, is all for thoughtful dialogue! Who knew? But the more important point is that the people spoke clearly and loudly, and the nation’s leaders—after hoping the demonstrators would just all go home and leave the governing to the government—the leaders actually listened. So isn’t that the specific way democracy is supposed to work? The people elect individuals to govern but retain the right to exert the ultimate power on the governing party or individuals. In a nutshell, that’s what happened in Israel last week. So the system worked. The government backed down. Democracy proved its vibrancy by showing that the power, at least ultimately, always rests in the hands of the people. To put that in clearer terms, about half a million people were estimated to have taken part in anti-government demonstrations last week, which would constitute more than 5% of the entire population. (In American terms, that would be the equivalent of about 19 million Americans taking to the streets to protest something the government announced its intention to do. ) And those people were listened to.

So that’s the positive way to spin the events of last week. But there’s also a cynical way to view those same events. Bibi loves the power he wields as P.M., but he is not (politically) suicidal and is fully aware of the implications of the fact that his governing coalition has a majority of exactly four in the 120-seat Knesset. Therefore, if just four Members of the Knesset were to break ranks and vote against the proposal, it would fail. And that would be so intensely humiliating for the P.M. that heading off a mortifying failure of that magnitude was worth discovering the worth of dialogue. Plus, if the ruling coalition breaks apart, then the government will fall and there’s no way to predict who would win in a new election. According to this interpretation, the decision to put judicial reform on hold had nothing to do with the power of the people and everything to do with the ego of the P.M., who was prepared even to appear to bow to the will of the people if that what was necessary to keep from losing face and losing the battle upon which he has staked his reputation and possibly even his political future.

So those are the two avenues of interpretation that suggest themselves. But then there is a third approach, one that sees all that has happened to date (and all that yet may happen) as a kind of an extended Greek drama featuring Bibi not as a fiend or as a saint, but as a tragic hero.

In Greek drama, the tragic hero is an individual possessed of great talent who is brought down by a fatal character flaw, by something in a constellation of otherwise neutral affects that prevents the hero from acting in his (or her) own best interests. All this was discussed at length by Aristotle in his Poetics, where he also wrote that the key element in any drama featuring a tragic hero has to be the audience’s simultaneous admiration and repulsion for the hero, their sense that the hero is, at the end of the day, his or her own worst enemy…and, at that, a far greater threat to success than any real flesh-and-blood foe might be.

To interpret the events in Israel this last week as a prolonged Greek tragedy, we must begin with Bibi, the man: a very respected veteran of one of the IDF’s most respected elite reconnaissance units, a life-long public servant, the scion of an admired and famous family of scholars and heroes (his brother Yoni was the only Israeli rescuer to die in the famous Entebbe raid of 1976), and Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister. He therefore starts out as a very sympathetic character, as someone the audience wishes to see rewarded for his lifetime of service.

But then there is hamartia to consider. The Greek word means literally “to miss the mark” but was used by Aristotle to describe the flaw that brings the hero down, the indelible personality trait that a lifetime of effort simply cannot erase. With Bibi, it would have to be his sense of personal infallibility, what Aristotle called hubris : since he cannot be wrong, it follows almost logically that a allowing a balance of power to endure according to which the Supreme Court can thwart his will is intolerable. That, in the end, is the direct function of infallibility, after all: the assumption that any who disagree must, almost by definition, be wrong. So how it possibly be a good thing to allow the Court to override policies he personally wishes to set in place?

And now we come to peripeteira, Aristotle’s name for the reversal of fortune that serves every Greek tragedy as the lynchpin of its storyline: the hero, unable to overcome his less good self, finds himself facing a situation that he personally created yet cannot control. He is, therefore, a victim of himself—which is what makes his story tragic and not merely sad. And this too played out in Israel last week as Bibi found himself face-to-face not with opposition-party politicians, but with an entire nation camped out on the Ayalon and around the Knesset, tens of thousands of citizens protesting a plan that must have seemed—and must still seem—wholly reasonable to the P.M., one that would remove the sole possible impediment to his making real the plans for the nation he wishes to put in place. Or, if not to remove that impediment, then at least to defang it and make it ultimately impotent.

And then we come to anagnorisis, the moment the hero, after suffering humiliating defeat, is visited with a moment of self-awareness, of self-knowledge (which is what the Greek word means), of self-understanding. And that is where we have come to in our drama. The hero has been smacked down, publicly and in as insulting a way as possible: by being led forward by the very people the man was personally charged with leading forward. So what will happen now? That is the real question! And that is where we are in this unfinished drama still awaiting the curtain to come down not on the first or second act, but on the play itself.

If this were a Greek tragedy, the hero’s downfall would be irreversible. But this is not, of course, an actual tragedy by Euripides or Sophocles that we’re witnessing. Bibi can survive. He actually has survived. So the question is whether he will be chastened by the humiliation he endured this week—his first effort truly to alter the face of Israeli demo-cracy mercilessly slapped down by the demos itself—and grow from the experience. Or whether he will continue to be chained to his own sense of infallibility—the hubris that makes it unbearable for him to have to endure the existence of a Court that can thwart his will—and so end up like King Oedipus or King Lear, like Hamlet or Jay Gatsby or Willy Loman: tragic heroes no less doomed by their own flaws than they were potentially great because of the possibility of overcoming them.

 

Learning from Caracalla

 I don’t think any of us will ever forgot the bone-chilling sight of hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-right types, and neo-Confederates marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting “Jews will not “replace us.” I was so naïve back then that I actually didn’t understand the actual meaning of those words, which I took to mean that the marchers believed that some sort of plot was underway to replace white-skinned Christians with Jewish people. Indeed, it was only later on that I learned that the chant referenced not the notion that Jews were plotting to replace Christian Americans personally, but that they—we—are working to bring non-white, non-Christian immigrants to these shores in such gigantic numbers that they would eventually constitute a majority of the population and thus be in a position to vote into office candidates who looked and felt about things as they themselves did. (To revisit my thoughts about Charlottesville at the time, click here; for my own revisit of the story a year later, click here.)

I haven’t written about Charlottesville in a while, but my thoughts returned to that series of dark days in August when I came across an essay published in the Washington Post this last week (click here) in which the author, Jennifer Rubin, reflects on the results of a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that self-defines as a think tank devoted to “conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy.” In that poll, in which about 40,000 different people were questioned and the results of which were published just last week, the percentage of Americans who self-identified as non-Hispanic white people of Christian faith stood at 42% of the population. Just a decade and a half ago, when Barack Obama came to office, the number was 54%, a majority of Americans. Six years later, the number was 47%--less than half the citizenry. And now the percentage has dropped to 42%, somewhere between a third of all Americans and half of them.

If you narrow the scope of inquiry to features solely white evangelical Protestants, the news

is even worse. In 2006, they constituted 23% of the population. By 2016, the number was down to under 17%. Today, the number stands at 13.6% of Americans.

The idea that Jews are working tirelessly to replace white people with immigrants of color who will eventually take over once their numbers are high enough to vote in the candidates of their masters’ choice is lunacy. But, it suddenly strikes me, the fear that these next decades will see a true sea change in the profile of our American population is not that exaggerated. It’s already begun. Dark-skinned immigrants are not being smuggled in to tip the balance. (That truly is craziness.) But the balance is indeed being tipped.

Rubin’s very worthy essay got me thinking, for some obscure reason, about Caracalla, an emperor of Rome even whose name, let alone whose work, has been largely forgotten by most. Let me explain why he suddenly came to mind.

Born in Lugdunum, which town would eventually morph into the French city of Lyons, in 188 CE, the man did not even live to see his own thirtieth birthday. (He reigned from 198 until his untimely death in 217.) He lived a short life. And yet he did several remarkable things, almost all of them terrible. (The key word here is “almost.” See below.) He was violent and vicious, the instigator of many murders and massacres. He was almost definitely guilty of the murder of his own brother (with whom he shared the throne until he decided he had had enough), his father-in-law, and his wife (whom he loathed, apparently, even before being forced to marry her). On the other hand, he appears to have invented—or at least popularized—the hoodie. (The Latin word caracalla references the kind of hooded jacket the emperor favored and which he wore so constantly that his real name, Lucius Septimus Bassianus, was dropped in favor of his nickname based on his favorite article of clothing.) And he did manage to construct a public bathhouse of such gargantuan proportions, called (what else?) The Baths of Caracalla, that it remained in operation for more than three hundred years. (I suppose they must have replaced the towels every so often.) For a reasonably balanced, very accessible, and interesting biography of the man, I recommend Finnish scholar Ilkka Syvänne’s Caracalla: A Military Biography, published by Pen & Sword Military Press in 2017 and available on amazon and other on-line sites.

But the reason that Jennifer Rubin’s essay brought Caracalla to mind has nothing to do with fratricide, hoodies or bathhouses, because Caracalla was also able to rise up over his own horribleness to do one exceptional thing. And that thing is what I want to write about today.

In Caracalla’s day, the Romans had a huge problem: they were vastly outnumbered in their own nation by non-Romans. How that had happened is easy enough to understand: before Caracalla acted, the sole citizens of Rome were ethnic Romans who lived in Italy plus the descendants of citizens who had settled in the provinces. Some local nobles were granted citizenship too, as were the inhabitants of some few great cities not in Italy. But the bottom line was that only a small minority of the population were citizens. Why Caracalla saw that as a problem is open to debate. Some scholars think it had to do solely with money: only citizens paid taxes so having very few citizens meant bringing in much less money than would otherwise have been the case. (This was the opinion, among others, of the great Roman historian Dio Cassius.) Another possible reason to regret having so few citizens would have had to do with the number of men eligible to serve in the Roman Legion, the national army, because only citizens were permitted to serve. A third motive had to do with the practicalities of the justice system: there were effectively two different court systems in place, one for citizens and one for non-citizens, but this was proving increasingly awkward as the world of commerce increasingly involved citizens and non-citizens in the same undertakings. And so in 212 CE Caracalla issued the decree known now as the Edict of Caracalla in which he formally granted citizenship to all residents of the Empire with only a few excepted categories.

All the theories mentioned above for this move have some cogency. But I’d like to imagine that Caracalla acted because he somehow understood that the Empire could only thrive if a large majority of its residents were personally invested in its future, in the propagation of its culture, and in its expansion north into Europe, east into Asia, and even possibly south into Africa. In other words, Rome could not function—or, to say the very least, could not function well—as a state in which only the smallest percentage of residents were personally invested in the nation’s future. (Before Caracalla, there were something like 75 million people living in the Roman Empire, of whom only about 14 million lived in Italy itself.) And it is precisely in that way that the situation in Caracalla’s Rome mirrors the situation in our nation as we enter the third decade of his strange century.

The Charlottesville chant was pure anti-Semitic craziness: the nation’s Jews are not involved in some nefarious plot to replace white Americans with immigrants, legal and otherwise, of color. But the fear underlying that lunacy is not without foundation. Things are shifting almost before our eyes. Demographically speaking, the nation of the 2060s will be totally unlike the America of the 1960s.

There are two ways to respond to this new reality. One would be to rage at the failing light. This was on full display in Charlottesville. But the other would be to take a cue from Caracalla and to face the new reality not by being enraged or feeling persecuted, but by accepting the challenge demography has placed at our feet. Yes, the Founders were flawed, complicated individuals—the kind who wrote movingly about equality under the law but who also owned slaves. But when they were through being children of their time, they also invented something remarkable on these shores, a nation that was completely different in its day from every other one on earth. That kind of patriotism rooted in that sense of American exceptionalism was once something that grew naturally from the education children received throughout the nation. Nowadays, not so much.

We can, however, learn from the past. Caracalla looked around and saw a huge demographic nightmare about to envelop his nation. By decreeing that, henceforth, almost all residents were to be granted citizenship, he was opening a door and inviting the up-to-that-point-totally-disenfranchised to step over the threshold, to become part of the polity, to exert themselves to become worthy of the citizenship now bestowed upon them. The situations aren’t entirely parallel. But the challenge of a shifting reality is much the same. If I were a young person today trying to decide whether to respond to the new demographical reality by exploding with rage or by extending a hand to those whom I fear the most, I hope I would make the right decision. Whatever his “real” motives, Caracalla made the move that brought in the disenfranchised and challenged them to create their own nation’s destiny. The response to shifting demographics should be thoughtfully to consider how to address a new reality in a way that keeps faith with the past and looks forward to a shared, potentially glorious, future.

Queen Berenice

March is Women’s History Month, an annual observance since 1987 and one of several such months each year proclaimed as such to encourage the study and appreciation of some specific group within the fabric of American society. Known to most will be Black History Month in February and LGBTQ+ Pride Month in June, but there are also Jewish Heritage Month (May), Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15–October 15), Arab-American Heritage Month (April), German American Heritage Month (October), Italian-American Heritage Month (October), Native American Heritage Month (November), and a few others. (For a full list, click here.) These months mostly come and go, leaving in their wake a few op-ed pieces, some longer essays, perhaps a television special or two. And, of course, they are focused on mostly, although surely not exclusively, by the groups whose heritage they exist to celebrate.

To take note of Women’s History Month this year, I thought I would write about a woman no one, I’m guessing, will ever have heard of…and yet who was present at a truly pivotal moment in Jewish history and who rose remarkably to the occasion.

In general, the role of women in history has been understudied and underappreciated—which observation applies across the board to all sorts of academic disciplines. But the degree to which the prominent Jewish women of antiquity have been mostly forgotten, their names themselves mostly unknown, is slightly astonishing. And a little depressing too. Some will have heard of Beruriah, one of the few female Torah scholars from antiquity to be cited and praised in our literature, but fewer will have heard of Yalta, an important figure from the mid-3^rd century CE, a communal leader respected and taken fully seriously, and the second-most mentioned woman in talmudic literature. And fewer still, I think, will have heard of Imma Shalom, the sister of Rabban Gamliel II of Yavneh and the wife of Rabbi Eliezer (one of the most prominent sages of his day), who is also quoted prominently in the Talmud in a way that suggests the respect she commanded in her day and in her place.

Those three—Beruriah, Yalta, and Imma Shalom—were part of the rabbinic world. But women also occupied positions of political importance, some of whom were actually the queens of their countries. Almost all have been completely forgotten, their very names unfamiliar despite their prominence in their own day. Queen Helena of Adiabene is a good example. Adiabene was a small kingdom located in the Kurdish part of today’s Iraq when Helena  and her husband King Monobaz converted to Judaism early on in the first century CE. Eventually, Monobaz died and Helena moved to Jerusalem, where she played an important role as a philanthropist, famously giving gifts of gold to the Temple and personally dealing with a crippling famine by importing gigantic amounts of food at her own expense from all over the world to distribute among the hungry. She was famous for the huge sukkah she constructed in Lod, where she lived before coming to Jerusalem, and for her even larger tomb which exists to this day a few miles north of the city. But who has ever heard of her? No one!

But the personality I thought I’d write about this week in honor of Women’s History Month is Queen Berenice, another personality long since forgotten by all. And yet, in her day, she was the voice of reason that tried—unsuccessfully but nobly—to prevent the destruction of the Holy City by the Romans…and in the same way Queen Esther saved the Jews of Persia from annihilation: by getting the Roman most likely to spearhead the campaign to the destroy the city to fall in love with her and then, at least possibly, to spare the city simply because she wished him to.

It's a long, complicated story. When Berenice was still a child, her father was named King of Judea by the Roman Emperor Caligula. And so, at the age of ten, Berenice became a princess. She was married at age fourteen to a much older man who died shortly after the wedding and left her a widow at age sixteen. Her father died shortly after that, but not before he succeeded in marrying her off a second time, this time to his own brother, King Herod of Chalcis. (Chalcis was a tiny kingdom in what today is Lebanon.) And so Berenice became a queen. And that same year she became a mother too, giving birth to the future king of Chalcis, whom she named Berenicianus after herself.

When Berenice was twenty, she was widowed for the second time. For a while, she lived with her brother—who, in the meantime, had become king of Chalcis and who ruled as Agrippa II—and served as the female presence in his many palaces across Chalcis and Judea, something along the lines of how Grover Cleveland’s sister Rose served as First Lady until he eventually married. And now she really does become a Zelig-like character, showing up everywhere—including, semi-amazingly, at the trial of Paul of Tarsus, the founder of the Christianity as we know it and the author of most of the New Testament.

And then she married for a third time, choosing yet another king as her husband, a man named Polomon, king of Cilicia (a small kingdom in today’s Turkey), whom she insisted agree to be circumcised and fully to convert to Judaism if he wished to have her as his wife. He did it too! But their union still didn’t last. Why, who knows? Maybe he resented the whole circumcision thing. Or perhaps they just weren’t meant to be. But before long she was back in Jerusalem, powerful, famous, and in exactly the right place to do great good.

The 60s of the first century CE were a dangerous, difficult time. The Roman governors of Judea, called procurators, were greedy bullies, or at least most of them were. The procurator in Jerusalem was a man named Florus, who was eager to steal at least part of the vast treasury of riches stored in the Temple. When the Jews protested, he sent in his soldiers to terrify the inhabitants into submission. Berenice, present in Jerusalem, first sent some of her servants to beg Florus to call off his goons. And then, when they were rebuffed, she went herself, bare-headed and barefoot, to beg him to withdraw. In the end, Florus withdrew his men. But Judea was on the brink of open rebellion against Rome nonetheless. Seeing disaster on the horizon, Berenice gave a long, passionate speech in which she begged the locals not to begin a war they could not possibly hope to win. But no one was in the mood to listen. And so the rebellion began.

Berenice, however, had a plan. She moved into her brother’s palace at Banias, a lovely and verdant section even today in Israel, where she was able to hobnob with Roman aristocracy. She met Vespasian himself, the future emperor who was at the time in charge of Roman forces in Judea. But it was when she met Vespasian’s son, a young man of twenty named Titus, that she suddenly saw an “Esther” path forward for herself and her people. She was in her forties. Titus was just twenty. But he was no match for her and he fell quickly into her trap. She did her best to keep him from moving violently against the Jewish rebels, perhaps trying to convince him that the rebellion would just die out if the Romans didn’t rise to the bait.

Our source for this story is the work of the Jewish historian Josephus, himself a client of the Romans, who writes that, in the end, Titus—head over heels in love—only moved against the rebels when he had no choice. And he remained in Berenice’s thrall for all of his years. Eventually, once his father became emperor, Titus returned to Rome and Berenice followed, living with him until Titus was finally forced to send her home and instead to marry a Roman woman who could give him a Roman heir.  

And that is the story of Queen Berenice. Unknown to most today, and yet a woman who invented and re-invented herself time and time again, eventually positioning herself to attempt to defuse a full-scale rebellion against Rome by appealing first to the rebels and then, when that failed, to their future opponent. Queen Esther was successful where Queen Berenice failed. Is that why we remember Esther, but have totally forgotten Berenice? Perhaps we should remember her too: a brave, wily, and daring Jewish woman who did her best to head off catastrophe for the Jewish people and who, even if she failed, deserves to be remembered as someone who, at the very least, tried to do good.

Smotrich Is Coming...Or Is He?

The issues swirling around the upcoming visit of Betzalel Smotrich to the United States are complex and troubling. On the one hand, he sounds like someone more than entitled to make such a journey: Smotrich is, after all, the Minister of Finance of the State of Israel and the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, one of the parties in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition. And yet he has a troubling history of making remarks that are beyond merely obnoxious and go all the way, at least in my opinion, to fully unacceptable. This is a man, after all, who has described himself as a “proud homophobe” who sees no problem with putting gay people in the same category with people who have sex with animals. (For more, click here.) And who has openly expressed his regret that the Arabs of Israel weren’t all expelled from the nascent State of Israel when statehood was first proclaimed in 1948, and that regardless of whether they were or weren’t prepared to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors in an independent Israel. But none of those previous comments (and they are legion) compare, I don’t think, to his remark in the wake of the pogrom carried out by Jewish settler types in the tiny Palestinian village of Huwara last week.

The events that led up to nightmare in Huwara are well known. Two brothers, Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, were murdered by a gunman who rammed their car and then shot them at point-blank range. The brothers, from the nearby Jewish settlement of Har Bracha, died instantly. This was a blatant act of terror, a murder that cannot be excused with reference to political rage. The residents of Huwara, however, did not see it that way; the reports of the villagers handing out candies and sweets in celebration of the brother’s murder, which I initially thought were probably exaggerated, appear to be true. This led to an attack against Huwara by about four hundred enraged Israelis in the course of which one man was killed, almost a hundred wounded seriously enough to require hospitalization, and thirty cars and about one hundred homes set on fire. The identity of the gunman was at the time unknown, so the rioters can’t have known whether he did or didn’t come from Huwara. The Palestinian man who was killed is not suspected to have had anything to do with the murder of the Yaniv brothers.

So that is the basic story. It’s a horrific tale, one featuring the deaths of innocents, the rage of an embittered mob, shockingly poor behavior on the part both of bystanders and participants, and an inexplicable absence of oversight by the people who are supposed to be in place to guard the peace.

And it was into this swamp of misery that Finance Minister Smotrich waded with his now-famous comment that the village of Huwara needs “to be wiped out” and that the State of Israel should “do it.” I understand that he was enraged. Who wasn’t enraged by the thought of Palestinians celebrating the cold-blooded murder of two innocent Jewish Israelis? Or by the thought that the killer might possibly have come from the very town in which the murders were perpetrated? But the thought that an appropriate response to the murder of innocents is the murder of other innocents is an idea that no decent person could rationally embrace, let alone express in public.

Even Prime Minister Netanyahu was apparently shocked by the remark. “I am asking you,” he said to the Israeli people in the wake of the events in Huwara, “while blood is boiling and winds are high—don’t take the law into your own hands. I ask that you allow the IDF and the security forces to do their work.” The President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, expressed the same thought in slightly different language. “Taking the law into one’s own hands, rioting, and committing violence against innocents,” the President said, “this is not our way and I express my forceful condemnation. We must allow the IDF to apprehend the despicable terrorist (i.e., the murderer of the Yaniv brothers) and restore order immediately.

And then, eventually, Smotrich walked back his original remarks, calling his comment about the village deserving to be destroyed “inappropriate.” And then he went further down that same path, noting that his comments were “incorrect…a slip of the tongue amid a storm of emotions,” and that he never meant for his comments to be taken literally.

To this walk-back, the Prime Minister responded with obvious relief. “It is important for us all to work to tone down the rhetoric,” he said, “which is why I wish to thank Minister Smotrich for making clear that his choice of words regarding the vigilante attack on Huwara following the murder of the Yaniv brothers was inappropriate and that he is strongly opposed to harming innocent civilians.”

So that sounded like it should (or at least could) be the end of the story. A man given to incendiary rhetoric spoke quickly and crazily in public, was then called on the carpet by his boss, and then withdrew his comments and more or less apologized for having spoken too hastily and without realizing he might be taken literally.

And now Minister Smotrich is headed for our country to speak at the Israel Bonds Conference that begins on March 12 in Washington, D.C. A White House National Security Conference spokesperson made it clear the other day that there are no plans for Smotrich to meet with any Biden administration officials or, for that matter, with any American political or government figures at all.

And that puts the ball squarely in the court of the American Jewish Community. Bonds is a big deal, a huge organization that raises funds for Israel in every conceivable Jewish venue in the United States, including at Shelter Rock. To reference their invitation to Smotrich as “just” a chance for a traveling Israeli to introduce himself to the leadership of a major American Jewish organization is really misleadingly to downplay the significance of the invitation. On the other hand, the man is a member of the Netanyahu government and, at that, one who leads one of the largest ministries within the government and who is in his own right the leader of a party with seven seats in the Knesset. Shouldn’t supporters of Israel feel obliged to listen to a leader well-ensconced within the power structure of the current government of Israel? The man did apologize for his remarks, after all.

Last Friday, 120 American Jewish leaders answered that question by signing a letter demanding that Smotrich “not be given a platform in our community.” (For a full list of signatories, click here.) And then, just a few days later, the JTA reported that the Biden administration is considering withholding an entry visa from Smotrich, despite the fact that he doesn’t appear to belong to any of the categories usually invoked for denying entrance to foreign nationals.

And so I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, Smotrich’s remarks were vile. Nor am I particularly convinced that he has changed his mind merely because his Prime Minister got him to say he had. But, on the other hand, I am fully afraid that many of those urging the Biden administration to bar Smotrich from entering the United States are not friends of Israel and are merely using this whole incident as a convenient peg upon which to hang their animus against Israel. On the third hand, I do support the right of Israelis to elect their own officials and then, if they become dissatisfied, to decline to re-elect them or even to bring down the government by turning public opinion dramatically enough to make the government unable to govern. As far as the Jewish leaders calling on the Israel Bonds people to deny an Israeli cabinet minister the right to address them, I have mixed feelings there too: who is to say that good couldn’t and wouldn’t come from a man like Betzalel Smotrich, an Israeli born, bred, raised, and educated in Israel, being exposed to the width and breadth of American Jewish culture—something that the Bonds Conference could well provide?

I write today, however, not to vent (or not just to vent), but to offer a concrete solution, one that could and even possibly would satisfy most parties to the affair.  Smotrich did a terrible thing when he, wearing his big yarmulke and openly identifying as a religious Jew, called for the murder of innocents and the eradication of a town merely because a wicked person committed a foul act on its streets. Issuing a press release walking back the remarks was a nice start, but cannot possibly be interpreted—not halakhically but also not realistically—as “real” t’shuvah. But the gates of t’shuvah are never closed, which is to say that the possibility of real repentance is always present. This truth, we repeat over and over and over in our High Holiday liturgy. Surely Smotrich knows those words by heart. So perhaps the time has come to act on them.

My suggestion is Betzalel Smotrich forego the opportunity to address the Bonds Convention and instead head to Huwara. He needs to find the courage to meet the people there and to evolve from an angry politician with a big mouth into a true worker for peace. He needs to find Palestinians to work with him, to find common ground, to build the kind of consensus that could conceivably lead to real change in the endless war between Israelis and Palestinians. He needs to take the bright light this whole incident has shone upon him and refocus it out onto the world as a force for illumination and the kind of open dialogue that can lead to peace. The trick is not to condemn the man for using intemperate language in the past, but to challenge him to make of this whole incident the framework for the kind of dialogue that leads, or at least that can lead, to peaceful coexistence.

It’s a cliché to say that no one but Nixon could have gone to China, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Perhaps the time has come for Betzalel Smotrich to go to Huwara.

Preserving the Balance of Power in Israel

One of the themes I’ve returned to again and again in these weekly letters is the strange way that everything changes as the years pass at the same time that nothing does. And reading ancient books, as I like so much to do, only sharpens that thought. The people in those antique works, for example, don’t have smart phones (or any phones) or computers or cars. They don’t dress the way we do or live in homes at all similar to our own. And, yet, when they sit down to worry about the world, the topics that occupy them are precisely the same ones that occupy us. How to live in peace with the neighbors. How to deal with ornery in-laws. How to escape out from under crushing debt. How not to be disappointed when your children choose a path forward in life different from your own. How to live decently and well when your instincts seem constantly to lead you off in the precise opposite direction. So when Jean-Baptiste Alfonse Karr famously wrote that “the more things change, the more they remain the same,” he certainly had it right. And that was back in 1849, when daily life was seriously different than it is today. And also the same.

Scripture, aside from being a theological document, is also a political one that suggests the way a free people should wish to be governed by its leaders. And there are many biblical passages, both within and outside the Torah, that speak to this specific point. Some are slightly contradictory, but taking them seriously as a set of working principles of political science yields an interesting picture and, at that, one that has direct bearing on the nightmarish public debate going on in Israel regarding the way the nation should be governed.

There are, speaking broadly, three instruments of governance in the biblical view: the king (occasionally a queen), the priesthood (as embodied in the office of High Priest), and the prophetic guild (with the occasional outlier who self-presents as a prophet without the backing of that guild). The sovereign has absolute power, but no one—including not the king himself—thinks that he can successfully govern the nation without divine support and, speaking practically, that requires having the support of the Temple priesthood who offer up the sacrifices and attend to the rituals that are understood to be what it takes for the king to stay in God’s good graces. So the king and the High Priest exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship: to retain their authority and their power, they need each other. And that creates an interesting dynamic: the king rules as an absolute monarch but can’t afford to alienate the High Priest, and the High Priest is possessed of the authority that comes naturally from being God’s chosen servant in the midst of the people but has no specific political power. And so they exist, these two, in a kind of symbiotic balance: each master of his own domain but neither able to act fully autonomously if doing so would alienate the other.

But that balance of power has its own corrective. If the king is able to garner the support of the High Priest with respect to a major policy decision—to go to war or to levy new taxes, for example—and so feels free to proceed, there is always the possibility that a prophet proclaiming the word of God will intervene to insist that the policy be abandoned or refined in a way that suits the will of the Almighty. The kings of Israel did not particularly like this arrangement. Why would they have? They did their best to keep the prophets from speaking out—readers who remember my story “Enemy at the Gates” will know something of the kind of brutal, degrading treatment to which Jeremiah was subjected when he opposed the king in public—but the prophetic movement survived for as long as did the monarchy. And so we see a system of checks and balances designed to guarantee that no single leaders—not the king or the High Priest, but also not the prophet—could act successfully without at least the tacit acquiescence of the others. It was in some ways a flawed system. (There was no sure-fire way to test the authenticity of a self-proclaimed prophet’s message, for example.) But the system worked well enough. And when it stopped working in the last days of the kingdom, that was precisely when the nation fell and the fortunate/unfortunate survivors were exiled from their homeland. (“Enemy at the Gates”  is part of my collection of short stories entitled To Speak the Truth: Stories 2011–2021. To purchase, click here.)

In our nation, we have a similar system of checks and balances intended to keep any branch of government from acting other than in the best interests of the people. The Congress can pass bills, but the President has to sign them. The President can decline to sign a bill, but Congress can override the President’s veto. And, in the end, the Supreme Court has the right to declare any law, even those duly passed by Congress and signed by the President, unconstitutional and therefore void. And that system—which specifically does not permit the Court to pass or sign legislation but only to address the work of the other two branches of the government—that system seems to work well enough: Congress and the President exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship, but neither can act contrary to the law no matter how many votes a bill might garner and how willing the President may be to sign it. And, presuming the integrity of the Court and the willingness of the President and the Congress to accept its judgments as binding, the system works well enough. (I heard that! But the system has worked well enough up to now and, I hope, will continue to do so.)

The situation in Israel is related to all the above, but the circumstances are not at all the same. The basic idea is that the Netanyahu government wishes for the Knesset to take control over the appointment of judges and to seriously weaken the ability of the Supreme Court to strike down laws passed by the Knesset by allowing the Knesset to override such decisions by the Court with a simple majority. The opposition to these “reforms” has been massive: hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens have been demonstrating in the streets and denouncing these proposed changes vociferously. For a full and vigorous expression of why all those thousands of Israelis are in the streets protesting, I recommend David Horovitz’s incendiary op-ed piece in the Times of Israel from a few days ago in which he equates the proposed reforms as steps that would neuter the Court and, and I quote, “bulldoze the Declaration of Independence.” (Click here to read the Horovitz essay.)  Less incendiary but no less heartfelt, was Michael Oren’s blog post in the Times of Israel from a few weeks ago in which the author, the former Israeli ambassador to our country, explains why someone like himself can strongly oppose Netanyahu’s proposed reforms and still, and at the very same time, feel that judicial reform is warranted and necessary. (To read Oren’s essay, click here.) Even a unabashedly right-wing author like Alan Dershowitz has written recently that the Israeli justice system needs a serious overhaul and has made some serious proposals for what the reforms that would bring about such an overhaul could or should look like. (To read a summary of Alan Dershowitz’s proposals, click here.) But neither Oren nor Dershowitz supports the specific proposals the Netanyahu government seems hell-bent on pushing through the Knesset.

Lots of exaggerated claims that I’ve come across lately only muddy the water. To say, for examples, that Supreme Court justices appoint themselves in Israel is exaggerated enough to be labelled simply untrue. But the reality is different from what we Americans are used to: in Israel, Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President, who is obliged to choose from names submitted by something called the Judicial Selection Committee, which is itself made up of three Supreme Court justices, two cabinet members, two Knesset members, and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association. Unless some members of the committee are absent, seven out of the nine have to agree on the submission. And if they do, then the President has no choice but to comply. So to say that the Supreme Court selects its own members is not at all true. But also true is that the system does invite input from the Court in a way that has no parallel in the American justice system. Is that a flaw in the system? Given the degree to which our own method of choosing Supreme Court justices has become so incredibly highly politicized that the Congress was able to get away with refusing even to consider President Obama’s final nomination to the Court, it’s hard to say that the American system is not itself in need of serious reform. But it’s also true that the Israeli Supreme Court plays a role in selecting its own members that is unlike the method in use in almost every other country in the world.

At the end of the day what matters—and what matters above all else—is the maintenance of a system of effective checks and balances that keeps any part of the government from acting other than in the best interests of the populace. This was the rule in ancient Israel and it is the rule, for better or for worse, in our nation, just as some parallel version of that concept is part of the way that all successful Western republics—certainly including the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy—govern themselves. So what is of paramount in Israel is that the concept itself be preserved and safeguarded. If the Court has veered off to reflect a political orientation at odds with the general populace, then that is precisely what the system exists to address. Neither the Knesset nor the Court should be able to speak definitively without the assent and support of the other. The President in Israel is politically powerless, yet he or she can use the enormous power of moral suasion that inheres in the office to act as a corrective in his or her own right. On paper, the Israeli system—similar in some ways to our own but also dramatically different in others—should work well. And, in the past, it has.

The Netanyahu reforms seem calculated to disable the system of checks and balances crucial to the moral right of the government to self-describe as representative  both of the will of the populace and of the foundational ideas upon which the State rests. Judicial reform can and should be effected if the system is not working properly. The will of the people in any democracy is both paramount and sacrosanct. But the system of checks and balances is crucial and must be maintained and kept intact. The reforms proposed by the Netanyahu government will seriously limit the ability of the Court to play the corrective role the founders of the State wished for it to play. Judicial reform is a reasonable goal. But the government is overreaching and should scrap the current proposals in favor of alternate ones that will preserve the ability of the Supreme Court to exert corrective influence on the government—just as the founders of the State intended.