Communal Democracy and Liberal Democracy in the Jewish Political Tradition
Daniel J. Elazar
Abstract
This article describes the emergence of liberal democracy, then
compares and contrasts liberal democracy with communal democracy,
showing the latter to be a prior form of democratic
self-government. It then discusses the two in the perspective of
self-government and rights, the two dimensions of democracy.
Having given the United States as the best example of liberal
democracy and Switzerland as the best modern example of communal
democracy, it then goes on to explore the Jewish political
tradition and how it is also an example of communal democracy.
The article then turns to the crisis of modernity and the Jewish
polity and how the modern commitment to liberal democracy won
over a majority of Jews even as it posed problems for the Jewish
polity, examining classical Judaism and pluralism, looking for
accommodations between the two in the contemporary Jewish polity.
It suggests a series of accommodations that have been developed,
especially for less traditionally observant Jews, and examines
their implications for the Jewish political tradition. In
conclusion the article suggests that a bridging between modern
conceptions of liberal democracy and premodern conceptions of
communal democracy has begun and that one way to help that
bridging would be for Jews to turn to the concept of federal
liberty as it was developed by the English Puritans and their
heirs out of the biblical tradition, at the beginning of the
modern epoch, as a source of ideas and directions to pursue.
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The Emergence of Individualistic Democracy
For the last decade of the twentieth century it seems to be
conventional wisdom to hold that the only real democracy is
liberal or individualistic democracy as it emerged from the
thought of the great seventeenth century political philosophers,
most particularly Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza and Harrington; the
English experience of the Civil War and most particularly the
Glorious Revolution, as it has evolved in theory and practice
since then. Liberal democracy has its roots in methodological
individualism, namely the view that every individual is actually
or potentially sovereign by nature and only by leaving the state
of nature through a political compact enters into society, or,
more accurately, civil society.1 Civil society, in those terms
is a socio-political order informed by an agreed-upon structure
of government and authority but one in which the polity is not
all-embracing but, rather, leaves substantial space for
individual independence and public activity based upon voluntary
association and cooperation. While recognizing the inevitable
need for government and authority, the individual was conceived
to be the measure of things, protected by his or her natural
rights and a civil society organized to secure them.
Liberal democracy, then, can be defined by its theory, its form,
its culture, and its practice. The theory of liberal democracy
emphasizes methodological individualism or the individual
standing naked in the world until he binds with other individuals
to establish civil society and government. All institutions are
subordinate to the individual or perhaps to the civil compact
among individuals.
From here on there are two theories. Under one, once
established, the institutions of government constitute a state;
the individual lives within the state, protected by his natural
rights and the constitutional means established to protect them.
Any institutions standing between the state and the individual
are defined as mediating institutions, they are voluntary and
their standing is subsidiary to both the individual and the
state. As institutions they do not have rights, only such
protections as derived from the natural right of individuals to
freely associate with one another.
The second theory holds that all associations of individuals,
public and private, are not only established by compact or
contract but remain associations, differing only in their
purposes and degree of comprehensiveness. Under this theory, the
institutions of governance do not constitute a separate "state"
but rather the largest and most authoritative set of institutions
in a particular civil society. While individuals may by free
compact allocate to the institutions of government powers of
coercion -- indeed they must in order to survive -- this does not
change the basic reality that all associations are freely
established by combinations of individuals and may be altered by
them through agreed upon procedures. Under this theory, not only
is there no state to be reified but there are no collective
institutions with rights of their own. As in the first theory,
they are protected only to the extent that the natural right of
free association of individuals extends them subsidiary
protections.
Liberal democracy takes several forms but invariably requires a
basic covenant or compact translated into a constitution of
government and a declaration or bill of rights (there is a
difference between a "declaration" or a "bill" with the former
more a statement of constitutional principles and the latter more
a binding constitutional law), establishing a system of popular
institutions of government whose members are chosen by free
election (directly or in some cases indirectly). Those
institutions will be charged with and capable of acting to
protect and defend individual rights and will include checks and
balances so as to provide effective limits on the exercise of
political power.
The political culture of liberal democracy must include, inter
alia, commitment to the individual as the main building block of
civil society, a sense of mutual tolerance and respect among
members of the political community, a commitment to the
democratic processes delineated above, and self-restraint in
pursuing one's political goals based on respect for the rights of
others including minorities. All these must be reflected in
political practice.
In the intervening centuries, liberal democracy has become even
more individual-rights centered in detail and practice than those
who originally conceived it may have anticipated. In Europe, the
medieval structure of mediating institutions was eliminated or
drastically weakened and transformed. The institutions that
survived lost most of their original authority and power, either
as a result of governmental action or changing modes of thought
(e.g., the drastic decline in the acceptance of religious
authority). What remained were strong class and ethnic
divisions, despite revolutionary efforts to eradicate them.
The United States -- the model liberal democracy -- was a modern,
that is to say, post-medieval civil society from its founding.2
There new forms of voluntary institutions developed in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries which became
part of the warp and woof of American civil society. All
Americans were expected to find a network of institutions and to
be rooted within them. Classic American pluralist doctrine as it
developed was based on a considerable amount of free individual
choice and people were not expected to be bound into communities
or their institutions from birth. Migration and changing
affiliation was an accepted part of the American experience, but
at some point individuals were expected to find their place and
stay with it.
In the twentieth century this voluntaristic "pluralism of
associations" was challenged and, after the 1960s replaced by a
"pluralism of individuals" anchored in a new understanding, both
ideological and constitutional (through Supreme Court decisions),
of individual rights as precluding the long-term binding of
individuals even by agreement past the time when the individuals
so bound consent to be bound.3 To give an example of how
far-reaching the change was, in pre-modern times marriage between
a man and a woman was essentially a linkage of families as much
as a union of two people. For Catholic Christians, marriage was
freely entered into but, once covenanted, was forever. In the
modern epoch, marriage became increasingly a matter of the
individual choice of the two parties, but it was still expected
that the parties would consider the families and communities of
which they were apart to maintain religious, status, and
certainly racial boundaries. Even in the liberal United States,
where divorce was legal, marriages could be dissolved only for
real cause (however defined) and then with the risk of
stigmatization. In the post-modern epoch, all of these barriers
have fallen. Marriage is considered strictly an individual
matter and if one of the couple tires of the other, divorce is an
accepted and easily obtained step.
Communal Democracy: A Prior Form
This sea change has advanced so far in the name of democracy that
many people in the contemporary Western world have forgotten that
democracy in some countries and among some peoples developed
along different lines. The Swiss, for example, developed
communal democracy 700 years ago or more, whereby individuals
were bound by custom and condition to communities but were full
participants (originally just the men, of course) in guiding the
life of the community and determining its governance. The Swiss
did not have to go through a process of rejecting the bonds of
community in order to achieve democratization. Quite to the
contrary, they fought for democracy to preserve those bonds. Just
as one can learn about individualistic democracy from the United
States, one can learn about communal democracy from the Swiss
experience.4
Communal democracy begins from the theoretical premise that
communities as well as individuals are of nature and that the
individual finds his or her rights best protected within the
framework of his community. To be democratic, that community,
even if its origins are an organic outgrowth of its past, must at
some point establish or reestablish its existence and the
relationships among its members on the basis of a covenant or
compact which either constitutes or leads to a constitution of
government including means for protecting rights or liberties,
both communal and individual. The theory of communal democracy
gives the community a political status in its own right.
The form of communal democracy must include the fully republican
elements of popular participation at all points in the process of
governance, albeit with a greater emphasis on achieving consensus
rather than winning by majority vote. The institutions of
communal democracy are constructed accordingly since the
maintenance of community is as important as the satisfaction of
the individual. Indeed the two are presumed to be in no small
measure inseparable. The political culture of communal democracy
is oriented toward the kind of self-restraint that comes from
multiple and multigenerational interlocking ties needed to
preserve community while also emphasizing a concern for the
direction the community will take. While it emphasizes
consensus, it also allows for vigorous contests to define the
consensus. The resolution of issues must ensure that everyone
receives an appropriate piece of the communal pie. It is
oriented more toward consultation than confrontation in
decision-making, although confrontational methods may be used to
bring about consultation under appropriate circumstances. How
this is done varies in practice in different communal
democracies. In any case it is expected that the individual will
share with the community as part of maintaining his or her place
within it. The community itself rests not only on shared history
and fate, but on shared norms.
The system of liberal democracy that developed out of seventeenth
century political thought and the modern political experience
originally preserved elements of democracy. However as radical
individualis and liberal democracy became essentially identical,
there was no place for a priori community. Indeed, the very idea
of shared norms became difficult in the face of relativism, a
doctrine that went hand in hand with radical individualism.
Nevertheless, the human need for community remained. To
accomodate it in the twentieth century, the concept of liberal
democracy was enlarged by the idea of pluralism. In essence, the
idea of pluralism was developed by those who, endorsing the
individualistic and rights-centered understanding of liberal
democracy, wanted to make some space for the preservation of
voluntary group identities as well. Thus pluralism came to mean
not only the right of every individual to choose his or her
associations and commitments, but also the obligation to
recognize the existence of groups without judging them within the
body politic, provided that such groups existed on a strictly
voluntary basis. Today liberal democracy can be said to rest on
the twin pillars of individual rights and pluralism which are in
some quarters defined as the sum and substance of democracy.
Self-Government and Rights: Two Dimensions of Democracy
In the recent debates on the subject involving Jews in Israel, as
well as the diaspora, democracy seems to have been equated by the
majority almost exclusively with individual rights and pluralism
and with their most individualistic variety at that. That is
only half the story. Even liberal democracy can be understood as
having at least two dimensions: 1) self-government, that is to
say, meaningful participation of individual citizens in the
establishment of the polity in which they live and in its
subsequent governance; 2) individual rights, that is to say, the
right of every individual to develop for him or herself a way of
life and a set of beliefs and opinions appropriate to it,
consistent with agreed upon common norms, and to live
accordingly, with minimum interference on the part of others,
including and especially, on the part of government.
Neither self-government nor individual rights are absolute.
Living in society requires the tempering of all in the face of
the realities of the human condition but, for those who believe
in them, they remain not only basic aspirations but basic
requirements for the good society.
The Traditional Jewish Polity5
Like the Swiss, the traditional Jewish polity, following the
classic Jewish political tradition, also followed the path of
communal democracy. Let us examine that more closely. The Bible
makes it clear that God and the Jewish people established an
initial relationship through covenant, and God played the major
role in setting forth the constitution, especially the religious
and moral constitution of the people. Ultimate sovereignty is
God's, but day-to-day governance, including most constitutional
decisions, is in the hands of the people within the framework of
the Divine constitution.
When it comes to democracy as self-government, the classic Jewish
political tradition is very positive indeed. In political
matters, the Torah makes it clear that there is no single
preferred regime (not even the Davidic monarchy which later was
raised to messianic status, especially after it no longer
existed), and that it is up to the people to establish political
systems appropriate to the circumstances that must meet basic
moral, social, and religious requirements. Thus an acceptable
political system must be just and pursue justice; it must provide
for the care of the less fortunate (the biblical "widows and
orphans"); and it must maintain the religious constitution of the
Jewish people, as interpreted by the judges of the time. It must
also be republican, rooted in popular consent and involving the
people in governance.
Let me reiterate: there is no doubt about the republican
character of the classic Jewish polity, nor has there been
throughout Jewish history. The particular character of Jewish
republicanism had a certain aristocratic tinge because of the
prominent role it gave to notables from leading families, and
priests, prophets, and sages who had reponsibilities for
interpreting the Torah, all of whom had to share power in some
way. Even when this led, at times, to the appearance of
oligarchic rule in the ancient Jewish polity and in diaspora
Jewish communities, as degenerated forms of aristocratic
republicanism, but in every case the regime remained republican.
According to the Torah and halakhically, it must be constituted
by all of the people, including women and children, and it may be
changed by the people. Whatever the problematics of counting
women in a minyan for prayer, the Bible makes it clear that they
were required to be present and counted at the great
constitutional ceremonies establishing the edah (the Jewish
polity) its covenants, and its subsidiary kehillot.
There is no question about the communalism of the Jewish polity.
Properly hedged, one can even speak about communal democracy in
the Jewish polity that at least it was not a foreign import or
without trying to claim that Judaism was democratic per se.
Democracy per se was not defined as a goal of the Jewish polity,
but there was a striving for some kind of a mixed regime with
strong democratic elements for certain purposes and aristocratic
elements for others. Under some conditions monarchic elements did
exist. Overall, the effort to balance the rule of God and the
rule of Jews generated each particular combination in time and
place. The degree to which Jews saw themselves as ruling
themselves as distinct from being ruled by God probably had some
impact on the character of the institutions involved, though I
myself would be hesitant to say whether the impact was positive
towards democracy or negative. That is to say, one could make a
case based on the sources that, in recent times, when Jews saw
themselves ruled directly by God they were more democratic and
when they saw themselves ruled less directly, they were less. On
the other hand, one could also make a case for the reverse in the
Middle Ages and in modern times. There needs to be more research
on that issue (and there are piles and piles of materials
available in the archives of the Israel Historical Society and
others that nobody has ever opened). While I would be very
hesitant at this point about drawing conclusions one way or
another, a strong case can be made that within whatever
parameters of self-definition used at the time, the pre-modern
communal self-government of the Jews was certainly republican and
at times had strong democratic elements.
None of this would fit all that well under modern definitions of
democracy; not in terms of universal suffrage, the principles on
which suffrage was extended, questions of individualism and
pluralism, and the like. All of these belong to the category of
liberal democracy which clearly introduced a new dimension. The
problem of reconciling the two within the Jewish polity remains
one of the primary tasks of that polity today as it has been for
the past 200 years.
With regard to communal democracy, there seem to be two critical
elements to be noted: the importance of custom and the importance
of consensus. Both are critical elements in terms of defining
what is the community and what does the community expect and
serve as guidelines for wider participation in decision-making.
In other words, if people shared the same customs and were
committed to achieving a consensus around a particular way of
life, it was not a problem if decisions were in the hands of the
many instead of the few; that the distinction with regard to the
many and the few had to do with other extraneous factors --
wealth, social status -- elements that are present, as it were,
in any discussion of human polities that tend to limit the
participation of the many or favor the participation of the few,
but once custom and consensus were accepted by everyone or
virtually everyone, they became binding forces.
In that sense, drawing from Alan Mittleman's article, the
emphasis on shared practices is a good point. It also is very
common to communal democratic systems. The Swiss may have done
so through the way they handled pasturing animals and the Jews
may have done so through Talmud Torah; both are shared practices.
We do have to add that matters are not quite that simple with
regard to the Jewish polity because, after all, its constitution
is a deliberate effort to limit the influence of custom and to
transform custom. The Torah as the Jewish constitution has to be
seen as a revolutionary document. It was designed to take a
people that had common customs and either to force them to
abandon certain of those customs or to transform those customs
into ones that were at the very least compatible with the Torah
or perhaps were new wine poured into old bottles to make them not
only more compatible but actually extensions of the effort to
revolutionize the Jewish people through the Torah.6
It is true that custom reasserted itself in Jewish life over the
next several millennia as the Torah became the basis for custom,
but still there is the constant recourse to first principles, of
varying degrees of strength but periodically going back to the
Torah and attacking the existing customary system. Certainly
modern Jews have made it a point to attempt to go back to first
principles, whether the Reform movement's concern with "Prophetic
Judaism" ( which has its problems) or Zionism's "Back to the
Bible" movement, in some quarters using a secularized Bible to
overcome the heritage of talmudic Judaism. There have been other
periods or situations where there has been recourse to first
principles -- for example, in the high Middle Ages to construct a
constitutional basis for Jewish communal life.7 So, in the
Jewish political tradition custom is necessary but not
sufficient. That is extremely important in defining the communal
and democratic dimensions and the limits on both in the history
of the Jewish polity.
There is also an emphasis in communal democracy on common and
mutual obligations rather than on individual rights. This is
universal in communal democracies. Even the most democratic of
communal democracies by the standards of majoritarian democracy
or consensus democracy, whichever one chooses, emphasizes the
common good as prior to individual rights. True, they see a
convergence along a whole host of fronts, but if there is a
divergence, common good takes precedence.
In all of Jewish history, with the possible exception of small
congregations here and there, there are no cases of autocracy, of
one-man rule, certainly none beyond the arena of the local
community. The one possible exception was Herod, who was imposed
upon the Jews of Eretz Israel by the Romans. He was given power
through nominally legitimate processes and then usurped that
power to eliminate the other instruments that shared power with
the king within the constitution.
This leads to the other dimension of Jewish republicanism,
namely, that in the traditional constitution and throughout
Jewish history power has always been divided among three domains,
known in traditional Hebrew as ketarim (crowns): that of torah,
responsible for communicating God's word to the people and
interpreting the Torah as constitution to them; kehunah
(priesthood), responsible for being a conduit from the people to
God; and malkhut, which may be best translated as civil rule,
responsible for the day-to-day business of civil governance in
the edah. While there have been struggles for power among these
ketarim and times in which one was stronger than the other, all
three, particularly torah and malkhut, have always been actively
present in the governance of every Jewish polity from the local
arena to the people as a whole.8
According to classic Jewish sources, the best Jewish regime is a
kind of aristocratic republican mixed regime with the aristoi
being essentially the leaders of the keter torah. Perhaps the
best modern Jewish regime in the diaspora is a kind of
trusteeship with the principal trustees being the keter malkhut.
This is a fundamental shift that has taken place but within
limits, that is to say, a trusteeship is also a kind of
aristocratic republicanism. The major difference is that the
aristoi draw their aristocratic element from above. The trustees
presumably draw it from below.
When speaking of the keter torah today, we must speak of dayanim,
of senior religious leaders, of Jewish intellectuals, many of
whom are both professors and rabbis, who are seen as speaking for
the spiritual dimension of Jewish life. Most congregational
rabbis today should be considered to be of the keter kehunah,
that is to say, they serve as channels for their congregants to
express their efforts to connect with a transcendent power beyond
them.
There is a certain blurring between ketarim that came in the
nineteenth century when Jews abandoned the Jewish polity. In the
twentieth century as the Jewish polity has been revived, the
articulation of each keter has become sharper. In Israel there
is much less blurring than in the diaspora, but there is much
less of it now in both than there was fifty years ago. While
there are some people who hold positions in more than one keter,
by and large, the people who bear the title rabbi and sit with
the keter malkhut are not keter torah. They are people who maybe
have been given their formal titles through keter torah, but
actually they are responsible to other leaders of keter torah if
they have not shifted over to keter malkhut altogether.
The rabbis who sit in the government and the Knesset are
musmachim (ordained rabbis) from yeshivot but they are not any of
the Moetzot Gedolai or Hachamei HaTorah. They are politicians
whom the keter torah has inserted into the process of keter
malkhut, but they are not themselves the leaders in keter torah.
The ultra-Orthodox world indeed like the keter torah to be
dominant or at least to be a vaada paratetit (a review committee
with veto powers, as in Israel). But that is not the same as
wanting to take over the responsibilities of keter malkhut.
Jews have always had people like that and it is not so unique.
But the fact of the matter is that, basically, whatever
straddling people like that were able to do also kept them from
usurping the other domains. They, too, had to specialize, in
different times in different ways, but even they had to
specialize, that is the point to make.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, for example, literally claims all three.
His followers openly say about him that he heads all three
ketarim. That is the nature of hassidut, but that is a
corruption of the tradition.
The relationship between Judaism and democracy has to be judged
whole and it must be judged in the context of the Jewish polity
as a communal democracy whose pre-modern origins antedate the
development of liberal democracy. Thus when it comes to the
popular constitution of the polity, the responsibility of the
governors to the governed, and a proper separation and
distribution of powers among the governors -- the three great
criteria for democracy -- the Jewish polity passes every test.
The proof of the pudding is that in Western civilization the
Bible is considered the foundation of democratic republicanism
and has been so treated by democratic reformers throughout the
history of the Western world. The strong biblical base of
American democracy, which grew out of the Protestant Reformation
in Europe and which remains vital today is a case in point.9 The
weakness of Jews (and other peoples) has been in the inventing of
appropriate institutions for the successful implementation of
these principles. Sometimes Jews did and sometimes they did not.
The Crisis of Modernity and the Jewish Polity
With the coming of modern individualism and liberal democracy,
the classic Jewish political tradition was -- and is --
confronted by an unavoidable challenge. Modern liberalism and
individualism, by freeing individual Jews from the bonds of
Torah, shattered the traditional constitution of the Jewish
people and have forced it to reconstitute itself along new lines.
The struggle to find appropriate lines has been at the heart of
Jewish politics for at least the last 200 years. That struggle
involves the confrontation between the theories and practices of
communal and liberal democracy and the search for some synthesis
of both forms.
The most visible aspect of this struggle today is between the
ultra-Orthodox and the secularists in Israel, but that is by no
means its only manifestation. The establishment of a Jewish state
itself was one answer to the modern challenge. Its socialist
founders, while militantly secularist in most cases, also argued
for a collectivist form of communal democracy while essentially
rejecting liberal democracy. The extreme forms of their secular,
socialist collectivism at times bordered on totalitarianism, but
kept under control because adherence to other ideas and
institutions remained voluntary. That version of renewed communal
democracy has since been abandoned.
There also were adherents of Western liberalism among the Zionist
founders. Even these Zionist adherents of liberal democracy
emphasized the organic character of the Jewish nation, assuming
that if the Jewish nation were living in its own land, the
principles of liberalism would not contradict those of
nationalism. In the post-modern epoch, this too has proved to be
an erroneous assumption.
In the Eastern European diaspora, a modernized view of Jewish
communal democracy was asserted by the diaspora autonomists and
nationalists. In the West, on the other hand, those Jews who
embraced liberal democracy and fought for Jewish emancipation on
liberal and individualistic grounds, abandoned and rejected the
very existence of a Jewish polity, seeking to depoliticize
Judaism, abandon Jewish peoplehood, and become a liberal Western
religion like every other one.
In a certain sense the idea of pluralism, which was invented by
American Jews, was a liberal democratic way of trying to bridge
the religious and ethnic (read "national") dimensions of Jewish
existence on a voluntary basis under modern conditions.10
Pluralism became particularly normative after the establishment
of the State of Israel, an act that brought Jews back to the
reality of Jewish political existence, even as the fact of being
Jewish and how became even more a matter of individual choice in
the U.S.A. That is why pluralism has become the cornerstone of
the American Jewish faith.
Classical Judaism and Pluralism
Judaism is emphatically pluralistic when it comes to recognition
of the separate identity of different nations. The biblical
vision, regularly reaffirmed in the Jewish political tradition,
is that the nations and peoples of the world have a right to
exist and be autonomous under God. In this sense Judaism, unlike
Christianity and Islam, is not ecumenical. It does not seek a
single world state, an ecumene, in which all national and
religious differences are obliterated. Quite to the contrary,
the Jewish vision of the messianic world order is one in which
all nations recognize the sovereignty of God but retain their
separate national and perhaps even religious characteristics, if
monotheistic. This is a view reiterated by the prophets of
ancient Israel and canonized in the Bible. It is equally a tenet
of modern Zionism, which offered a socialist or secularist
variant for God's sovereignty, which, while profoundly
untraditional, follows the sense of the tradition in this
respect.11
Judaism is not pluralistic when it comes to recognizing paganism
among the nations -- it does not believe that anything and
everything goes in such matters -- and classical Judaism does not
accept the permanent legitimacy of a pluralism that rejects the
minimum Torah requirement of acceptance of the Noahide covenant
and commandments, that is to say, it is not relativist. The
question in both cases is one of interpretation. Jewish
monotheism is very strict indeed on the religious level.
Rejecting the one God is not acceptable human behavior.
In fact, Judaism recognizes that humans do have the freedom to
choose, even in the matter of belief in one God, but are subject
to God's response as He chooses if they choose to reject Him and
His covenant. A choice against God represents freedom to stay
outside of the moral order, not to be democratically accepted as
part of it and to participate in its governance. Such freedom is
like the freedom of states in international relations; it is
anarchy, not order, while democracy implicitly and explicitly
reflects the existence of order.
This article cannot do justice to the problem of pluralism within
Judaism. In traditional Judaism it is accepted that there is one
Torah binding on all Jews, and a clear halakhic tradition growing
out of the Torah. Still, at the very least, regional and local
differences in customary observance are recognized as legitimate
-- some even say binding. Moreover, since the middle ages, it
has been difficult to overrule local rabbinical courts on any
halakhic matter. In civil matters which are equally within the
province of the Torah and its halakhah in traditional Judaism,
there is even greater latitude. Suffice it to say that Jewish
tradition recognizes that within the four ells of Torah there is
considerable room. Moreover, any honest look at Jewish
constitutional history clearly reveals that the interpretation of
Torah itself has changed greatly from epoch to epoch. In other
words, there have been a series of reconstitutions, the very fact
of whose existence suggests the possibility of a real degree of
pluralism is such matters. My colleague, Professor Stuart Cohen,
and I have traced these reconstitutions in considerable detail in
our book, The Jewish Polity.12
Obviously, a majority of contemporary Jews no longer accept this
formulation as binding. In fact, it is rejected by the
ultra-Orthodox and the non-Orthodox alike, but in different ways.
Contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy, with its effort to develop a
monolithic approach to halakhic and religious matters, is just as
erroneous as contemporary liberal Judaism which claims that there
is no legitimate authority in Jewish life, that any Jew can do
whatever he or she wants to in matters halakhic and religious. In
fact, even most monistic Orthodox recognize a certain pluralism
within halakhah. That is why today Jews have a Chief Rabbinate,
the Moetzet Gedolai HaTorah (Agudath Israel's Council of Torah
Greats), the Moetzet Hakhmei HaTorah (the Sephardic Council of
Torah Sages), and the various batei din (religious courts) of the
extreme ultras. Whatever the fights among their members and
partisans, the legitimacy of all is more or less mutually
recognized.
Non-Orthodox religious Jews, particularly in the United States,
have made religious pluralism within Judaism their standard and
have rallied around it with increasing frequency in recent years.
For Reform Jews who have unqualifiedly accepted the most radical
contemporary premises of liberal democracy, individual rights and
pluralism have become the ultimate values, superceding anything
in Jewish tradition that they see as standing in their way. For
Conservative Jews the problem is more complicated since they
claim to be within the framework of halakhah, but the thrust of
their decision-making has been to try to walk a middle course. In
Israel, secular Jews, like American Reform, increasingly identify
themselves exclusively with liberal democracy, individual rights,
and pluralism as understood in that context, having abandoned the
secular collectivism of their parents.
Accommodations in the Contemporary Jewish Polity
All of this is true in the religious realm. It is testimony to
the importance of that realm for Jewish existence, even in a
secular age, that all efforts to establish a Jewish polity
entirely separate from the religious realm have failed. Any and
every Jewish polity, including the State of Israel, must come to
grips with that religious dimension. At the same time, a
tentative resolution or accommodation of communal and liberal
democracy, especially in Israel, has led to a much stronger
separation between the keter malkhut, on one side, and the
ketarim of torah and kehunah, on the other.
The contemporary keter malkhut not only is a separate arena but
its standards have become secular standards. No longer must its
leaders or its messages be contained within the framework of the
traditional constitution of the Jewish polity in every case. The
State of Israel, for example, is a secular democratic state under
the rule of law, not halakhah, as secular Israelis and the
ultra-Orthodox both agree. (Only the religious Zionists are still
trying to meld hok and halakhah in the state.) The secular left
fiercely guards this distinction. Yet the Israeli regime must
make provision for all three ketarim and for the peculiarly
Jewish synthesis of religion and polity.
Israel's keter malkhut is secular and its leaders are chosen on a
secular basis (although rabbis can and do stand for election to
the Knesset and serve in the government, but they do so as
secular leaders). Nevertheless, even the Knesset saw fit to shift
the basis of Israeli law from the English to the Jewish legal
tradition.13 The official keter malkhut, the Israeli Chief
Rabbinate, with its two chief rabbis and chief rabbinical
council, the local rabbinical courts and local chief rabbis, were
established and empowered by law of the Knesset, and the two
chief rabbis are elected by the Knesset. While there are other
elements in the keter torah that are not formally dependent on
the Knesset for their existence, their institutions are funded
heavily from the state budget. The keter kehunah in Israel is
manifested by the local moetzot datiot (religious councils), that
are responsible for grassroots supervision and other state
activities in the field of Jewish ritual or the provision of
state support for those activities.14
Similar arrangements are to be found in diaspora communities.
Following the pattern of the British government, the Board of
Deputies of British Jews, the keter malkhut of Britain, supports
the chief rabbi and the beit din as the representatives of the
keter torah and the United Synagogue for the keter kehunah. Even
in the United States, where for years the federations and the
synagogues tried to stay apart on the separationist grounds
dominant in the U.S.A. with regard to "church" and "state," the
last two decades have witnessed a growing together of these
institutions. In France, following the way of the country, the
keter kehunah was dominant for years in the form of the
Consistoire. Equivalent institutions have emerged in the keter
malkhut (CRIF and the FSJU), and the keter torah itself is
developed from out of the Consistoire structure.15
What about contemporary Israel? In the Jewish state, the regime
that was chosen and adjudged the best in the pioneering period
was consociational, in the sense that consensus democracy tries
to keep everybody in the system, even at a price. The
consociational system was developed at the end of the modern
epoch. We do not yet know what the best postmodern regime is.
Consociationalism in Israel was developed at the end of the
modern epoch. By the mid-1960s, it had ceased to be the
comprehensive system it was in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Today
it is a residual system in many respects. The parties still
reflect the effort to keep diverse publics tied together within
the system but the people no longer see themselves as fitting
neatly into the various camps and parties, the movements that
made classic consociationalism viable in Israel.
The same thing is true in the diaspora. Increasingly, the
trusteeship notion is under assault by groups that want to do it
themselves, that are less willing to entrust their participation
or money or anything else to trustees. This is more than
demanding greater accountability. They want to have "hands-on"
control. Surely they want greater accountability, but even their
willingness to have accountable office-holders has diminished
somewhat. I would not try to speculate what will develop. We
are, after all, only in the middle of the second generation of
the postmodern epoch. It is far too early to begin to make any
assessments as to what will end up being the best regime either
for the state or for the diaspora.
What we can say is that there is likely to be no less of a
commitment to democracy, with strong elements of liberal
democracy that developed in the latter part of the modern epoch
that are part of the Jewish future. Which leaves us with the
question of bridging the gap.
It was relatively easy to modify Jewish aristocratic
republicanism when it was the norm under the classic regime
because of the fact that leaders and other elites were expected
to have both occupations and shared practices, and that publics
and leaders alike shared a sense of being bound by a common Torah
and common Yir'at Shamayim. Modernity and post-modernity has
kept the idea that was once more exclusively Jewish and spread it
that leadership is not to be a leisure class but to be a working
class. If anything, postmodernity has turned matters around.
Leadership is very much a working class whereas the rest of the
population is increasingly a leisure class. In every field
elites work harder than the ordinary public is expected to work.
Now the ordinary public may work just as hard. I do not think
the distinction between elites and publics is such an easy one
and everybody decides how hard he or she wants to work depending
on circumstances, expectations, and ambitions, but there is no
question that if one is going to be in leadership position one
has to work hard.
But the sharing of practices is a different problem, certainly in
the Jewish sphere. If we were to take many of the countries of
the West, certainly a country like the United States, the
equivalent of shared practices today is sports. That is why the
extraordinary emphasis on sports in the United States and
increasingly in other parts of the world as well. People do not
maintain much in the way of patriotic practices any more. In the
United States, people do not serve in the army any more as a
shared practice, but they do do sports.
For most non-observant Jews, however, there are no new shared
practices of the quality of religious observance and Talmud
Torah. Look how many Jews no longer or never participate in those
shared practices. "Giving" is seen by some as a replacement, but
giving is not a shared practice in the same sense as membership
and participation in the congregation. A shared practice
involves rituals. The rituals themselves are part of the event.
Going to a certain cycle of meetings has become a rather pale
shared practice for "giving." If we see how the top contributors
to the UJA and Federations give, we see that they have created a
kind of neo-Sadducean set of rituals, just as there are
traditional Pharisaic rituals of observance, with its own
calendar and practices -- "dinners," "the campaign," missions,
and meetings of various sizes and shapes. In short, it is
possible to sketch out the rhythm of people who are active in the
keter malkhut in the United States. They literally have monthly
events through the course of the year that people key themselves
up for and participate in.
It is very difficult to develop successful shared practices that
have the power of ritual. Seder in the United States, for
example, has become a shared American practice as much or more
than a shared Jewish practice. While 90 percent, plus or minus,
of American Jews claim that they participate in a Seder
subjectively, in many cases it may be a shared family meal, no
more, and have no Jewish content to it. To assume that this is a
shared Jewish practice is true only at the lowest sociological
level. On the other hand, certain religious non-Jews have
adopted it as a religious practice in which there is a ritual and
a meaning and an activity that is linked to freedom or "roots"
with more content than many "Jewish" sedarim.
At the same time, Jews may be much more committed to Thanksgiving
than the generality of the American population precisely because
they can be unambiguously American about it. Thanksgiving was
supposed to be a ritual for home and community. Now, however,
Thanksgiving is becoming a restaurant-centered practice for many.
Going out to buy a meal commercially means that it is changing to
become questionable as a ritual. The Detroit Lions game is more
of a ritual on Thanksgiving today than is the meal for more and
more people.
In Israel, voting is very definitely a meaningful ritual
practice. The difference between voting in Israel and voting in
the United States is stark. In Israel it is a Shabbaton, a
holiday. People go to the polls in their neighborhoods and see
their friends and neighbors voting along with them in a holiday
spirit. In Israel, there is almost universal voting, officially
about 80 percent for Jews and Arabs alike. Given the way
registration is conducted there, studies have shown that 10
percent of the people on the list do not live in the country and
another 10 percent are comprised of aged people, the sick, the
traveling, and everything else. An 80 percent turnout is as
close to 100 percent as is physically or humanly possible. The
state is still new enough that the act of voting is truly a very
important ritual practice. In the United States we can see by
the low voting turnouts how voting has ceased to be a ritual
practice in that sense.
The problem of maintaining ritual practices is linked with
maintaining a rhythm of life, about elsewhere as having a life
rhythm whichfollowing a calendar that has meaning. That is
where, in the United States, Thanksgiving, for example, fits into
a calendar reflecting the rhythm of the American way of life. It
is a sign of the times that fewer Americans today talk about the
American way of life, people talk about lifestyles of Americans.
It is a very telling shift in language.
Clearly, there is a rhythm of Jewish life and there are those who
live by it. In Israel, Jews, whether they are religiously
observant or not, must take note of it. Outside of Israel the
number of Jews who follow that rhythm in its fullness, in its
completeness, is small. Some communities have created another
rhythm.
In both Israel and the diaspora this accommodation begins with
the liberal democratic distinction between public and private
spheres, then defining the public sphere as a place where
traditional religious norms including certain minimal norms of
observance (e.g., kashrut and basic rituals of the Jewish rhythm
at public institutions and functions) are to be maintained. In
essence, public institutions have a covert or subsidiary
educational function designed to teach Jewish tradition in some
variant of its classic form. At the same time evey individual
clearly has the right to define his or her form and degree of
Jewish expression including religious expression.
Moreover, in Israel matters of personal status, especially
marriage and divorce, are by law left in the hands of the
recognized religious leaders of the various recognized religious
groups within the state -- Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. This
enables the state itself to be relatively neutral toward the
religions of its citizens while at the same time protecting the
communal dimension of those religions, particularly the Jewish
and Muslim. This is particularly important in a state of the
Jewish people where religious, ethnic and national identity of
Jews is so intertwined. In turn the state provides support for
the educational, cultural and religious activities of all of its
ethno-religious communities.
Implications
Were all this simply a matter of biblical teachings, we might say
that Judaism has a classic tradition in harmony with democracy
but that it has long since disappeared. That is emphatically not
the case. There is a Jewish political tradition which has
persisted as an integral part of Jewish tradition in which all of
these principles have found expression throughout Jewish history,
while the Jews were in their land and in the diaspora, not
without struggle and not perfectly by any means any more than can
be said of any other people, but in real ways. We at the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs have been exploring that
tradition since our founding and have compiled detailed evidence
for its existence and influence, citing chapter and verse. We
have published the results of our investigations under the best
academic auspices and in more general form, making them available
to a variety of audiences. Moreover, we have emphasized the
importance of the Jewish political tradition in helping Jews to
become better citizens of Israel and the Jewish polity as a
whole. For us, the tradition offers standards of evaluation of
Israel's political institutions and behavior in proper democratic
fashion as well as those of the diaspora.
The principal way in which the Jewish polity has tried to bridge
the gap between communal existence and individual need up to now
is through a recognition of the stronger separation of public and
private which fits in with liberal democracy. Individuals are
free to choose how they want to live their lives but the public
calendar will remain a calendar that follows the principles of
the Jewish rhythm.
This is different from the pattern of 80 to 100 years ago. When
Jews ceased to keep kosher, they ceased to keep kosher in their
institutions as well as in their private lives. But, in the late
1960s and subsequently in the American diaspora, which had gone
furthest in a rejudaization of the public institutions, some
standards of expected public observance were established. That
is when American Jewish leadership came to the point where they
wanted to bridge the gap. Before that they had accepted the
premises of modern liberal democracy whole and were abandoning
the older premises of communal democracy entirely. After the Six
Day War and the events of the 1960s, not only the the United
States but in France and elsewhere as well, those who were active
and concerned at all recognized the importance of public
rejudaization. That is when the effort to bridge the gap began
as a postmodern phenomenon.
Is this public-private distinction tenable? That is an adapt
public institutions to their private behavior. It is an open
question.
Even if it is transmitable or it continues to exist in Israel for
political reasons, there may be more chance for the situation to
change in Israel than in the diaspora. Precisely because there
are boundaries and it is not so easy to stop being Jewish, there
may be more insistance on the part of the secular majority that
public institutions square with private belief and practice. A
diaspora Jew who chooses to go to a synagogue dinner, to be a
member of a synagogue, or to be active in a community federation,
expects to get kosher food at the annual banquet and say Birkat
Hamazon after the meal. It is part of being Jewish. But if
someone lives in Israel and is told that he or she must serve in
the army for three years and while in the army, must eat kosher
-- one cannot put milk in one's coffee so easily -- there may be
a point where secular people will say, "Enough, we refuse to be
forced to live this way when we are doing our service to our
country. You are asking us to fulfill our military obligations
and we will not be forced to be what we are not in the process."
So in a certain respect, the possibility is even more likely that
this form of bridging will run into trouble in Israel if the
cleavage between public and private behavior grows too great.
The second question is, is there sufficient bridging? Assuming
we could at this point strengthen that form of bridging, have we
found a sufficient solution to our problem? Let us say everybody
agrees to keep the liberal democratic norms in private behavior
but, because we want to maintain a communal framework as well, we
will maintain common public norms.
Now that liberal democracy has triumphed in both the Western and
ex-Communist worlds and in its triumph has taken on more radical
forms, its weaknesses as well as its greatness are becoming
exposed. By excessively atomizing society, it has achieved the
unintended consequences of weakening the social bonds necessary
for even liberal civil society to be a good society, not to speak
of its inability to take cognizence of the very real existence of
communities whose tenaciousness constantly surprises the
partisans of undiluted liberal democracy. Thus, if the classic
Jewish political tradition is no longer able to alone provide the
answers that moderns and post-modern humans seek, the
contemporary refusal of many Jews to abandon either communal
democracy or liberal democracy and the struggle of the Jews as a
people and a polity to find an appropriate synthesis should speak
to contemporary humans.
Democracy and Federal Liberty
In this article we have confined our discussion of communal
democracy to Switzerland and the Jewish people. As post-World
War II political anthropology has demonstrated, there are many
other examples of communal democracy ranging from the tribal to
post-colonial syntheses of tradition and modernity.16 Our
concentration here on Western models is justified in that those
are the models to which the classic Jewish political tradition
contributed and to which contemporary Jews adhere.
The Bible emphasizes communal liberty and what the Puritans in
the seventeenth century defined as federal liberty, that is to
say, the liberty to live up to the terms of the covenant
(federal, from the Latin foedus meaning covenant), rather than
individual liberty, which, as natural liberty, meant the lack of
restraint except insofar as nature itself restrains us all.17
Communal liberty stands in contrast to atomistic individualism as
the highest good. The Jews, like the Swiss, have emphasized
individual liberty within the community, not apart from it. This
approach differs from the radical individualism espoused by many
in the contemporary Western world. Hence those espousing the
latter will inevitably accuse Judaism of being undemocratic. Here
we have a confrontation between different understandings of what
constitutes liberty and, by extension, democracy. Despite its
claims, radical individualism is not the only starting point for
defining democracy.
We are helped in this by examining the concept of federal
liberty. Federal liberty can be interpreted rather narrowly as
some would have it or it can be interpreted more broadly. It
can be interpreted as having to do primarily with religious
commitment as the Puritans did in the past and many of the
ultra-Orthodox do today, or it may be interpreted as having to do
with the maintenance of constitutional liberties, as the U.S.
Supreme Court has interpreted it with regard to racial and gender
discrimination. In both cases, judges have relied implicitly
upon the principle of federal liberty -- which they enunciate
under the terms of what is constitutional and what is not -- to
modify what would otherwise be, in their eyes, unbridled
individualism.
For example, in terms of natural liberty, if a restaurant owner
wanted to close his restaurant to use by people of another race,
he would be able to do so since the restaurant is his property.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that, under the terms of
the United States Constitution, a resident of the United States
has, explicitly or implicitly, accepted that Constitution by
virtue of his residence, and cannot so discriminate, since such
an act would be unconstitutional. This is precisely what federal
liberty is about.
Federal liberty in this sense stands in contrast to natural
liberty, that is to say, the right of every individual to do as
he or she pleases, restrained only by nature. The latter is only
possible outside of society. Otherwise it is both self- and
socially destructive to the highest degree. Governments,
including and especially democratic governments, are instituted
to overcome the deficiencies of natural liberty which lead to
anarchy and the war of all against all, whereby the strongest win
at the expense of all others. So, if the biblical teaching
stands in opposition to unbridled individualism, that is a sign
that it is among the best friends of true liberty which is based
on restraining natural liberty through covenant.
The distinction between federal and natural liberty is a starting
point for the development of a contemporary theory of communal
democracy that includes a strong dimension of individual liberty
and rights, guaranteed constitutionally. A proper theory of
rights and obligations is another dimension. In the Jewish
tradition of communal democracy, obligations are the source of
rights, that is to say, the covenantal obligations of Jews to be
a holy people establish a set of rights for every individual.18
This theory must then be translated into meaningful practice.
Notes
1. Vincent Ostrom, "Hobbes, Covenant, and Constitution," Publius
10:4 (Fall 1980).
2. Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967).
3. Daniel J. Elazar, The American Constitutional Tradition
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
4. Denis de Rougemont, La Suisse: Ou L'Histoire D'un Peuple
Heureux (Paris: Hachette, 1965); Benjamin Barber, Death of
Communal Liberty: History of a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1974).
5. See Daniel J. Elazar and Stuart A. Cohen, The Jewish Polity:
Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Daniel J. Elazar,
ed., Authority, Power and Leadership in the Jewish Polity: Cases
and Issues (Lanham, Md.: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and
University Press of America, 1991); and Daniel J. Elazar, ed.,
Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its
Contemporary Uses (Lanham, Md.: Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs and University Press of America, 1983).
6. Hans Kohn, "Israel and Hellas," Chapter 1 in Nationalism
(Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1965); Michael Walzer, Exodus and
Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
7. Menahem Elon, The Principles of Jewish Law (Jerusalem:
Encyclopedia Judaica, 1975).
8. Stuart A. Cohen, The Three Crowns: Structures of Communal
Discourse in Early Rabbinic Society (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
9. Cf., e.g., William Everett, God's Federal Republic, (New York:
Paulist Press, 1988).
10. Cf. Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United
States (New York: Arno Press, 1970); Mordecai Kaplan, The
Religion of Ethical Nationhood: Judaism's Contribution to World
Peace (New York: Macmillan 1970).
11. Daniel J. Elazar, "Toward a Meaningful World Covenant,"
Reconstructionist 37, No. 6 (September 1971):14-20.
12. Jewish Polity, op. cit.
13. "Hok Yesod Hashfita" (Basic Law: The Judicature), in The
Constitution of Israel (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs, 1988).
14. See entire issue "Israel as a Jewish State," Jewish Political
Studies Review 2:3-4 (Fall 1990): including Daniel J. Elazar,
"Israel as a Jewish State"; Alan Dowty, "Jewish Political
Traditions and Contemporary Israeli Politics"; Benyamin
Neuberger, "Does Israel Have a Liberal-Democratic Tradition?";
Yosef Gorny, "The Jewish State and the Jewish People: Israeli
Intellectual Thought from the Six-Day War to the 1980s"; Shmuel
Sandler, "The Origins of the National and the Statist Traditions
in Zionist Foreign Policy," and Efraim Inbar, "Jews, Jewishness,
and Israel's Foreign Policy."
15. Daniel J. Elazar, People and Polity: The Organizational
Dynamics of World Jewry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1989); Charles Hoffman, Gray Dawn (New York: Harper Collins,
1992).
16. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964); Lucy Mair, Primitive Government
(London: Scholars Press, 1977); Lloyd Rudolf and Suzanne Rudolf,
The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984).
17. John Winthrop provided the classic formulation of the
distinction in his "A Model of Christian Charity." See also
Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1939) and The New England Mind: From
Colony to Province (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953).
18. Haim Cohn, Human Rights in Jewish Law (New York: Ktav, 1984);
Daniel J. Elazar, Jonathan Sarna, and Rela Geffen Monson, eds., A
Double Bond: The Constitutional Documents of American Jewry
(Lanham, Md.: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and University
Press of America, 1992). See also entire issue "Obligations and
Rights in the Jewish Political Tradition, Jewish Political
Studies Review 3:3-4 (Fall 1991): including Daniel J. Elazar,
"Obligations and Rights in the Jewish Political Tradition: Some
Preliminary Observations"; Harvey Shulman, "The Political and the
Sacred: Political Obligation and the Book of Deuteronomy";
Norbert M. Samuelson, "The Right to Belief in Jewish Philosophy";
Ira Robinson, "Individual and Community: Rights and Obligations
as Reflected in Two Nineteenth Century Responsa"; Gershon C.
Bacon, "Haredi Conceptions of Obligations and Rights: Polish
Jewry, c. 1900-1939"; Alan Mittleman, "Two Orthodox Jewish
Theories of Rights: Sol Roth and Isaac Breuer"; and Daniel J.
Elazar, "Is There a Practical Way to Bridge the Gap Between
Traditional Jewish and Modern Expectations of Rights and
Obligations?
This article is a revised version of a paper prepared for the
Tenth Workshop in Jewish Political Studies under the auspices of
the International Center for the University Teaching of Jewish
Civilization and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
Jerusalem, July 1991 / Av 5751
