Parashat Acharei Mot-K’doshim – Accepting Imperfections
The Midrash on Acharei Mot, the first half of this week’s double portion, includes the teaching that laws about permitted and prohibited relationships were needed because people were already doing these things. I would see this as a truism for all laws that exist – laws around fraud exist because some people over the centuries have sought to dupe others in order to take their money, while laws about the treatment of slaves were needed because people had slaves and did mistreat them, and so on.
The laws and rules of Leviticus, Torah and commentaries for most of Jewish history did not know democracy and the modern nation state that acts as lawmaker and rule-setter. However, many of the principles of law-making were drawn by the mainly Christian nation builder of Europe and then North America. And, through the ages, what people were doing would be a prime driver of law-making.
However, this pattern of law and regulation following what people are doing, often only after some considerable delay, is now proving much more costly to society as the pace and scope of change increases. We might take, for example, the banning of smart phones for children, which was first done in Australia and is now spreading to other countries. We have had to wait for evidence, often at the greatest cost for some children, before such bans are being considered.
As a different example, the emergence of vaping as a preferable practice to smoking allowed a new industry to develop in an unregulated way until evidence of danger accumulated, and this is not to mention the emerging picture of some shops using vapes as a cover for other criminal activity.
Law and regulation seem always to be playing catch up and there are always arguments about how much law and regulation should control and how much freedom every individual should have. And this is before we consider AI and its massive impacts. These are challenging time.
In response, some people are developing a preference for the ‘benign dictator’ sort of political and law-making leadership. In a way, the Torah presented this model, with God as the ultimate such ‘benign dictator’. On another day, we could go from this point into a theological discussion, but that it not my purpose today. Suffice it to say, no human being has ever remained a benign dictator, and I don’t know of a country in which a dictatorship has remained benign for any length of time.
Modern orthodox leader, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, stated, “Democracy is not prescribed in the Bible, nor is it an end in itself. But it is the best means currently available for protecting the values at the heart of a biblical vision of society.” Examining the story of revelation at Sinai and that of Jethro and Moses that preceded it, Lord Sacks said, “The contrast is clear. Israel receives its constitution from God, but it learns its system of government from the experience of other people … All attempts to confer transcendental justification on a particular system of government – be it the Divine Right of Kings or the Thousand Year Reich or the Communist utopia – is at best mistaken, at worst a form of idolatry.” [i]
Elsewhere, Rabbi Jill Jacobs warned a couple of years ago, “We are in the midst of a democratic crisis. Global freedom has declined for 18 (now 20) years in a row.”[ii] She went on to assert that such times are dangerous for all, and for Jews in particular. We are seeing this reality in the spate of attacks on Jewish buildings and, by extension, the Jewish community.
We are approaching elections for local government, and for the devolved Scottish and Welsh parliaments. Assessing every political party with reference to the moral values drawn from the Torah, in general, and this week’s Torah portion, in particular, would be one way in which our Judaism might guide us. We might also consider parties and their candidates on the way in which they affirm and model a commitment to liberal democracy, as our form of Judaism can only continue to exist in a country that strengthens its democracy in these challenging times.
Liberal democracy is imperfect. It might best be described as the least worst system of government. Our Torah portion reminds us in all sorts of ways that human beings are imperfect and that God is the only perfection. Nonetheless, may we remember that in this week’s Torah portion, in Leviticus 19:2, we are called to be holy, because God is holy.
May each of us continue to strive for holiness, even though we, as individuals are, and everything created by humanity is, imperfect.
May we continue to strive towards a (near-)perfect society, in which the love of neighbour (Lev. 19:18) and love of stranger (Lev. 19:34) guide our laws and regulation. Amen
- Rabbi Richard Jacobi serves East London & Essex Liberal Synagogue
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[i] https://rabbisacks.org/archive/democracy-and-religious-values/
[ii] https://truah.org/resources/fragments3-democracy-jill-jacobs-more-than-just-elections/