After the fall of the Second Temple in the first century, Judaism gradually became a lawyerocracy, a society ruled by lawyers. Jews call these lawyers “rabbis,” but think about the training rabbis traditionally receive–it’s primarily many years of law school, learning the Talmud and other sources of Jewish law until one becomes sufficiently expert to be a legal advisor and judge.
Jewish lawyerocracy helped keep the Jewish people united during their dispersion. One could travel from one Jewish community to a far-flung one hundreds of miles away, and be assured that others would accept you as a fellow Jew, and that the laws and prayers would be quite similar.
But lawyerocracy also caused problems. For one thing, lawyers are trained to see every problem as a legal problem, and to therefore to address problems with more and more law. Thus, from relatively modest beginnings, halacha [Jewish law] gradually took over every aspect of daily life.
To be sure, the rabbis developed doctrines to mitigate over-legalization, such as the precept that laws that a community has longed ceased to follow are no longer laws. But such precepts were rarely followed in practice. Instead, law was law, custom became law, and new laws were created to help ensure that the existing laws weren’t violated. For many Jews, law became an onerous burden rather than a path to connecting with G-d.
Another problem was that rabbis, i.e., lawyers, often became the community’s leaders and rulers. From Sa’adia Gaon serving as Exilarch in the Eastern Holy Roman Empire to the Council of the Four Lands in eighteenth century Eastern Europe, rabbis frequently held secular power as well as religious authority. And as Lord Acton noted, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Over the centuries, the power accrued by the rabbis was subject to explicit and implicit criticism by various dissenting movements and individuals. The Karaites believed the rabbis had strayed too far from the written Torah. Kabbalists implicitly found Jewish legalism inadequate to explain the precarious state of the Jewish people, and the chaotic state of the world. Various messianic movements sought immediate redemption, with overthrowing the yoke of the law often high on their agendas. Early Hasidism revolted against the notion that being learned in the Talmud, something unattainable for many poor, rural Jews, was a higher value than a spiritual connection to G-d. The Reform movement sought to reorient Judaism around ethical monotheism and prophetic values, correctly predicting that the lawyerocracy would largely fail to win Jews’ allegiance once they integrated into Christian societies. Socialist Jews held public Yom Kippur feasts to mock pious adherence to the law at the expense of material concerns.
And of course, Zionism was itself a dramatic revolt against the authority of the rabbis, insisting that Jews take responsibility for their own fates and restore Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Yisrael. Zionists utterly rejected the accepted view of the lawyerocracy that Jews needed to wait for the Messiah to be redeemed, and should obediently obey the law in the meantime.
Thus, the irony. Zionism, especially in its dominant secular variety, was the culmination of centuries of percolating distrust of the notion that the law is Jews’ salvation. And yet the notion that law matters above all, and lawyers can be entrusted with the fate of the Jewish people, obviously has persisted in the cultural DNA of Israeli Jews.
The Israeli Supreme Court has accrued to itself more power than any other Supreme Court in the world. Even more striking, the attorney general has power to by herself undermine almost any Israeli law or policy, a power that is shocking to those of us used to the American concept of separation of powers. And both the Supreme Court and the Attorney General have seized these powers based on only the flimsiest of rationales.
Hence, the irony referred to in the title of this blog post. Secular, left-leaning Zionists have seen their power erode for decades. The peace process is on life support. State-run industries have been replaced by economic liberalization. Rabbinical authority governs family and conversion law with ever-increasing stringency. Religious Zionists have gradually replaced secular kibbutzniks in the military elite. Shockingly illiberal parties are now routinely serving in government.
