For the first time, we just blew the Shofar and started Selichot for this year, announcing the imminent arrival of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as we have now begun the month of introspection and refinement we should search for in the month of Elul.
Our Parasha speaks about the necessity of having power, in terms of our legal system, distributed evenly amongst the Judges, Priests, Prophets and Kings. Justice must be accessible and impartial. Procedures must be followed and there is to be a supreme court to deal with hard cases:
In our Parasha we find the system where the King of Israel is also commanded by the Torah, and the passages are phrased in the negative: It teaches what a King must not do (rather than what he should do). He should not “acquire great numbers of horses,” or “take many wives” or “accumulate large amounts of silver and gold”. These are the temptations of power, and as we know from the rest of the bible, even the wisest of all, King Salomon was himself vulnerable.
A fundamental Torah idea is that leadership is service and privilege, not dominion or power or status or superiority. Even the King is commanded to be humble: he must constantly read the Torah “so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God … and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites”. It is not always so easy to be humble when everyone is bowing down before you and when you have the power of life and death over your subjects.
The larger theological question is why, with a perfect Torah and self-refinement in Holiness would a legal system even be necessary? Do not the prophets speak of times without war, evil and malice – times of peace and justice?
Unlike some other faiths, we do not believe in perfect people, we believe in people who are involved constantly in perfecting themselves – individuals who through living a Torah life are elevated to tremendous levels of “Devekut” (spiritual attachment) and connection with God and are able to change their character, becoming a more refined and crafted person. One who is able to live with the highest levels of integrity and morality.
The Myth of “perfect people” is possibly one of the most dangerous ideas that has ever arisen: individuals who make no mistakes, who’s every act is automatically justified regardless of the moral value of such actions: we can immediately see this in lives of famous dictators and some religious personalities.
The bible is instead filled with fallible human beings. Our Torah is a powerful cure for the moral and spiritual ills of man: not a quest to find a perfect one. To create Law and Customs that honor and protect all.
Our goal is to be a perfecting society – a people striving to do better, to achieve more, to do more good and excellence rather than mistakes and missed opportunities: All of us have erred significantly and severely over the last year, it is now time to face it and to speak it out in Prayer and Teshuvah – to begin the process of preparing for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – to become judges of ourselves and designers of our betterment and growth over the coming year.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Refael Cohen