Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship

By Meir Y. Soloveichik

Ever since Plato’s Republic, the study of statecraft has been a staple of Western discourse, and so has the study of particular leaders. Although Jewish scholars, thinkers, and popularizers have contributed notably to this genre, strikingly few have turned their attention to the history of Jewish leaders—that is, leaders specifically of the Jewish people—in particular. 

And yet there has been no lack of such outstanding figures, from the biblical period of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land and once again in present-day Israel or during the millennia of exile and formal Jewish statelessness in the Diaspora. This book, devoted to ten of the most colorful, fascinating, and consequential Jewish political leaders over the past three millennia, fills the gap. 

Among the ten, men and women alike, some were firmly bound to Judaic religious teachings and others less so, but guiding all of them was the fixed lodestar of their own Jewish identity. By the mid-20th century, the legacy of past generations would inspire modern successors bent on the re-founding of the sovereign Jewish state, one of the greatest political feats in human history. 

In delving into the unique circumstances and predicaments faced by these ten, and into the characteristics that mark them and their statesmanship as specifically Jewish, readers will also become familiar with what Jewish tradition has to say about the demands of statesmanship and, by inference, with the qualities needed by successful Jewish political leaders encountering the challenges of today and tomorrow.    

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Jun 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781641773294

Meir Y. Soloveichik

Born and raised in Chicago, Meir Soloveichik attended Yeshiva College in New York, studied religious philosophy at the Yale Divinity School, and earned his PhD in religion from Princeton University. He serves as Director of Yeshiva University’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought and as Rabbi at Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.  Soloveichik has published widely on both Jewish and American history and has lectured around the world on the intersection of religious and political thought. Most recently, Bible 365, a six-days-a-week podcast that guides listeners through the entire Hebrew Bible, has struck a deep chord among audiences religious and non-religious alike. Soloveichik has testified before the U.S. Congress on the subjects of law and religion and served as a member of the State Department’s Commission on Inalienable Human Rights.   

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

‘David, king of Israel, lives and endures."

This talmudic maxim, pronounced by adults with reverence, put to music and sung by children at a young age, has helped to keep alive the memory—and the lasting impact—of a man who died millennia ago. In the minds and hearts of Jews around the world, and perhaps especially in the capital city of Jerusalem that he created, the spirit of that monarch, the subject of this book’s first chapter, does indeed live on—making him, along with Abraham and Moses, one of the most revered figures in Jewish history.

To say that the biblical David still lives and endures is also to say that David’s brand of Jewish statesmanship, joining political genius with ardent faith, profoundly matters—fully as much today as in the 10th century BCE. This renders it all the more striking that so few studies of Jewish statesmanship exist.

To be sure, writings about statecraft itself have long been a staple of Western literature, and some of the best-known examples of the genre are rightly honored as seminal works of political philosophy. The same can be said for works focusing on individual leaders, from the writings of Thucydides on Pericles in ancient Greece to, in the modern period, Winston Churchill’s meditations on the Duke of Marlborough or Henry Kissinger on Klemens von Metternich. All reflect the justified conviction that history’s most influential actors have enduring lessons to impart concerning the character of political leadership.

Modern Jewish scholars and thinkers have assuredly been among those contributing to the study of the subject of statesmanship in general. Few, however, have turned their attention to the history of Jewish leaders in particular—that is, leaders specifically of the Jewish people (as distinct from Jews who have risen to greatness in service to non-Jewish regimes or causes).

Nor is this lacuna a recent phenomenon: in the brimmingly ample corpus of learned texts compiled by or about Jews over the millennia, it is difficult to point to studies whose central concern has been either with the particular nature of Jewish statecraft (again, in this book’s distinct use of the term) or with outstanding exemplars of that calling.

One may be tempted to attribute this seeming neglect to the relative lack of practitioners of Jewish statecraft, either during the biblical period of sovereignty in the Holy Land and of sovereignty once again in present-day Israel or during the millennia of exile and formal Jewish statelessness. Indeed, one might have conjectured that precisely because Jews lacked a landed existence for so many centuries, true examples of statesmanship were simply not to be found in the exilic era: a time when Jews enjoyed neither the national independence nor the national power so manifestly present in the life of King David.

That, however, would be a mistake. Statecraft is, at its essence, the marshaling and application of available power on behalf of one’s people—and also, in the Jewish case, the representation of one’s people before the powerful. During those stateless millennia, it was often precisely the challenges of life in dispersion and subjugation that gave rise to some of the most compelling embodiments of Jewish statesmanship on the part of figures who refused to give up on the Jews as a people and who acted in the political realm to safeguard their posterity.

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This returns us to our enterprise here in Providence and Power.

The entire biblical book of Esther—the subject of our 2nd chapter—can be read precisely as a meditation on the nature of Jewish leadership in the exilic age immediately following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Unveiled in this text are the remarkable political instincts that, driven by the young queen’s conviction of having been placed by providence in a position to act on behalf of a nation dispersed—but a nation still—will enable her to save her people from annihilation. As her cousin Mordecai pointedly reminds Esther at one critical juncture: Perhaps you have arisen to the throne for just this moment.

In later generations, the specifically political aspects of Esther’s life have often gone unappreciated, but her person has nevertheless been celebrated every year on the Jewish holiday of Purim. The same, sadly, cannot be said for Shlomtsion, the queen of Second-Temple Judea whom we meet in our 3rd chapter. That so few today know anything about her shows how even a leader in a period of Jewish independence can remain unstudied and unsung. Like Esther, who survives the court of a manic Persian king and his rabidly anti-Semitic vizier, Shlomtsion makes her own gifts manifest amid the mayhem in the fratricidal court of the latter-day Hasmoneans circa 100 BCE. In rising to the throne, and in working alongside the spiritual leader Shimon ben Shetaḥ, she is able to seize and to redeem the last interval of Jerusalem’s independence before the arrival of the Romans, by whom, in 70 CE, Jerusalem will be destroyed once again.

And even with that destruction, Jewish statesmanship did not disappear. The heritage of Shlomtsion and Shimon ben Shetaḥ would live on in the actions of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, the heroic savior of rabbinic Judaism and the focal figure of chapter 4. Although he did not devote his life specifically to politics, his legacy is bound up with two defining political moments: his own dawning realization that the city of Jerusalem was doomed to destruction at the hands of the Romans, and his consequent initiative in successfully ensuring a haven for Jewish continuity outside of the Judean capital. This profound political and strategic response to the second devastating conquest of Judea’s capital is a study in formidable and heartbreaking decisions forced upon a Jewish leader at a time of extreme crisis and requiring a series of tragic sacrifices in an against-all-odds gamble to preserve the Jewish future.

Moving on, other stirring exemplars of statesmanship in the exilic history of the Jewish people include, in chapter 5, Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), a 15th-century Sephardi sage who combines his role as a scholar and religious leader with high service, also on behalf of his people, to the governments of Spain, Portugal, and Venice. In a way not seen in Judaism for some time, Abravanel joins a subtly masterful understanding of realpolitik to faith in God’s providential care for His people.

A century-and-a-half later, and in a similar vein, Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657, chapter 6), another Sephardi rabbi, will seize the freedom provided by the Dutch Republic to lobby Oliver Cromwell for the readmission of Jews to England, from where the entire Jewish population had been banished in 1290. In an especially poignant example of the workings of politics and providence, Menasseh dies convinced of his failure to make use of his own providential moment in history; in fact, as our retrospective study demonstrates, his example is nothing short of inspirational.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, with the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment and increasingly, for West European Jews, civic emancipation and enfranchisement, another fascinating form of Jewish statesmanship emerges. Some individuals, including descendants of those who had been cut off from Jewish faith, or who had cut themselves off, arise to speak on behalf not only of Jewish civil rights but also of Jewish national restoration. One of them, whom we encounter in chapter 7, is Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881). Baptized at the age of twelve by his father, who has regarded his own Jewish heritage with utter scorn, the younger Disraeli becomes so entranced with the role played by his ancestral people in history, and by the refusal of that people to succumb and disappear, that he is driven, perhaps against his own political self-interest, to place his Jewishness at the heart of his political persona. As a matchless British politician, and as prime minister of the United Kingdom, he will argue in his writings and public statements that a Jewish reclaiming of the Holy Land is yet to come.

Disraeli’s prescience will soon be confirmed in the rise of another public Jew: an assimilated Austrian journalist, lawyer, and activist named Theodor Herzl (1860–1904, chapter 8). The latter’s own transformation, from alienated skeptic into the founder of modern political Zionism, is so unlikely that only providence may seem to offer a coherent explanation for all that he accomplishes, all that he sets in motion, and all that he inspires.

No less unlikely is the trajectory, tracked in chapter 9, of another assimilated Jew, the American jurist Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941). From publicly militating against any self-identification of American Jews with specifically Jewish causes, this associate justice of the Supreme Court and confidant of President Woodrow Wilson will go on to play a critical role—some say, the critical role—in Britain’s announcement in 1917 of the Balfour Declaration endorsing the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home: the first major achievement of the Zionist movement following the death of Theodor Herzl.

By the mid-20th century, finally, a number of modern Jewish leaders, even as they dedicate themselves to the refounding of the sovereign Jewish state—itself one of the greatest political feats in human history—will look back for inspiration and a sense of fellowship to the outstanding figures of the past. We meet two of the most outstanding such figures in chapter 10. They have much in common, and profound differences as well.

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), founder and first prime minister of the state of Israel, will make the decisions that prove critical for the new nation’s birth and survival. His statecraft, as we shall see, is markedly inspired by the Hebrew Bible and by his personal admiration for the leaders described in it. By contrast, his somewhat younger political rival Menachem Begin (1913–1992, prime minister 1977–1983) will constantly remind his fellow Israelis that their national inspiration must be drawn not only from the heroes of the biblical age but also from the centuries of Jewish leaders and believers who followed: a covenantal connection to the past that is manifest in every aspect of Begin’s own life and leadership. As I will argue in the book’s final chapter, I believe that Menachem Begin is the ultimate embodiment of Jewish statesmanship in our time, not because he played the most critical role in Israel’s birth—that honor goes to Ben-Gurion—but because he embodied the fusion of faith and fortitude, the embrace of both providence and power, once personified by David, king of Israel.

What can be said about Ben-Gurion and Begin can be said about all of the figures in these pages: they have certain features in common, and some features that make them profoundly and intriguingly distinctive. As the book will describe, many of them, like Begin, placed traditional faith at the heart of their statesmanship, from the biblical examples of David and Esther to Menasseh ben Israel. Others, including Disraeli and Brandeis, had, like Ben-Gurion, a more complicated relationship with Jewish religious tradition. But guiding the efforts of all, whether in the ancient or modern periods of sovereignty or in the centuries of exile in between, is the fixed lodestar of their own Jewish identity and the high compelling duty of service to the well-being of the Jewish people.

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This volume, which originated in a series of lectures for the Tikvah Fund, is devoted to some of the most fascinating and consequential Jewish political leaders over the past three millennia. In studying the unique challenges faced by these leaders, and the characteristics that mark them as Jewish statesmen—bearers, that is, of a highly particular history, heritage, and identity—we also examine what Jewish tradition has to say about the demands of statecraft itself, and by inference about the qualities needed by successful Jewish political leaders encountering the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Pondering the relative lack of biographies of seminal Jewish figures, the late Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein once ruefully remarked that our Johnsons have no Boswells. (He was referring to the 18th-century English literary genius Samuel Johnson and to James Boswell, Johnson’s faithful companion and biographer.) Indeed, too many of the greatest Jewish political figures have had no Boswells. But that only increases the importance of efforts like ours to understand the lives they lived and how they led. We have no higher duty, the political philosopher Leo Strauss admonished his students immediately after the death of Winston Churchill, than to remind ourselves and our students of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence.

It is my hope that this book will make its own contribution to understanding the political and human greatness of the Jewish past and to helping ensure this people’s future.

CHAPTER ONE

David

It is a peculiar fact that, from medieval times until today, the elaborate rituals attending the coronation ceremonies of English kings have owed a great deal to the Hebrew Bible, and specifically to the Bible’s descriptions of the coronations of King David and his dynastic successors. Even more peculiar, perhaps, is that, in all this time, not a single English monarch has been known by the name of David. The one partial exception to the rule was the uncle of Queen Elizabeth: baptized Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, he was known to his close friends as David but, upon attaining the throne in January 1936, immediately took the regnal name of Edward VIII—before abdicating the throne altogether by December of the same year.

Evidently, then, David, for the British, has been no name for a king. (The Scots have evinced a somewhat greater liking for it.) And yet, for Jews, there is and there can be no better name for a king, for no other individual has been so eternally affiliated with the very idea of Jewish monarchy. That David is thought of as the political ruler par excellence can be seen in the perennial Jewish practice of referring to him always with his honorific as David hamelekh, David the king, as if to say: "David the king." Just as Abraham, for Jews, is always Avraham avinu, Abraham our father, indicating his status as the supreme symbol of the Jewish family, and Moses is Moshe rabbeinu, Moses our master, confirming him as the supreme teacher of the Jewish faith, David hamelekh reigns supreme in the annals of Jewish statesmanship. Indeed, if we wish to learn about statesmanship from a Jewish perspective, we must turn first and foremost to his life and legend.

And what a legendary figure he was, veritably from the start. As a mere stripling, he was propelled to fame through his one-on-one victory over the notoriously invincible Goliath. Thereafter adopted by King Saul as a favored ward, only to be soon targeted as a potential rival to the throne, David gained further acclaim by surmounting a series of near-calamities until ultimately succeeding Saul on the throne. Upon being crowned, he proceeded to solidify his reputation for military brilliance by enlarging the territory of his monarchy and seizing control of the city of Jerusalem, which for centuries had been considered impregnable. Late in life he would bequeath to the next generation the task of realizing his vision of a grand Temple to God in the capital city.

So quintessentially regal is David in the Jewish imagination, so synonymous with both monarchical magnificence and uniquely exemplary statesmanship, that millions of Jewish children today are as familiar as are their elders with the five adulatory words of the beloved tune, David melekh Yisrael ḥai v’kayam: David king of Israel lives and endures!

But herein, on reflection, lies a great enigma. If Abraham is always avinu, our father, because his family has endured, and Moses is always rabbeinu, our master, because his teachings have endured, in what sense, if any, can it be said that David is always, perpetually, king of Israel?

True, his son Solomon did build the Temple about which his father had dreamed, but after Solomon’s death ten of the twelve tribes seceded from the kingdom; for the next several centuries, David’s dynasty ruled over southern Israel alone. After the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylonia in 586 BCE, no descendant of David would again sit upon the throne of Israel; the Jewish monarchy, when it did rule, was instead led by the priestly Hasmonean house. In later centuries, before disappearing altogether, the Davidic dynasty survived only in certain lesser offices established by rabbinic authority, like patriarch in the Holy Land and exilarch in the Diaspora. As a ruling royal family, the house of David endured only in the form of a messianic hope.

What, then, does it mean to declare that David king of Israel lives? To address that question, we need to define not only the generally accepted elements that constitute a true statesman but also, more particularly, what it means to speak of excellence in Jewish statesmanship.

As for the first, we can begin by distinguishing the statesman from another indispensable type of public servant: namely, the administrator or bureaucrat. The latter, all rules and regulations, excels in the analysis and management of what is; the former, all personality, impresses with his or her vision of what has come before and what is yet to be. If, at their best, administrators achieve by meeting or exceeding the demands that are put upon them, the achievements of statesmen, extensions of their unique creative capacities, are measured by their ability to lead and inspire.

This point was made by the late British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his essay On Political Judgment (1996). We tend to speak about political science, Berlin wrote, as if affairs of state obeyed universal rules; but truly great leaders decide what to do by drawing on a strength within themselves. Political judgment, in Berlin’s words, is a capacity, in the first place, for synthesis rather than analysis, for knowledge in the sense in which … conductors know their orchestras as opposed to that in which chemists know the contents of their test tubes, or mathematicians know the rules that their symbols obey.

Great leadership, in other words, reveals the inner genius of the leader, and is an art rather than a science. That is no doubt what the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, as the convener of the six-power 1878 Congress of Berlin, had in mind when he exclaimed admiringly of one participant, British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann!" (The old Jew, he is the man!).

What, then, of statesmanship from the unique perspective of Judaism? Innate political genius is certainly part of it. But at the heart of the Jewish perspective lies another, wholly different claim about the sources of great political achievement undertaken for and on behalf of the Jewish people. Political instinct is essential, but something remains that cannot be chalked up to the choices made by leaders. According to this something, Jewish success and Jewish endurance are to be seen also as the result of divine providence;