The King’s Two Torahs

 The 613^th and last mitzvah in the Torah is the commandment for each individual to write a Torah scroll. In Parshat Shoftim the Torah teaches that there is one person who is required to write a second Torah for himself. While we might have thought that a second Torah is appropriate for the Kohen Gadol as a spiritual leader or the Chief Justice of the Sanhedrin due to his legal expertise and leadership, we learn that it is the political leader, the king, who is required to write a second Torah.

Rav Kook explained who a Jewish king needs a second Torah. At Har Sinai the Jewish People accepted the Torah on two levels: personal and national. The Torah comes to refine and elevate a person and a nation. However, whereas most people are in general agreement as to what it means for an individual to be moral and ethical, it is much more difficult to find consensus on what does it mean for a nation to be moral and ethical. The king, as representative of the nation, writes a second Torah to demonstrate his (and our) commitment to utilize Torah values to guide us on a national level. In the Diaspora this means that Jewish communities must seek ways to live our Jewish values in how we operate.

In Israel this challenge is greater, for the Jewish State is supposed to be governed by Jewish values. The Jewish People went almost 2,000 years without the opportunity to apply Jewish values to the bureaucracy and institutions of the state, such as the legislature and judiciary. Without a lived tradition of how to do this, the State of Israel has been a blessed and miraculous experiment in how to apply Jewish values to nation building while navigating all of the challenges such as: partisanship and differences of opinion, protecting minority rights, national defense, building and economy, the list goes on and on. One example of this challenge is the debate in Israel today regarding judicial reform. While it is easy in a hyper-partisan climate to simplify a debate and caricaturize the opposing views, the reality is more complex and more nuanced.

Rav Kook cautioned regarding the moral and spiritual dangers inherent in political life:

“We must not allow the tendency toward factionalism, which threatens most strongly at the inception of a political movement, to deter us from seeking justice and truth, from loving all of humanity, both the collective and the individual, from love for the Jewish people, and from the holy obligations that are unique to Israel. We are commanded not only to be holy individuals, but also, and especially, to be ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”