Was the Free Society Really Born in Athens?

Parashat Yitro (Exodus 18:1–20:23)

These ideas grew out of reading and meditating on Rabbi Sacks's 10 to 15 weekly essays on the parasha, and on his books and worldview.

A remarkable moment in history. The Israelites are on the brink of receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. What happens here is not just another event. It's the birth of a new society.

Today, historians of political thought tend to attribute modern ideas to Marx, to Rousseau, to Hobbes, and eventually back to Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics, to the ancient Greeks and their city-states. But this is a mistake. Although the word democracy has its root in Greece, as does abstract thought, the ideas that shaped those thoughts actually find their source in an earlier text, the Bible. Hobbes doesn't shy away from it. He quotes the Bible almost 700 times in his Leviathan. Long before the Greeks, Sinai was the blueprint of a new free society.

And three things stand out as crucial, long before the Israelites were ruled by judges, by kings, or anything else.

First, it was a covenant that God made with the Israelites at Sinai that set the moral limit to power, establishing the primacy of right over might. Any king acting against the virtues of the Torah could be challenged. And it's the single most important idea about the politics in the Bible. Kings will be challenged and can be challenged, by the people or by prophets.

And this solves the classic problem of democracy on the ancient Greek side, the weakness of the tyranny of the majority: that the rule of the majority does not contain any guarantee of the rights of the minority. But here's the solution. We don't rule by the majority or by power, but by what's right. And so in Judaism, prophets were mandated to challenge authority if it acted against the Torah and against what's right. Individuals were empowered to disobey immoral orders. This is the road to a free society.

Another crucial point is the prologue before the covenant. God asks for the consent of the governed. God says, "Now, if you faithfully heed My voice and keep My covenant." He asks for the consent of the governed. And they answer back to Him, "We will do everything the Lord has said." The exchange is profound. Revelation cannot proceed. There is no legitimate governance of a people who do not consent. Even the Creator of heaven and earth needs consent, because a free God desires the free worship of free human beings.

The third delves deeper, to who these partners of the covenant are. And what's remarkable is that it is all the people: men, women, children, anybody. This was not seen in Athens when they implemented democracy. There we see very few rights for women, slaves and children. Women in America and England could not vote until the 20th century, but Israel's constitution of liberty included everybody. The first ever idea of universal citizenship.

And these are not abstract ideas. They are the core of what it is to be Jewish, of Judaism. It is a mission. After the consent of the governed, the mission is to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. What was given at Sinai was not just another religious event. This was its democratic mission statement. Who we are. What we stand for.

The people's consent, their active participation and their collective responsibility are what make the people capable of fulfilling this tremendous task. Every individual, man, woman, child, everybody, is empowered to lead, to serve, to contribute. Without this distribution of responsibility, no nation is capable of being a holy nation, and we will not be able to fulfill our mandate to the world.

Sinai represents a model of moral leadership, a society whose authority is limited by law, where moral responsibility is shared. It is this combination that makes us not just a free nation but a holy nation. A nation with a mission on each and every one of us. A nation of servant leaders, tasked with a universal mission.

And so we are responsible not just for ourselves but for the moral health of the world. And thus all Israel is united by this responsibility. As the Talmud later says, all Israelites are responsible for one another.

And thus, after Yitro's proposition of delegating leadership, it appears that one in eight Israelites was a leader in some form. Leadership is shared and democratized and distributed throughout the Israelites.

Every Jew is called to be a servant and a prince, and to serve their community, their family, their nation, the world, each one through their gift, through their passion. Give to the best of your ability. Take responsibility when problems arise. Make the world a better place, because you have a responsibility to the world, and you have been chosen and selected to be a priest and an heir to something greater than you. And that implies not just a gift but a responsibility.

This is the gift that made Jews extraordinary in every field they touched, because they were not just participants, they were leaders.

To be a Jew is to be called to be a leader.