One small sentence uttered this week by MK Merav Michaeli in the Constitution Committee caught my ears and jarred them.
Michaeli, chairwoman of the Labor Party, sought to bash the coalition. So far it is accepted, after all, this is what is customary. She tried to claim that the coalition was beeping at the citizens, but there is nothing new about that either. But the example she used, oh the example: "What distinguishes democracy from monarchical rule, from things that were customary in the Middle Ages, or in your Bible, is that the government is supposed to be bound by the law, just like the last and last citizen."
The head of the Labor Party, whose name is also taken from the book of books, actually said that the Bible belongs to the coalition, the religious, the ultra-Orthodox and the Likudniks. She chose to say this even though even in the opposition there are tefillin layers, Sabbath observants, Bible scholars and lovers. The Bible does not belong only to the religious parties, not even to the religious public, not even to the traditional.
Michaeli calls to intensify the protest // Archive photo: Yehuda Schlesinger
It was David Ben-Gurion, the father of Michaeli's party, and a clearly non-religious man, who said in his testimony before the Peel Commission 86 years ago: "The Bible, written by us in our Hebrew language and this land itself, is our mandate." Ben-Gurion greatly appreciated the Book of Books and testified that it was an inspiration for him. "I don't know in our literature or in any other people's literature a cultural and educational treasure comparable to the Bible," he wrote, founding a Bible class that operated at the prime minister's residence every two weeks. This circle was continued by prime ministers and presidents who were not religious: Begin, Weizmann and Netanyahu.
Only Bennett, the last in the chain to renew that tradition, is religious. So the Bible is not "yours" – it belongs to the entire nation, and even more so, it is the biggest global bestseller of all time. It would be desirable for the people, the entire nation that is the protagonist of this book, to be the ones who read it and study it, argue about it and get inspiration from it. But that's only part of the matter.
Michaeli tried to present the Bible as a symbol and example of a situation in which the government is above the law and not bound by it. Well, dear Michaeli, surprise. Have you heard of King Saul, the first king in Israel who was deposed from the throne because he did not obey the divine decrees given to him by the prophet Samuel? Here is a king who did not obey the law and therefore his kingdom was cut off.
Have you heard of King David, the man who is the symbol of the Jewish kingdom to this day? Could he do whatever he wanted? No, neither does he.
After all, David was severely punished after taking Bathsheba from him and sending her husband, Uriah, to die in the war. He was not above morality, despite his high status. And what about King Ahab, who agreed to the murder of Navot Hizraeli, an ordinary man, because he coveted his field? Wasn't he punished with death for it?
The Bible is full of examples of kings who were not above the law, of kings who were required to have a high standard of morality.
Kings who had to pay attention to divine decrees and their subjects, and could not do with them as they pleased.
Exactly the opposite of what you were trying to claim. But that's not all, either.
The Bible, according to quite a few scholars, is the source of a large part of the democratic foundations on which the regimes of countries in the Western world are based. Prof. Amnon Shapira shows them in his book "First Democracy in the Bible: Ancient Foundations of Democratic Values," but he is not the only one.
Trial of cancellation
Scholars talk about the idea of covenant that is based in the Bible and underlies the relationship between government and the people, the foundation of "after many to tip" according to which the majority determines, the treatment of the weak in society: slaves, strangers, orphans and widows, the balance between private property and taxes for the common good and the obligation to give charity from all property - all these were born in the Bible.
The Bible in particular, and Judaism as a whole, is replete with examples that inspired and foundationed democracy throughout the world.
It would be a shame to dismiss all of these with a disparaging sentence. On this, Ben-Gurion wrote sadly: "Our generation does not know the Bible."
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