By Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
The parsha of Shoftim is the classic source of the three types of leadership in Judaism, called by the Sages the “three crowns”: of priesthood, kingship and Torah.[1] This is the first statement in history of the principle, set out in the eighteenth century by Montesquieu in L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws), and later made fundamental to the American constitution, of “the separation of powers.”[2]
Power, in the human arena, is to be divided and distributed, not concentrated in a single person or office. In biblical Israel, there were Kings, Priests and Prophets. Kings had secular or governmental power. Priests were the leaders in the religious domain, presiding over the service in the Temple and other rites, and giving rulings on matters to do with holiness and purity. Prophets were mandated by God to be critical of the corruptions of power and to recall the people to their religious vocation whenever they drifted from it.
Our parsha deals with all three roles. Undoubtedly, though, the most attention-catching is the section on Kings, for many reasons. First, this is the only command in the Torah to carry with it the explanation that this is what other people do: “When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, ‘Let us set a King over us like all the nations around us...’” (Deut. 17:14). Normally, in the Torah, the Israelites are commanded to be different. The fact that this command is an exception was enough to signal to commentators throughout the ages that there is a certain ambivalence about the idea of monarchy altogether.
Second, the passage is strikingly negative. It tells us 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” (Deut. 17:16-17). These are the temptations of power, and as we know from the rest of Tanach, even the greatest – King Solomon himself – was vulnerable to them.
Third, consistent with the fundamental Judaic idea that leadership is service, not dominion or power or status or superiority, 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” (Deut. 17:19-20). It is not easy to be humble when everyone is bowing down before you and when you have the power of life and death over your subjects.
Hence the extreme variation among the commentators as to whether monarchy is a good institution or a dangerous one. Maimonides holds that the appointment of a king is an obligation, Ibn Ezra that it is a permission, Abarbanel that it is a concession, and Rabbenu Bachya that it is a punishment – an interpretation known, as it happens, to John Milton at one of the most volatile (and anti-monarchical) periods of English history.[3]
There is, though, one positive and exceptionally important dimension of royalty. The King is commanded to study constantly:
