Focus on Israel

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: According to a common narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization with the exclusion of religious arguments from the discussion. But in the pathbreaking book, The Hebrew Republic, author Eric Nelson argues that this story is wrong. Instead, he contends political thought in early modern Europe became less secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked a radical transformation.

Hello and thank you for joining me today on Focus on Israel. Many Christians believe that as the Jews rejected Jesus, then God has rejected them. This replacement theology is growing as many Christians believe they have replaced the Jews in God's prophetic plan. If you truly believe the Bible is the word of God, then you know that when he speaks of Israel, he is speaking about the land of Israel, Ephraim, or the whole house of Israel, all 12 tribes.

The mission of this series and PJTN is to educate and equip you so that you can share this truth with your family and friends. In the groundbreaking book The Hebrew Republic, author Eric Nelson boldly claims that the secularism as modernism narrative is incomplete at best and at worst totally backward. The book significantly revises the history of some key concepts in early modern European political thought and is thus a paradigm shifter.

The Hebrew Republic demonstrates unforgettably that we need to understand piety to comprehend politics. I was fortunate to sit down with scholar and author Rabbi Ken Spiro to discuss the ramifications of this book. Rabbi Spiro is a senior lecturer and researcher for Aish HaTorah Jerusalem. He has a master's in history from the Vermont College of Norwich University and rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem.

He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, such as BBC Radio and TV, the National Geographic Channel, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel. He is the author of several books, including World Perfect: The Jewish Impact on Civilization; Crash Course in Jewish History; and Destiny: Why a Tiny Nation Plays Such a Huge Role in History. His writings and seminars can be accessed on kenspiro.com.

Born and raised in the US, Rabbi Spiro has lived in Israel since 1982. He served in a combat infantry unit in the IDF, is a father of five children, and currently lives in Jerusalem. His quick, fast-paced, humorous style and his ability to explain deep concepts clearly make for an entertaining and enlightening presentation. His commentary on The Hebrew Republic is truly thought-provoking.

Ken Spiro: Eric Nelson, what he's talking about in his book, which is fascinating, is a rewriting of the narrative that we understood about how we got to the modern world of today. It's precisely the separation of the state from church that allowed the development of the modern world because the church was anti-intellectual and oppressive. While Europe goes through a huge transformation ideologically and philosophically, it wasn't because we divested ourselves of religion in the Western world.

Rather, with the printing press in the mid-15th century and then the Protestant Reformation, which reintroduces the Bible back into the masses, something that never existed—neither literacy nor availability of the text in Catholic Europe—it played a key role in basically the political evolution of Western civilization, the creation of modern liberal—and when I say liberal, in the true sense, like John Locke liberal—democracy.

Unlike today, when most evangelical Christians are literal scripturalists who just look at the text of the Bible in translation, these scholars, many of them, understood that there's an oral tradition, a whole legal corpus body that's behind that. We have to understand that also. So they weren't just looking at statements in the Bible like an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. They decided we need to understand what these great rabbis thought about how to practically apply these statements.

And from that, that's really the foundations of the creation of modern liberal democracy, which is a complete opposite of what people were saying. It's precisely by reconnecting to the biblical roots in its pure form. This leads to a whole progression of political development, especially in America, from the Pilgrims and the early settlers in the 17th century who viewed themselves as literally reenacting the Exodus narrative.

If you look at the early colonists, all of the statutes, the sources for their legal statutes in New Haven and places like that are not taken from the Christian body; they're taken from the Hebrew Bible. How it evolves, interestingly enough, as the world moves out of that period of time, that very fundamentalist Puritan period, to the 18th century.

The founding fathers of America, who were less religious—people like Benjamin Franklin, many of them were deists—they didn't like necessarily the rigidity of the dogma of many of the mainstream religious faiths, not just Catholicism but also Protestantism. But they did believe in the necessity of a God as a source of morality and as a guide. They used the Bible to justify their political stance vis-a-vis England, which is a very interesting discussion, too.

The big one, of course, being, does God want a monarchy or not? That was the big debate. The first suggested emblem for the United States, which wasn't accepted—now it's the eagle, the E Pluribus Unum thing—was originally Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams agreeing on this image of the Egyptians drowning in the sea with the Jews standing on the shore, and the motto was "Rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God."

Nelson talks about in his book, which is quite interesting, that there was this idea of separation of church and state, which is always misunderstood to have that merger of political and religious power together as one. Because in the 17th century, there was the Thirty Years' War in Europe, which was basically between Habsburg Catholic states and Protestant Europe, which was one of the most destructive wars in the history of Europe. Between four and eight million people died.

It was viewed not that secularism is good, but state religion in conflict. When religion is so deeply embedded within a state, it's a source of contention and strife and leads to war. But removing God and faith? No. It's freedom of conscience. You worship God the way you want. But many Enlightenment thinkers, people like Voltaire and Locke, said, first of all, without a God, you have no moral standard.

In Judaism, the Bible is a holistic thing. There is no such thing as separation in terms of Jewish law covering religious law and political law. There's no distinction between the two. You have countries where the political leader is the religious leader, which is traditionally a very oppressive system because it gives the state the control of you in this world and also what's going to happen to you in the next world.

Judaism says we don't remove Judaism from government, but the organs of government are divided. You have a political leader who's a king, and you have a chief religious leader who's the High Priest. Those two don't mix. They're two separate jobs with two separate responsibilities. Most importantly, you have a judicial, legislative body, which was called the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court, who adjudicated and legislated sort of like the Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.

They served as a check and balance against the power of an absolute monarch or the fanaticism of a religious leader who says, "God tells me to go do this and do that." A priest in Judaism can never say, "I got from the Lord that this is what we do," nor could a prophet say, "Dump that piece of religious legislation or that law because God just told me." You always have a system of laws as a process whereby you create legislation, and it's independent from the monarchy.

That's a huge innovation which people also don't realize was essentially adopted by America as the structure of the US government. They just replaced kingship with presidency as the chief political leader. But the other idea, which is really interesting and which comes from the Bible, is at the roots of that story of Samuel and Saul. Because the reality is the biblical ideal is a king. It's an interesting question. God tells the Jews one of the 613 commandments is to appoint a king.

Yet when the Jewish people finally ask for a king, God says, "Don't get upset, Samuel. They didn't reject you; they rejected me." What's going to happen? And the understanding—it's a whole discussion—but it's not that kingship is bad. We asked for the wrong kind of king—a king like the non-Jews have. It's a very interesting discussion in psychology and amongst rabbinic thought about personal freedom and autonomy.

Protestantism was about the printing press—a perfect convergence. The printing press enables inexpensive mass production of books. Rates of literacy go up. Get rid of intermediaries. You read the book, albeit in translation, without the oral traditions of the Jews. But you, using your conscience and your desire to have a relationship with God and live with truth, you take responsibility for the decisions you make. That is the greatest innovation in creating what is liberal democracy in the world today.

That's an essential concept in Judaism, which is why Jews have always been obsessed with literacy and education. You cannot be—it's a famous statement of the rabbis—that a righteous person cannot be an ignoramus. The more you exercise your free will and take responsibility, and the less it's done for you outside, the greater you will be, the more God-like you will be, and the greater the country that you create of citizens who are like that you will be able to make.

That is, in my opinion, as a historian, the greatness of America, the land of opportunity. The Liberty Bell is a "Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof" direct quote from the Bible. It's a little taken out of context because it's talking about the Jubilee year. It's not necessarily talking about political freedom; it's talking about the land returning to its original owners.

But it's amazing how these biblical images, these biblical motifs, sentences from the Bible were used as rallying points and spiritual and political justification for the American Revolution and setting up of a new form of government based on one nation under God. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." This is an attempt to take the Roman concept of natural law and unite it with the idea that God gives human beings.

It's really one and the same thing, but this is the basis of America. Fundamental rights that come from God that no human being, no king, can interfere with is the foundational principles of political freedom and personal autonomy, which are the real greatness of America as a political experiment.

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From studying history, it's very clear that what starts with the Jews never ends only with the Jews. We must strongly stand against any anti-Semitic trends, for if not stopped, they'll cause harm to all of us and we'll witness the downfall of our Judeo-Christian Western culture. Today, many people say there's no longer a need for a Jewish state, that Jews around the world no longer need a place of refuge. But anyone who has heard recent statistics about the worldwide rise in anti-Semitism would never make such a claim.

The reality is that Neo-Nazi groups and Nazi sympathizers are increasing around the world. Surveys show that over one billion people in the world harbor anti-Semitic attitudes. Close to 50 percent believe that Jews have too much power in the business world, and two-thirds of the world's population has never heard of the Holocaust or believe the historic accounts of it are inaccurate. Don't let yourself be manipulated by evil people with a wicked agenda.

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Ken Spiro: The word democracy comes from Greece, Athens, and demokratia is the people rule. The Greeks had—in America today, you have representational democracy. You vote, but you don't vote directly on issues; you vote for people who represent you. Greek democracy was citizens voting directly. But when you see who citizens were, it was an oligarchy. You had an elite bunch of men with land who had all the political power.

That's a very common attitude even up into modern times. The notion of the common person, poorly educated, thinking about his own narrow personal self-interest, having a say in politics is far from an ideal system. So while we use the term democracy today, America was not founded as a democracy; it was founded as a republic, actually. Judaism does not espouse democracy either. The Jewish system doesn't have representational government.

The idea is personal autonomy and you take responsibility for yourself, but you do have a king, but he has checks and balances. Unlike today, where anyone who's involved in politics knows that it's a game, it has to do with political support, money, your PAC. It has nothing to do with your competence, your clarity, your ability to think clearly. The founding fathers, I think, would be horrified by some of the people who are elected representatives of today.

Judaism was on a political level a meritocracy. That the best person for the job in terms of being a judge was the person who, out of his character and his knowledge and peer recognition—not the masses voting for you because you're more popular and you're doling out money here and there. So the notion of people voting is not a Jewish idea, but democracy, which has emerged, is kind of a synthesis of these Jewish ideas combined with this classical Greek idea into a relatively workable form of government.

I think Winston Churchill said it the best. He said democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other system we've tried from time to time throughout history. So while it falls short of the biblical idea of what government was about, at least it creates a level of stability and a check on tyranny and absolutism that has created systems of government that have been the most politically stable and the most economically successful.

There was a narrative sort of foisted on the collective educational system of America. I don't know if people teach anything like this at all today. I doubt they even go through these different—I find when I ask my students about the classical period, medieval period, Renaissance, Enlightenment, they look at me like I've got to ask my phone. But from what I learned, having that more traditional American education, I think it was based on an understanding of history.

I can't find a conspiracy theory of a bunch of guys sitting in a room saying we've got to write this differently. But what Eric Nelson brings out in his book, which is so interesting, is that it's a complete misreading of an understanding of the evolution of the United States based on the notion that somehow it's a misunderstanding of church and state.

As America emerges from its colonial period of the Puritans and the Huguenots and people like that who were really fundamentalist and emerges into the founding father period of the 18th century, they used the Bible to justify their own political agenda and were much less into the almost fanatical adhesion to the Bible that the earlier settlers of America had.

I think that's where we start to distinguish between the Bible as the foundation versus using the Bible selectively as a source to justify our agenda. The fact that they came to the conclusion that God abhors monarchies is not really—maybe they should have brought a couple of rabbis into the discussion. I would have loved to be beamed back in time and explain it's a little more nuanced than that.

Kingship is an ideal form of government in Israel. The Messiah is a king. King David is viewed as one of the greatest characters, and King Solomon. But you have to understand the Jewish concept of kingship within the polity of biblical Israel to understand the proper kind of monarchy. And the fact that God is upset when the Jewish people ask for a king and he appoints Saul, not because they asked for a king so much as they asked for the king for the wrong reasons.

Like, "We're tired of taking responsibility for ourselves; just give us a king to decide." And God's like, "Uh-uh." When you ask for a king, it's when you have your act together and you've reached—it's a great lesson, by the way, that's so relevant today. I always use this quote when I'm teaching: Every generation gets the leadership they deserve. When you have a country of people who are well-educated, independent people, they're not going to tolerate dictatorial, poor leadership. They're going to want A-level guys running it.

When you've got ignorant people who are disenfranchised, who just want someone to beat us up and tell us what to do so we don't have to decide, you're going to get those kinds of leaders. So the leadership is an expression—it's a fundamental concept in Judaism—the leadership is an expression of the collective level of the people. The Hebrew Bible is so fundamental to the founding of America because it introduces the most important concept: that there is a creator of the universe.

He knows and controls everything. And that infinite being gives creation certain absolute values and standards. Without that—and that is the great influence that Judaism had on the world—it introduced to a world that was completely polytheistic and morally relativistic an idea of an absolute God and an absolute standard of morality. Otherwise, you get tremendous oscillations between one side and the other.

Jewish law, by the way, is only based on principle, never on precedent. When you have an absolute being, you only have principles, which is why you can get in American law, you can have something legal one day and the Supreme Court decides another day and it's the other way. Judaism would say, "No, no, no. There may be ways of applying that principle slightly differently within certain red lines."

But this is, on a moral level, on a governmental level, and on a spiritual level, this is the most stabilizing idea in all of human history. That is the foundational principles on which America is founded—that "one nation under God." We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that there are principles and there are ideas that are absolute and not subject to human interpretation. When humans get involved, it always goes south eventually.

America is an experiment, and it's a flawed country. It's made mistakes; no country is perfect. But it's the greatest political experiment in human history in my opinion. It's been the most successful country, the land of opportunity. The fact that if it's such an evil country, then why are so many millions of people trying to cross the border from 150 different countries to Mexico to get here? It's such a bad place; go to Sweden. Everyone knows this is bottom line, with all of its flaws and imperfections, an amazing experiment precisely because of the principles it's based on and the opportunity created because it was based on those principles.

The reason why non-Jews should be concerned with anti-Semitism is, first of all, you have to always when you look at anti-Semitism, which is a huge topic, so I can't do it justice in a simple answer. But Jews are accused of many different things in this world throughout history. We kidnap Christian babies, use their blood to bake matzah, we poison wells, we're in league with the devil, we control the world's economy, seismic activity, the animal kingdom.

We send sharks to destroy Egyptian tourism, vultures to spy on Saudi Arabia. Iran accused Israel three years ago of stealing its cloud cover. But all those excuses aside, the way the Jewish people understand anti-Semitism is that Jewish people from Abraham onward for 3,700 years have been dragging the world kicking and screaming towards a vision of values based on one God and one absolute standard of morality.

Anti-Semitism—and even though people believe many of these excuses—it's like a doctor looking at the sores on the skin but missing the disease in the body. On the deep, often subconscious, subliminal level, what drives anti-Semitism is a rebellion against the national historic mission of the Jewish people to bring these ideas, this idea of one God and one absolute value into the world. Therefore, when evil will come into the world, even Jews who are disconnected from Judaism, they have this—the true hater of the Jew recognizes they've got this in their soul.

Hitler called the Jews "bacillus," bacteria. One Jew with no Jewish education allowed to survive will spread this Jewish ideology around the world, so every Jew has to go. But that means when evil comes into the world, it will target Jews first. You can literally tell how a country is doing in terms of its human rights and democracy. In the words of Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Jews are the canary in the coal mine.

Miners 100, 200 years ago before they had modern gas detection equipment would bring a canary in. If you see the bird convulsing on the perch and falling over and dying, you better get out of that mine because there's something dangerous that you haven't seen yet, but it went after the bird first. So too, when you see countries that start to mistreat their Jews or are already mistreating their Jews, they're either totalitarian or moving towards totalitarianism.

George Gilder, who's not Jewish, wrote a book called The Israel Test. He basically said, if I could paraphrase what he says, just as Jews within a country are the measure of that country's values and morality, Israel the state is the Jew amongst the nations. Show me what a country thinks about Israel and I'll tell you all about their human rights and democracy. It's not an accident that Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba—they hate Israel because it's the exact same thing macro on a country level.

Why should that concern non-Jews? Because that means the disease is spreading; it's just attacking the organ that's most sensitive to it. But once it gets through there and burns its way through the Jews, it's going to come after everyone else. And if it's not stopped early on and snuffed out, it's going to come to your doorstep. That is why all people who are concerned with preserving the rights and values of liberal, free, just Western civilization need to confront anti-Semitism because it's a cancer that will destroy ultimately the entire world.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: With Rabbi Spiro, there is so much there that you may need to watch this program again. If you'd like to view the interview in full, please go to the PJTN YouTube channel. Well, that's our program for today. And I want you to know we appreciate your support. The time to take a stand is now. Be a leader in your community and in your church. One person can make a difference.

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