In support of civil disobedience

“Do not follow the majority to do evil”

Paul Eidelberg

Some years ago I came across an essay “The Jewish Government” by Rabbi Meir Kahane (z”l). Commenting on Exodus 23:2—“Do not follow the majority to do evil”—Rabbi Kahane said that “transgressing a law passed by the evil is a mitzvah.” He explains as follows:

A majority which contests Torah law, the only law of the Jewish People, is no majority. Those who contest Torah law are lawbreakers when they decide to oppose the law of the Jewish People and to forbid that which is required and to require that which is forbidden. It is they who undermine the rule of law and disturb the peace. It is they who bring tragedy and Divine punishment upon the Jewish People. If the government or a Jewish king establishes a law or decree against Torah law, the laws of G-d, we are duty-bound to reject it. The issue here is not Jews rebelling against the government and breaking the law, but Jews seeking to uphold the law and rebelling against a government which breaks the law and tries to keep Jews from living by it.

It is forbidden to obey a governmental decree or law which opposes G-d’s Torah, and obviously, it is forbidden to aid … sinners in implementing it. [Maimonides, the] Rambam wrote [in the Mishneh Torah] (Hilchot Rotzeach 12:14): “Whoever makes a blind man stumble by giving him inappropriate advice; or gives strength and encouragement to sinners, blind people who do not see the way of truth due to the desire in their heart, violates a negative precept: “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind” (Leviticus 9:14).

According to Rabbi Kahane, the verse “Do not follow the majority to do evil” warns us not to give verbal encouragement to sinners and not to befriend allies of injustice, as it says in Isaiah (8:12): “Do not treat as a coalition that which this people calls a coalition.” “A coalition of the wicked is no coalition, and there is no force to any law or decision or decree of a wicked government which opposes the Torah. It is a mitzvah to resist them, and it is absolutely prohibited to accept the evil majority’s decision.”

Rabbi Kahane goes on to say: “… the principle that ‘Dina D’Malchuta Dina,’ ‘The law of the government is law,’ is no issue here. No kingdom or government, Jewish or non-Jewish, has any right to nullify a mitzvah or to pass a law opposed to our holy Torah, and if they do so, their edict has no force.…”

We thus see in the Torah and its commentators the basis for civil disobedience if not rebellion!

Let us not be deceived or anesthetized by the democratic principle of majority rule. The American Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive” of man’s unalienable or God-given rights, it is the duty and “Right of the people to alter or abolish it.” “Any” form of government obviously includes a democracy.

The American founding fathers well understood that a majority can be as unjust as a minority; indeed, they feared majoritarian tyranny. We should thus be doubly concerned about any Israeli government that would leave the fate of our Jewish brothers and sisters in Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights to a “majority” vote in a national referendum.

We have already witnessed the crime perpetrated by the State against the Jews of Gush Katif—a crime “justified” in the name of majority rule. Yes, a Knesset majority enacted the Evacuation Law implemented by the State—its army and its police. That law clearly revealed the conflict between the State and the Torah.

Is it futile to repeat the words of the great Alfred North Whitehead: “The Jews were the first people not to worship the State”? Is it futile to declare that above the laws of the State are the laws of G-d? How we have fallen! Kahane, Whitehead, and Jefferson—a rabbi, a philosopher, and a statesman—they saw the light, whose source is the Torah. That light is being extinguished in the unJewish and pseudo-democratic State of Israel.