More on my political inclinations from Chapter 1:
Shmaayah would say: Love work,
loath mastery over others, and avoid intimacy with the government.
I like that we are advised to both "loath mastery over others" and "avoid intimacy with the government" -- these are 2 sides of the same coin! Government IS "mastery over others". We should avoid setting ourselves up to be ensnared in the love of power, even when it appears to be "legitimate".
It's worthwhile to think of this, not just in the context of modern politics, but in terms of how this text was originally intended. For the majority of Jewish history, "the government" was not a Jewish government, but one that tolerated a Jewish minority. And with very few exceptions, countries where Jews have lived have shown, again and again, that they can switch from tolerance of Jews to intolerance at the drop of a hat. (There is hardly a country in Europe that has not, at some time, welcomed Jewish immigration for the commerce and prosperity it was believed would follow... and there is hardly a country in Europe that has not, at some time, expelled its entire Jewish population.) The United States is actually one of the very few countries that has never made antisemitism a matter of national policy.
ReplyDeleteSo if chazal (our learned teachers, long since passed away) mistrusted government, they had good reason to do so.