[Avodah] John Locke and Tzedaqa

[Michael Makovi]

The following question has occurred to me, and while I doubt any prior
Jewish authorities ever thought about this issue, it still seems valid
to me. After all, a sevara is d'oraita.

If you carefully read things like John Locke, Cato's Letters, and the
other examples of democratic thought (anything that Thomas Jefferson
would have read), one constantly recurring principle is that the
government has only those powers which the people grant it. Social
contract theory would dictate that the government is only the people's
proxy. Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" opens with a brief overview of
Locke-ian theory, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Politics" is excellent as
well.

The issue, however, is that if the government is only the people's
proxy, then it cannot have any powers which the people themselves do
not have. All the people can do is surrender their own powers to
something more capable and powerful, to execute those powers on their
behalf.

Now, I cannot go to my neighbor's house and take his money to feed the
poor. Therefore, I cannot grant the government that power either. The
entire concept of taxation for the sake of social welfare is anathema
to the Framers of the United States Constitution.

Everyone has a right to his own "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness", and everyone has the concomitant obligation to other
others' rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". So
the liberty and rights are very negative; everyone has the right to
sit under his own vine in content, but no one has a positive right to
anything which he can demand from others. Therefore, the government's
task is only to police society and make sure that everyone's rights
are honored by everyone else.
According to Cato's Letters,

> The two great laws of human society, from whence all the rest derive
> their course and obligation, are those of equity and self-preservation:
> By the first all men are bound alike not to hurt one another; by the
> second all men have a right alike to defend themselves.
>
> ...
>
> Government therefore can have no power, but such as men can
> give...no man can give to another what is none of his own...
>
> ...
>
> Nor has any man in the state of nature power...to take away the
> life of another, unless to defend his own, or what is as much his
> own, namely, his property. This power therefore, which no man has,
> no man can transfer to another.
>
> ...
>
> Nor could any man in the state of nature have a right to violate the
> property of another...as long as he himself was not injured by that
> industry and those enjoyments. No man therefore could transfer to
> the magistrate that right which he had not himself.
>
> ...
>
> No man in his senses was ever so wild as to give an unlimited power to
> another to take away his life, or the means of living... But if any man
> restrained himself from any part of his pleasures, or parted with any
> portion of his acquisitions, he did it with the honest purpose of enjoying
> the rest with greater security, and always in subservience to his own
> happiness, which no man will or can willingly and intentionally give
> away to any other whatsoever.

 As I said, all this is utterly opposed to the concept of welfare,
taxation, etc. A good explanation of this fact is found in "The Rise
of Government and the Decline of Morality" by James A. Dorn,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/catosletters/cl-12.pdf.

And as I said, I'm sure that everything I've said so far is utterly
foreign to the Tanakh, Gemara, Rambam, etc. If I started speaking
about social contract theory to them, and my right to revolt against
the government when I am not pleased with it, they'd think I'm crazy.
Nevertheless, the Tanakh tells us that the PEOPLE choose a king. I
feel quite confident that the basic roots of democracy are in the
Tanakh, and indeed, it is from the Tanakh that John Locke derived his
ideas. And as I said, a sevara is d'oraita. Everything I've said so
far, sounds perfectly logical on paper.

So my question is: given that we know that historically, the Jewish
communities would assess tzedaqa like a tax, how could they do this?
Granted that everyone has an obligation to give tzedaqa, but who gave
the kehilla the right to assess tzedaqa? Who made the kehilla boss?

Now, then, one might argue that the people made the kehilla the boss.
But even according to this, any one individual could still withdraw
his democratic consent to be governed under the social contract, and
thus deny the kehilla the right to assess taxes from him personally.

So here's what I'm thinking: in a small, self-contained community,
where everything is intertwined and mutually-related, living in the
community and eating kosher food and using the miqvah are all parts of
living there, and so is paying taxes to finance tzedaqa. If one
doesn't want to pay tzedaqa, then fine, leave the community and live
with the Christians or Muslims. At the very least, stop eating the
community's kosher food, using its miqvah, etc.

But my justification for religious coercion falls apart in a larger
nation, with a capitalistic economy. In that case, one is more likely
to belong to a synagogue, pay dues to the mikvah, buy kosher food at a
purely capitalistic market with no communal backing, etc. Everything
is delocalized. Thus, it becomes far more difficult to assess tzedaqa
as a tax. For how Judaism and democracy interact in a modern society
and nation, we'd have to study both the halakhah and John Locke much
more deeply, and study the words of Rabbis Haim Hirschensohn, Benzion
Uziel, Yitzhak Herzog, and anyone else who's written on the subject.
Tzarikh `iyun gadol me'od.

In other words: in a small self-contained community, a greater amount
of coercion is justifiable, because the community has more reality
than a larger community, especially a nation. As the community grows
larger, especially as it becomes an entire nation, it grows more and
more abstract and disconnected from the people. At the same time, it
becomes harder and harder to escape. To enforce religious practice in
a small Jewish community is tolerable, because one could conceivably
move away from the community to somewhere else. Additionally, he is an
intimate part of the community and its services. The community is both
concrete and immanent. But a nation is abstract and transcendant; it
is neither immanent in his personal life, nor can he easily escape it
if he is displeased with it.

Of course, nowadays, Israeli politics is even further from democracy
than it is from the Torah. Israelis care about John Locke even less
than they care about kashrut and Shabbat. In Israel, we're still
struggling to ensure that the government is democratically-elected, as
most of the power is in the hands of the judiciary, which is not
elected and has no constitution to limit its powers. So the question
of how to reconcile mandatory tzedaqa with John Locke is the least of
our problems.

Interestingly, however, I just saw that Moshe Feiglin advocates the
revitalization of localized communities in Israel, precisely because
he believes it will lead to a resurgence of Jewishness and Judaism in
Israel. In his article "Judaism and Democracy for Israel"
(http://www.jewishisrael.org/eng_contents/articles/article7020.html),
he writes:
> Israel's Jewish constitution must institute district elections, as is
> common practice in the vast majority of democracies in the world.
> In that way, Israel's communities will be revived. (They were all
> united into one large socialist collective when the state was born).
> Every community will decide on its Jewish public character. There
> is no doubt that the absolute majority of communities will choose to
> preserve their Jewish identity. Even the residents of predominantly
> secular Ramat Aviv preferred closing their local mall on Shabbat –
> once they were finally asked.

So perhaps indeed, localizing and de-nationalizing matters is the
correct thing to do, both from a pragmatic standpoint (i.e. it will
encourage people to themselves choose to be more Jewish) and from a
philosophic standpoint (i.e. John Locke).

But today's community's are something else, to study later. Right now,
I just want to reconcile Medieval Jewish practice with John Locke.
Anachronistic, yes, but it's a still a concern to me.

Does anything I've said make sense?

Michael Makovi