מלכות בלא ישות

Torah is not egalitarian about authority. It commands a king, a court, a priesthood, and clear lines of decision. It is also, in the same breath, more suspicious of concentrated power than almost any ancient legal system, and the two facts are connected.

The hedges

The Torah’s king is constrained before he is empowered. He may not accumulate horses, wives, or silver and gold. He must write a Torah scroll and keep it with him and read from it all his days, so that his heart not be lifted above his brothers.

Read the reason clause carefully. The stated purpose of the restrictions is not efficiency, and not justice in the abstract. It is that he not come to regard himself as belonging to a different category from the people he governs. The Torah identifies the specific failure mode of monarchy as an error of self-perception, and legislates against it directly.

The king as heart

Chassidic and philosophical sources compare the king to the heart of the body. The comparison is usually taken as flattery and it is closer to a constraint.

A heart is central, and it is central by circulating rather than by accumulating. It receives everything and keeps nothing; the moment it retains blood it is not functioning, it is failing. Its centrality is entirely a matter of throughput.

Melech HaMoshiach

Everything the tradition says about Moshiach’s bittul should be read as a statement about political safety and not only about piety. He is given an unusual amount of authority. The reason this is not alarming is that the authority is described as passing through him.

A leader who says venachnu mah at the height of his power has made a structural statement, not a modest one. It means the office is not his property, the movement is not his, and the results do not belong to him. That is the only condition under which anyone should be trusted with the mandate the sources describe.