In this week's parsha we have the priestly blessings. Why should the priests do the blessing?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britian, points out: "they were dependent on the gifts of the people ... So when the Israelites prospered as a whole, the priests benefited. They had a direct interest in the prosperity of the nation. More than anyone else, the priests were dependent on the welfare of others. They were able to bless the people with a full heart, because if others were favored, so too would they be."
For government to work succesfully, the leaders and the people have to have roughly similar interests. In a despotism, this is often not the case in the short run, as we have seen in Burma. The leaders plunder the country and huddle in the capital, while the rural masses are swept away in cyclones. And the leadership class is just small enough than they can live well even off a very poor nation.
Democracy partially solves this problem, by requiring the leaders to be up for election and to be thrown out when the masses get poorer. But even so the system is not foolproof.
At the local level, this is especially so. I lived in Washington, DC when Marion Barry was the mayor. Barry's appeal was to the poor and stupid, and so he benefitted when the well-educated and well-off were driven into suburbia. Not surprisingly, he adopted policies (like cutting the police force) that made the city unlivable and drove people into suburbs (actually, his policies weren't so good for the poor either- but many of them couldn't afford to move, and he paid others off with government jobs). The only thing that saved the city was federal intervention (as well as a general trend towards urban recovery in the 1990s and early 2000s).
Even at the national level, the system is not foolproof. Today, the Republican Party, as the party now occupying the White House, is hostage to the business cycle. But its nominee might well win - partially for good reasons (his own distinguished record in the Senate, the Democrats' weaknesses) but also for bad ones.
In particular, to the extent public attention is distracted to war and terrorism, Republicans benefit. Just as the ghetto Left can "fix" elections at the local level by driving the middle class into other jurisdictions, the militarist Right can avoid the business cycle by creating its own vicious cycle: wars leading to resentment against the United States, which leads to terrorism, which leads to more wars against hostile countries, which leads to more terrorism, which leads to more wars ... a cycle that may insulate incumbents from the economy if people are scared enough. [See, e.g. the 2002 elections, in which Bush used 9/11 to gain seats in the teeth of a recession].
The only way to break the cycle is to eliminate terrorism and militarism- not an easy thing, since the terrorism part does require some cooperation from the rest of the world. And of course, in Israel the problem is ten times worse; in America there is at least a respectable argument that if the United States stopped playing world policeman, the terrorist problem would diminish considerably. But in Israel, this is obviously not a plausible argument; the terrorist don't want Israel to stop meddling in their affairs, they want Israel to stop existing for the simple reason that they believe Israel is their turf.
On that grim note, good shabbos!
