The building of the Tabernacle was the first great project the Israelites undertook together. It involved their generosity and skill. It gave them the chance to give back to God a little of what He had given them. It conferred on them the dignity of labor and creative endeavor. It brought to closure their birth as a nation and it symbolized the challenge of the future. The society they were summoned to create in the Land of Israel would be one in which everyone would play their part. It was to become – in the phrase I used as the title of one of my books – the home we build together.
From this we see that one of the greatest challenges of leadership is to give people the chance to give, to contribute, to participate. That requires self-restraint, tzimtzum, on the part of the leader, creating the space for others to lead. As the saying, attributed to Lao-Tsu, goes: “When there is a good leader, the people say ‘The leader did it.’ When there is a great leader, the people say ‘We did it ourselves.’ ”
This brings us to the fundamental distinction in politics between state and society. The state represents what is done for us by the machinery of government, through the instrumentality of laws, courts, taxation and public spending. Society is what we do for one another through communities, voluntary associations, charities and welfare organizations. Judaism, I believe, has a marked preference for society rather than state, precisely because it recognizes – it is the central theme of the book of Exodus – that it is what we do for others, not what others or God does for us, that transforms us. The Jewish formula, I believe, is: small state, big society.
The person who had the deepest insight into the nature of democratic society was Alexis de Tocqueville. Visiting America in the 1830s he saw that its strength lay in what he called the “art of association,” the tendency of Americans to come together in communities and voluntary groups to help one another, rather than leaving the task to a centralized government. Were it ever to be otherwise, were individuals to depend wholly on the state, democratic freedom would be at risk.
In one of the most haunting passages of his masterwork, Democracy in America, he says that democracies are at risk of a completely new form of oppression for which there is no precedent in the past. It will happen, he says, when people exist solely in and for themselves, leaving the pursuit of the common good to the government. This would then be what life would be like:
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Tocqueville wrote these words in the 1830s, and there is a risk that this is what some European societies are becoming like today: all state, no society; all government, little or no community. (This is not to imply that there is no role for governments; that all should be left to voluntary associations. Far from it. There are things – from the rule of law to the defense of the realm to the enforcement of ethical standards and the creation of an equitable distribution of the goods necessary for a dignified existence – which only governments can achieve. The issue is balance.)