I learned something very interesting yesterday at synagogue about the origins of the police.
I was reading a commentary on the weekly Torah portion, which I had written about (drawing attention to the theme of "justice" in the text). The commentary pointed out that while the emphasis in the Torah is on judges, it also mentions the importance of "law enforcement officials" in Deuteronomy 16:18: "You shall set up judges and law enforcement officials for yourself in all your cities that the Lord, your God, is giving you, for your tribes, and they shall judge the people [with] righteous judgment."
The commentary noted that while in the Messianic age, people would not need police officers to enforce the law, in todays age we do. (My rabbi noted that the Biblical ideal was to have "counselors," not police, to assist in the administration of justice, in the perfect world in which human beings never sought to flout the law.)
The relevance of Deuteronomy 16:18 was not lost on the congregants. We have been told for more than a year by the luminaries of Black Lives Matter -- in the streets, on cable news, and in the editorial pages -- that modern-day policing is a legacy of slavery, somehow tracing its origins to the officers who were dispatched to catch slaves that had escaped. It always came across as complete garbage, but it was spoken with great confidence and with an air of high dudgeon.
The reality: anyone who has a Bible can learn that police have existed for thousands of years. Moreover, the people Moses were addressing (or their parents) had just emerged from slavery themselves. The Bible recognizes that police are essential to the protection of freedom.
Think of Deuteronomy 16:18 the next time you encounter BLM.
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This week's Torah portion includes several laws about conduct in civic and personal life, the common theme of which is boundaries -- setting bounds to what one may do at home, at work, and even in the battlefield.
One noteworthy passage concerns Amalek, the evil nation that attacked the Children of Israel as they made their Exodus from slavery to freedom. Deuteronomy 25:17-19 commands Jews to obliterate Amalek's memory.
The South African government accused Israel of genocide on the basis of a story about Amalek in the Book of Samuel, in which King Saul was commanded to wipe out the entire evil Amalekite nation.
Because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted this week's portion -- "Remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17), the South African government claimed he was commanding soldiers to commit genocide.
It was an absurd and malevolent misreading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. The commandment, as observed by Jews today, is to remember the evil of Amalek and fight ...
