Praying for Putin?

This is the full version of a post that was first published yesterday on the Judaism Reclaimed Facebook page.

Ukraine continues its struggle to survive in the face of the massive military invasion by its powerful Russian neighbour. This invasion has taken its toll on Ukraine’s Jewish community. Many have fled, leaving family, friends and possessions behind them. Families have been separated amidst heart-rending scenes of chaos and panic. Unbelievably, those who choose to remain and defend their land are charged by the Russian government with being neo-nazi collaborators. These events raise a difficult question for Russian Jews. Are they required to pray for the welfare of their state and its leaders

The default position in Pirkei Avot is that every Jew in every land should follow the guidance of Avot 3:2, where Rabbi Chanina Segan Kohanim teaches: 

“Pray for the peace of the government (in Hebrew, malchut) since, if it were not for fear of it, a man would swallow his neighbour alive”. 

Before discussing the applicability of this teaching today, it is helpful to contextualise it. Rabbi Chanina lived, and died, in Israel at a time of chaos and anarchy. The Romans, having occupied the whole of Israel and the Levant, were the ruling power – the malchut. Nowhere in Israel was more anarchic than Jerusalem, where the power struggle between different religious and nationalist factions resulted in the great tragedy of Jew-on-Jew murders which the Roman governors had no great interest in preventing. The Jewish authorities too were powerless to stop this carnage. Indeed, the members of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court, absented themselves from the Lishkat HaGazit (the sole location from which they could discharge judicial functions relating to capital offences) so that they could avoid passing the death sentence on Jewish murderers. This decision was arguably taken on the basis that, since so many Jewish lives were already being lost and the death penalty was no longer an effective deterrent, it was folly to address the escalating mortality rate among Rome’s Jewish subjects by killing even more of them. In this context, Rabbi Chanina could be said to have been urging his co-religionists to pray that the Romans should have the time and the resources to intervene and stop this senseless internecine slaughter.

Nothing in Rabbi Chanina’s words indicates their scope or spells out that they apply only to Roman governance of Israel. The Bartenura therefore reads this Mishnah widely, applying it even to the duty of the Jew who lives in any other (i.e non-Jewish) nation of the world. Not all commentators are so worldly, however. The Ritva, for example, learns it is a maxim for one’s spiritual development: the malchut of which one should stand in fear is that of the One Above, since it is He alone who judges the way we manage our lives.

But who or what is really the focal point of this Mishnah? Tosafot Yom Tov notes that it refers to the peace of the malchut, not the melech (“king”). Since governmental structures are almost always hierarchical, ordinary citizens are most likely to encounter the ruler’s enforcers – government inspectors, tax collectors and other members of the lower echelons of power. These people too should be prayed for, in the hope that they will discharge their duties in a manner that is neither unfair nor burdensome. The Tiferet Yisrael picks up on the same terminological point. He observes that, while there is always a malchut, there may be no melech at all. He cites Rome in the days of the Republic and, in more recent times, the democratic cantonal governance of Switzerland.

While the words of the Mishnah indicate that the great evil which it seeks to avoid is anarchy, traditional commentators have shown that this Mishnah is flexible and can been subjected to many different interpretations. One might therefore expect a variety of approaches to the question that opens this essay: do we pray for the welfare of an oppressive government that is led by a dictator or tyrant, and which may implement policies that are harmful to or downright destructive of Jewish interests and values?

Some commentators adhere rigidly to the notion of prayer even when the government is hostile to Jewish interests. Writing in Germany in the mid-19th century, Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch urges that one should not merely pray for the well-being of the state but should actively promote its interests. Rabbi Marcus Lehmann goes further: “Even an unfair and despotic government is a thousand times better than anarchy and no government at all”. It is ironical that the staunchest exponents of support for the state, regardless of its nature, should come from the jurisdiction that spawned state-sponsored genocide.

In the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War, Jewish scholars, politicians and historians have generated between them a vast literature on the relationship of the Jew to the State. This intense focus has not however been directed at the meaning and relevance today of Rabbi Chanina’s Mishnah.

Numerous popular post-War writers on this Mishnah do not cite the Holocaust and the Third Reich in Hitler’s Nazi Germany as imposing any limitations on the need to pray for the welfare of the State. For some who survived that war the topic may have been too fresh and raw for them to tackle, or the duty not to pray for such a regime may have been so obvious as not to need stating. In this category we find Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky’s Netivot Shalom, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau’s massive Yachel Yisrael and the Be’er Avot of Rabbi Mordechai Mendel Frankel-Teumim. There are also Rav Ovadyah Yosef who, in Anaf Etz Avot—a pirush on Avot that spans some 400 pages—this Mishnah receives little more than half a page. More recently, Irving Greenberg’s Sage Advice—a work that is not short of opinions—leaves this Mishnah with the Romans. The decision not to address the relevance of this Mishnah to modern dictators and their regimes is not limited to commentators from the orthodox camp. Judah Goldin’s The Living Talmud: the Wisdom of the Fathers and Kravitz and Olitzky’s Pirke Avot: a Modern Commentary on Jewish Ethics reflect the same trend

Others touch upon the case of the problematic regime in such indirect terms that one might entirely miss their relevance to our question. Thus Reuven P. Bulka, Chapters of the Sages, writes: “Certain governments, as has been the pattern in Jewish experience were fear-inspiring and even tried to interfere with the Jew’s attempts to actualize Jewish responsibilities It would seem that we are praying for something that goes against our theological responsibilities”. The text continues in the same vein and the reader is left to decide for himself what this means.

Two American commentaries do however meet the issue of the tyrannical regime full-one. The first, Irving M. Bunim’s Ethics from Sinai, describes the gullibility of those who would deny the possibility of Nazi-style genocide, citing reasons that echo the terms of Rabbi Y. Y. Weinberg’s letter to Hitler in 1933. For Bunim one’s prayer should be not so much for the welfare of the government as for “good conditions” since it is the absence of peace and tranquility that turns humans into beasts of the jungle. The second, Rabbi Marc D. Angel, in the Koren Pirkei Avot, would curtail the application of this Mishnah so as to avoid praying for the welfare of the wicked. He writes that “praying for the welfare of the government is relevant only if the government itself is just. If the government is immoral, one should certainly not pray for its welfare”, making specific reference to the Nuremburg trials and the role played by judges and others in enforcing laws that by no standard of morality could be justified.

This Mishnah forms the religious basis for reciting the prayer of HaNoten Teshua in the Diaspora and is therefore the source of a well-known Anglo-Jewish institution, the Shabbat morning Prayer for the Royal Family. This prayer, which is usually recited in English, encompasses the well-being of the ruling monarch (at the time of writing, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II) and the Royal Family. On the basis that the Head of State is only a constitutional monarch, the text of this prayer also covers the elected government of the day:

“May [God] put a spirit of wisdom and understanding into her heart, and into the hearts of all her counsellors, that they may uphold the peace of the realm, advance the welfare of the nation, and deal kindly and justly with all the House of Israel.”

While it is never possible to ascertain with certainty the extent to which one’s prayers are positively acted upon by God, the period within which this prayer has been regularly recited in British synagogues spans more than a century in which British Jews have been able to exercise an increasing range of civil and religious rights in their host country. It is also the period in which the government published the Balfour Declaration and subsequently voted in favour of the establishment of an independent Jewish State of Israel.

 The text of this prayer does not endorse the policies of “my country right or wrong” and plainly does not endorse the initiation and pursuit of any government policies that are inimical or hostile to Jewish interests. It is bland and appears to be written in such a manner as to avoid giving offence to those whom it is articulated. A draft of this nature may be said to implement the guidance of Rabbi Chanina while not straining the conscience of inhabitants of even the most corrupt and contrary regimes.