I recently attended a parlor meeting for a group that seeks to foster respectful discourse among people with different points of view.  And indeed, it was my first in-person conversation with someone who spoke with great passion about the injustice of unelected supreme court judges being able to overrule the will of the people as expressed in Knesset legislation.  This is a central argument of justice minister Yariv Levin and other supporters of the “judicial reform” (or “judicial coup,” depending on which newspaper you read), intended to weaken the authority of the court over against the other branches of government.  This tension over the proper balance of “checks and balances” is of course very present in US political discourse – and the United States has a constitution!  How much the more so is it a painful conversation in Israel, where the six-month deadline for ratifying a constitution, set in the Declaration of Independence in 1948, has dragged on for 77 years with no end in sight.  It turns out that this is a dilemma with deep roots:

In the Torah, Moses offers the Israelites the option of monarchy: “If…you decide ‘I will set a king over me, as do all the nations about me…’” (Deut. 17:14) they are free to do so with some limits, including: “When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Torah written for him on a scroll by the Levitical priests.  Let it remain with him and let him........

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