הרב אבי גרוסמן Rabbi Avi Grossman

I appreciate your bringing Rothbard’s statement to my attention. It brings up an interesting topic that I was discussing recently, secession from a national body within Jewish thought. Whenever considering concepts such as these, I first look at it in terms of halachic applicability, and then in terms of practicality and utility. The former must be divided between the two major halachic domains, Torah as it applies to Jews, and Noahide law as it applies to the rest of mankind.

It seems to me that if, in an ideal and united Jewish state, such a thing was proposed, namely, that a given tribe or tribes of Israel wished to form their own state, it would certainly be technically permissible, and perhaps even the default condition of the Jewish people, and maybe even under the right circumstances, encouraged by one of God’s spokesmen. However, despite this technical permissibility, it might very well be the wrong thing to do under most circumstances, and certainly not the right thing to do if the nation truly wishes to achieve its national goals.

I will now elaborate:

1. The technical permissibility is indicated by the fact that History records incidences of a number of contemporaneous Israelite states, e.g., the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, or of the various autonomous Jewish communities ruled by exilarchs during the Hasmonean era and beyond. Maimonides even codifies this possibility in his Laws of Kings and approves of multiple kingdoms.
2. The default condition of our people was distinctly defined tribes, with distinct borders and systems of governance: for centuries, each tribe had its own official nasi, leader, and Sanhedrin, a relatively new word that describes the body of elders that made decisions, etc., for the tribe. In one of the most unfortunate aspects of this condition, tribes could even conduct their own military/foreign policies, which sometimes led to civil war, and in rare cases, cooperation, and this appears as early as the Pentateuch, wherein three tribes made independent decisions to conditionally join the others in the conquest of Canaan, and then, after said conquest, were threatened with punitive action by the others. In the book of Judges, we first read about a war conducted by the tribe of Judah with Simon’s assistance, while other tribes were meant to conduct their own wars, and later we read about most of the tribes uniting against the single tribe of Benjamin. There are many more examples of this. When I think about this point, I see that the state of Jewish unity is actually miraculous: it was nothing short of unprecedented that our stubborn and dedicated people managed to stay united in one kingdom long enough to build the Temple.
3. As Maimonides writes based on an evaluation of our biblical history, it may be that sometimes a prophet will appoint a king over some of Israel even if there is a reigning Davidic monarch, and we have two explicit incidences of this happening in history. However, there were many dynasties in Israel that did not receive prophetic approval, and perhaps it would have been better for them to defer to Davidians, who always carry a divine mandate.
4. However, as the later prophets make clear, if we are ever to achieve the messianic and utopian ideal, the Jewish people will have to somehow find a way to get over their mostly petty differences and reunite in God’s service. I hope and pray that day will come soon. (The modern state of Israel still contains a large religious population that does not recognize its legitimacy, as they view everything in terms of their own understanding of halacha, and a large leftist population that refuses to recognize the state’s sovereignty in many places, and leads an international campaign to delegitimize its necessary security arrangements.)

As for humanity at large, history is replete with examples of a national body becoming too large, and naturally dividing into daughter nations/tribes/etc. I would argue that this is the message in many of the lineages recorded in the book of Genesis, for instance, where eponymous founders of the ancient nations sometimes had sons and grandsons who formed their own. For example, Canaan begat both the Sidonians and Tyrians, who were always known as Canaanites, but he also had the Hittites and Amorites, and Abraham himself, while having the Jews as his most important (in a cosmic sense) descendants, also had the Ishmaelites and Edomites. The thirteen colonies broke away from Great Britain perhaps prematurely, while Canada and Australia became adult nations of their own, without violent schisms. I argue that secession is a natural phenomenon built into humanity, and the opposite, maintaining overgrown and unnatural national unions, or worse, trying to form large unions where they do not occur naturally, is inherently wrong and doomed to failure, and this is the lesson of numerous states of the modern era and of the Tower of Babel, noticeably included in the biblical narrative right after the critical statement: “These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations; and of these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.” That is, the union that started to form after the nations had already proliferated needed to be thwarted.

I, therefore, see no halachic reason for opposing any form of political secession per se. If California wishes to secede from the United States, or if Los Angeles wants to declare its independence, so be it. However, I do believe that the Noahide, and therefore, universal obligation of men to govern themselves by rule of law demands that government exist at the very least on the local level, the “city’s gates” so to speak, so that disputes can be adjudicated and men “do not come to eat each other alive.” No man can declare that he has his own state. But aside from the most basic forms of local government and law, the Torah certainly does not demand more from humanity, nor does it recommend more. History would also indicate that the destructiveness and lethality of any given war are exponentially proportional to the sizes of the belligerent parties, and therefore if warring parties were limited in size, the casualties and collateral damage could be minimized. Two cities with populations in the hundreds can expect to lose tens in armed conflict; 20th-century superpowers sustain and cause casualties in the millions, and use technology much more efficiently (read: devastatingly).

Thus, many of us understand why, for instance, the American founding fathers felt that leaving arms in the hands of private citizens could be a reasonable protection from encroaching government tyranny, while today it is laughable to believe that the NRA’s membership could stand a chance against a rogue federal government, or why it may have been wrong for Abraham Lincoln and his federal government to fight a devastating civil war to prevent the secession of states from the union, and we hope that if some states were to ever resolve to leave the union, they would be allowed to do so peacefully. I have much sympathy for the Brexit movement if only for this reason.

However, I would also like to point out that, despite my second-guessing the propriety of the American Civil War, the form of slavery in 19th century America was not condoned by halacha. All people are forbidden to kidnap and enslave others, and what the Sages describe as slavery is nothing like that as has been practiced in most of the world throughout history. When the Torah describes Israelites acquiring slaves of gentile origin, it is on the assumption that either the servitude started with some sort of consensual transaction, i.e., a gentile man sold himself into servitude to a Jew in exchange for his family acquiring a sum of money from the Jew, or that he elected to become a Jew’s slave instead of undergoing complete conversion (and his family may have also received some compensation), or non-Jews entered the service of Jews because they were captured in war. (That which is described regarding conquered populations, or ones that have accepted terms of surrender, is what the sages termed geirei toshav, resident aliens, or Gentiles who remain free by swearing allegiance to Noahide law and accepting second-class citizenship and national service.)

Gentiles could only acquire each other as slaves through fair, legal means, but if a slaver went to a distant continent and kidnapped people in order to sell them elsewhere, those people should rightfully be set free and their captors executed by a court of law. (I am working on the assumption that unless we are explicitly told otherwise, Noahides are held to the same standards as Jews with regard to injunctions that apply mutually. Kidnapping is either a form of theft or if he then subjugates or sells his victim, it is a form of murder, both of which carry the death penalty for Noahides. The various differences between how these laws apply to Jews and gentiles can be found in the literature, e.g., although there is a universal prohibition against eating from a living animal, the definition of the animal’s death is different for Jews.)

We recently wondered why members of the Dor De’ah movement, on the one hand, and Satmar/Munkatch on the other, are treated so differently. The former are vocal unbelievers in the Zohar, who accuse generations of Jews of being quasi-idolaters for believing in a pleroma, the latter similarly regarding anyone not sharing their Satanism as denying the Final Redemption (and so on). Both freely refer or referred (Dor De’ah is past its heyday) to millions of Jews as heretics, but only the Darda’im were seriously treated as sectarians.

I gave my own answer above. Here is Rabbi Grossman’s answer:

In my experience, the major difference is that the approach of the Darda’im (and the Rambam, BTW) is inherently subversive and therefore a perceived threat to the rabbinic establishment. As you have read in my recent article, Rambam could dismiss an established custom, endorsed by centuries of practice and by the Geonim, if he was convinced of its heretical source. I will dub this “Rambam’s Razor,” and in recent discussions with older scholars, I could clearly perceive their subconscious realization that such a methodology could radically change halachic practice. Of course, from an objective standpoint, the truth is the truth, and we should not take matters of Issur and Hetter personally, as though we have a vested interest in maintaining certain opinions in practice, but for many, they are just too uncomfortable with it.

The Darda’im, as the Rambamists par excellence, represent undermining tradition, even if we know they are really just trying to restore older traditions. Anti-Zionists, however, have appearances totally on their side, and from any point of view but the most perceptive, represent the strictest adherence to tradition in practice, and their opposition to Zionism is tolerated because of Zionism’s perceived novelty and therefore suspicion.

May God grant us the ability to properly analyze and fully understand each approach and its consequences.

Reprinted with permission from Avraham Ben Yehuda, here.