Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried
— Winston Churchill (aka Otto von Bismark)
Tonight I have listened to a lecture on the philosophy of Plato, in which I heard that he famously proposed two types of societies:
1) An ideal city-state, which was ruled by philosopher kings who alone had access to the truth and intellectual tradition and were able to reason and derive ethical standards. (The other citizens of the polis were soldiers who enforced the laws and the rest of the citizens who weren’t intellectual. Plato used this model of society as a moshol for one’s mind which consists of intellectual, emotional and spiritual parts. Everyone knows he got the idea by reading Tanya.)
2) A more realistic polis, which was ran democratically. The role of the philosophers in such a polis was to come up with laws and explain them to the general public. All the people would then vote on the laws. (And by “people” I mean free men who were citizens of the polis. [And by “men” I mean “males”.])
Now, upon hearing this, I wondered: what if the system of halachic psak was more like the second model than the first one? What if Halacha was determined not by authorities (the king, the Sanhedrin, the talmidei chochamim having enough education, experience and authority to pasken), but democratically? The role of talmidei chochamim would be to explain the proposed piskei din and the halachic reasoning behind them, and then all the Jews in a particular community would vote, and the outcome would be incumbent upon all the Jews of the community.
Please share what you think in the comments or by voting in the poll on the right.
