Jeremy Phillips asks: Do we have to pray for the success and welfare of a government that we do not like, is not of our choosing, and contains coalition parties or individuals whom we distrust or of whose policies we strongly disapprove?
At Avot 3:2 Rabbi Chanina, Segan HaKohanim, teaches:
הֱוֵי
מִתְפַּלֵּל בִּשְׁלוֹמָהּ שֶׁל מַלְכוּת, שֶׁאִלְמָלֵא מוֹרָאָהּ, אִישׁ אֶת
רֵעֵֽהוּ חַיִּים בְּלָעוֹ
“Pray for the welfare (literally
'peace') of the government since, if it were not for fear of it, a man would
swallow his neighbour alive".
But things are never as simple as they seem. Does one pray
for the peace of the realm when the government is oppressive, corrupt, selfish
and immoral? Opinions are divided. Rabbi Marc D. Angel, for example, writes:
"...praying for the welfare
of the government is relevant only if the government itself is just. If the
government is immoral, one certainly should not pray for its welfare" (The
Koren Pirkei Avot).
Against this, it is worth considering the background to this
teaching. Rabbi Chanina lived, and died, at a time of chaos and anarchy, when
the Romans occupied the whole of Israel and the Levant; they were therefore the
ruling power in Israel itself. 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, these being
deaths that the Roman governors had no great interest in preventing. The Jewish
authorities too were powerless to stop this carnage. Indeed, it was a sorry
reflection of those troubled times that the members of the Sanhedrin, the
supreme Jewish court, absented themselves from the Lishkat HaGazit (the
Chamber of Hewn Stone, from which place alone capital cases could be tried) so
that they would not be able to pass 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. If one is to pray for the welfare
of only a good government, we may well ask whether Rabbi Chanina was ever able
to follow his own advice.
Rabbi Marcus Lehmann (The Lehmann-Prins Pirkei Avoth) takes the view that Rabbi Chanina's teaching does indeed apply to corrupt governments. One does not pray, of course, that their leaders and functionaries should succeed in their evil, but that they should mend their ways and govern justly. This is reflected in the classic formula of the prayer for the King found in the British Authorised Daily Prayer Book:
“May [God] in his mercy put a
spirit of wisdom and understanding into his heart, and into the hearts of all his
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.”
This formulation does
not endorse the errors and follies of the government. It does however invoke
God's mercy -- and it also acknowledges that wisdom and understanding are gifts
from God, gifts of which many governments throughout the world are sorely in
need.
