Reply To: Time to make the popcorn

AAQ – You are probably right here. Israeli democracy has weak points that are hard to fix. But, as the numbers I quoted above show, Israeli democracy is in a reasonable state overall and is improving over time.

The numbers you quoted don’t mean anything at all, as I pointed out in a different post.

Somehow, halakhists spent centuries discussing fine points of kashrus, but did not develop good theories of democracy.

Maybe because Kashrus is something Hashem told us to do, and democracy (in the Western sense) is not.

for example, according to a historian who studied Jewish Poland during Vaad Arba Artzos, Jewish political and business structures mostly mirrored Polish ones (that were pretty advanced and democratic by those times, until Poland missed out on industrialization)

The Jews BUILT the business and financial infrastructure of Poland, from Casimir the Great on, when Poland was still basically a semi-barbarian society just starting to get its act together commercially with the help of the Jews Casimir imported for that purpose, and they greatly influenced the development of Poland as a nation. This is a general machlah of historians to read everything as Goyish influence on Jews, and not the other way around.

R Gamliel has 1000 people in his household learning Torah and 1000 learning Greek. We lost that skill to balance things.

That was specific to the house of Rabban Gamliel, as Nassi, the (hereditary/meritocratic non-democratic) leader of Klal Yisroel who had to deal with the Romans. Sort of a vocational school for askonim. That wasn’t an ideal or a model for the general tzibbur to follow.