The Mishnah in Tractate Sotah [7:8] tells a fascinating story. Once every seven years, during the holiday of Sukkot following the Sabbatical (Shemitta) year, the entire nation would gather in Jerusalem for the Assembly (Hakhel) ceremony to hear the king read from the Torah. It was a reenactment of the revelation at Sinai, with the king standing not as a sovereign above the people but as the reader of the covenant before them. On one such occasion, during the Second Temple, King Agrippas took the Torah scroll and began to read. When he reached the verse that said [Devarim 17:15]: “From among your brothers shall you place a king over yourself; you may not place over yourself a foreign man who is not your brother,” tears began to run down his face. The people cried out, “Do not fear, Agrippas. You are our brother! You are our brother!” The Talmud is not satisfied with this tender scene. It records a devastating judgment: at that moment, the Jewish People became liable for destruction because they flattered Agrippas. The conventional reading is straightforward. Agrippas understood that his lineage made his kingship problematic. The people reassured him that he was one of them. Their words may have been emotionally true, but they blurred an important constitutional question. A nation that cannot tell its king the truth is in trouble.

But perhaps there is another layer. Perhaps the people were not answering Agrippas’s question at all. Agrippas heard the words “from among your brothers” and wondered whether he belonged. The people answered, “We are brothers.” Not merely, “You are one of us,” but “Look around. You have brought us together. We are standing here as one people under one Torah.” To understand why that possibility matters, one must first understand who Agrippas was. He was not a simple Jewish king from a simple Jewish dynasty. He was a Herodian, descended from a family that had come to power under Roman patronage. Raised in Rome and connected to the imperial household, his kingship came through the machinery of empire rather than through a traditional Jewish dynasty. Yet ancient sources portray him as a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)