The Torah didn’t command the king to carry the law because kings are naturally inclined to follow it. It commanded it precisely because they aren’t.

The king of Israel was required to write his own Torah scroll and keep it with him at all times — lo yasur min ha-Torah — so he would never forget that he was subject to the same law as every other Israelite (Devarim 17:18-20). Not as ceremony. Not as piety performance. As a structural check against the intoxication of power.

The scroll was not an honor. It was a leash. It tethers people to laws.

We have spent the past several months watching what happens when the leash is removed.

I write this not as political commentary but as someone who has spent decades at the intersection of Jewish tradition and behavioral science — studying what our texts teach about power and what psychology confirms about how it corrupts. This isn’t about partisan politics. It’s about what it means when the most powerful become functionally exempt from accountability, and why Jews — drawing on both tradition and trauma-informed pattern recognition — should worry.

What the Record Is Not Allowed to Show

Jack Smith spent years investigating alleged crimes involving classified documents and efforts to overturn a democratic election. He completed his work. He wrote his report. Federal regulations required its release.

And then the American public was blocked from reading it.

Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed by the very president under investigation, blocked its release, apparently with little concern with the optics of her decision. Now Attorney General Pam Bondi is reportedly seeking to establish policy preventing future special counsel reports from ever seeing daylight.

Think about what that means. The rule of law rests not only on prosecutions but on transparency, on the public’s ability to know what its government investigated and why. When the record of accountability itself is sealed, we move from “the law applies to everyone” to “the law applies to everyone whose record we choose to make visible.”

Whilte it is unfair to Donald Trump who is unable to defend himself against evidence contained in the report, his co-defendants, people with a fraction of his power and resources, face prosecution for the same alleged conduct. They will be held accountable. He will not. And the public will not be permitted to read why.

This is precisely the pattern our tradition warned against and that social psychology confirms happens when power goes unchecked.

What Torah Teaches: The Scroll as Neuropsychological Intervention

When the Torah commands the king to write and carry the scroll, it’s explicit about why:

“Let his heart not be lifted above his brother and let him not turn aside from the commandment” (Devarim 17:20).

The danger isn’t that the king will become evil. The danger is that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)