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 he will come to believe he is different and that rules binding ordinary people don’t apply to him.

This ancient insight anticipates what social psychologists have confirmed experimentally: power systematically alters moral cognition. Research by Dacher Keltner demonstrates that even temporary elevation to authority increases risk-taking, reduces empathy, and diminishes perspective-taking. People in power show decreased activation in neural networks associated with empathy and increased activation in reward-seeking circuits. Power literally changes how the brain processes moral information.

Let’s consider the scroll as a neuropsychological intervention, a daily practice designed to counteract power’s predictable corrupting effects on cognition and behavior.

The Talmud extends this further. Rabbi Yose ben Yoezer ruled that a king must be judged for capital crimes (Sanhedrin 19a). His reasoning: “If you exempt the powerful from judgment, you have destroyed the foundation of justice.”

When Natan confronted King David after the Bathsheba affair — “Atah ha’ish” — “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12:7) — he was declaring that position does not exempt you from accountability.

The prophets assumed power would always attempt to exempt itself from scrutiny. Their role was to make that exemption impossible.

When the record is sealed, when a judge with obvious conflicts blocks a report, when an attorney general moves to ensure future reports meet the same fate, we are watching the scroll be set aside. Quietly. With legal language.

What It Says to the World

Research on social norms demonstrates that visible norm violations by high-status individuals create permission structures for broader transgression. When leaders model behavior that violates stated rules without consequences, observers internalize the lesson that formal norms are performative rather than binding.

Autocratic leaders in Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and beyond have long argued that democratic accountability is simply political warfare deployed selectively. Every maneuver that makes American justice look transactional becomes ammunition for that argument.

Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Xi Jinping no longer need to defend themselves against American criticism. They can simply point to Judge Cannon’s courtroom and sealed investigative reports. The message received globally: accountability is for those without sufficient power.

That is a gift to every strongman on earth.

What It Says to Jews: Pattern Recognition, Not Paranoia

As a trauma therapist, I’ve learned that when people with repeated betrayal by systems express concern about warning signs others dismiss, they’re often not being paranoid. They’re demonstrating pattern recognition refined by painful experience.

Neuroscience confirms this. Communities with trauma histories, like Jews and other minorities, develop heightened sensitivity to environmental cues predicting danger, not as pathology but as adaptation. What looks like hypervigilance to those without such history is often accurate risk assessment by those who’ve paid the price for missing earlier signals.

Jewish “paranoia” about legal system erosion isn’t paranoia. It’s hard-won wisdom encoded in collective memory through epigenetic processes.

Jewish safety across centuries has depended on the impartiality of legal systems we did not control. When those systems maintained integrity, when law meant something apart from who wielded it, we could flourish. Medieval Spain under the Convivencia. The Dutch Republic. The United States for most of its history.

And when legal systems became instruments of the powerful? Visigothic Spain. The Russian Empire. Weimar Germany’s courts that began dismissing Jewish claims years before the Nuremberg Laws. Legal erosion preceded physical destruction. Always.

This follows a predictable sequence. First, legal institutions are delegitimized through claims they’re biased. Then, they’re captured through personnel changes and procedural manipulation. Then, accountability becomes selectively enforced. Finally, the most vulnerable discover their legal protections have evaporated.

We’re watching this sequence unfold now. Since October 7, 2023, we’ve witnessed systematic failure of legal institutions to protect Jews when protecting us becomes politically inconvenient. University administrators permit calls for Jewish genocide (i.e., “from the river to the sea”) as “free speech” while silencing milder expression on other topics. Police stand by during assaults on Jewish students. Prosecutors decline to charge hate crimes against Jews while pursuing Jews who defend themselves.

When powerful legal actors bend rules for the powerful, everyone watching learns that law is about power, not principle. And every vulnerable group becomes more vulnerable. Including Jews.

A Cheshbon HaNefesh: The Psychology of Moral Compromise

Cheshbon hanefesh (accounting of the soul) requires stripping away rationalizations we construct to protect ourselves from uncomfortable truths.

Social psychology has documented eight cognitive strategies people use to rationalize support for leaders whose behavior violates their stated values: moral justification (“This serves a higher purpose”), euphemistic labeling (“Executive privilege,” not obstruction), advantageous comparison (“Better than what the other side did”), displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, distortion of consequences, dehumanization, and attribution of blame.

These mechanisms operate outside conscious awareness. We don’t experience ourselves as abandoning principles. We experience ourselves as being realistic, pragmatic, and loyal.

For Jews who see these legal maneuvers as justified, the cheshbon hanefesh questions are:

Are we defending the rule of law, or celebrating its bending because it currently bends in a direction we prefer?

Are we experiencing cognitive dissonance,simultaneously holding “I believe in equal justice” and “I’m glad this powerful person is exempt” — and resolving it by deciding the exemption is justified?

Some will argue: But this president moved the embassy to Jerusalem. Recognized the Golan. Appointed pro-Israel judges. Stood with us.

True. We can and should be grateful.

But gratitude for good policy does not require abandoning principle when the same political actor escapes accountability. Conflating these and treating sealed investigative records as acceptable because the shielded person supports our interests is precisely the mistake Jewish communities have made throughout history, usually to our eventual regret.

Research on moral injury describes the psychological damage that occurs when people violate core values under pressure from authority or group loyalty. It manifests as profound shame, disconnection from authentic self, and spiritual crisis.

Supporting the sealing of investigative records because the person being shielded advances our political interests creates moral injury. Not immediately. But inevitably, for those paying attention to the gap between what we say we believe and what we’re defending.

“What does HaShem require of you? Only to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Mishpat means legal fairness and accountability applying to powerful and powerless alike. It is the application of justice (tzedek).

We are tribal creatures. Evolution shaped us to prioritize in-group cohesion and deference to powerful leaders. But these adaptive mechanisms become maladaptive in complex societies requiring impartial institutions.

The Torah’s insistence that the king carry the scroll represents an evolutionary override, a cultural technology designed to counteract our hardwired tendency to excuse those we’ve elevated to power.

Research on slippery slopes in moral decision-making demonstrates that erosion rarely happens through dramatic reversals. It happens through incremental shifts, each individually justifiable, that cumulatively transform systems.

Lo yasur min ha-Torah. He shall not turn aside from the law. Not even him. Especially him.

This is not a political position. It’s a Torah position confirmed by everything behavioral science teaches about power, moral cognition, and institutional erosion.

The king must carry the scroll. Not because we trust him. But because we know — through tradition, through history, through science — what happens when he doesn’t.

And a people who cheer when the scroll is set aside should ask themselves very carefully and very honestly what they are actually cheering.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)