A Jewish state must defend Jewish life. But the moment force begins to sound self-justifying, something has already gone wrong.

Jewish history does not grant Jewish power innocence. It should make Jewish power more suspicious of its own sacred alibis, not less.

That is why Leo XIV matters right now. On Palm Sunday, he said that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war. And in the Good Friday Way of the Cross meditations read at the Colosseum, the warning was made explicit: every person in authority will have to answer to God for the way power is exercised, including the power to start or end a war.

The issue is not papal authority in the old sense. It is whether political power still recognizes any limit outside itself.

Modern states do not fear religion when religion blesses flags, enemies, emergency powers, and the grammar of necessity. They fear religion only when religion refuses annexation by the state and reminds rulers that they may answer to a judgment they did not create and cannot administer. That is why Leo has become irritating to parts of the contemporary political class. He has urged Trump to find an off-ramp from the Iran war and has emerged as a clear critic of sacred language used in the service of force.

Henry VIII still matters because he supplied the template. The break with Rome was not merely a Tudor quarrel. It was a structural operation: power severing itself from an external measure and learning to sanctify itself from within.

Christian schisms were rarely only theological. They were battles over jurisdiction, over who had the right to govern the border between sacred authority and political rule. Once that border becomes unstable, doctrine and power stop traveling separately.

What makes the present moment more dangerous is that it no longer requires a formal schism. The state does not need to found a national church in order to capture the sacred. It can absorb biblical language, civilizational rhetoric, collective memory, and the vocabulary of destiny directly into its security grammar. It does not need to abolish transcendence. It only needs to nationalize it. That operation is cleaner, faster, and harder to name. It is Henry VIII without the paperwork.

And now there is a third layer. Sacred power is no longer only political or ecclesiastical. It is becoming technological and apocalyptic. Peter Thiel’s Rome lectures on the Antichrist and the danger of a one-world government justified by promises of protection from nuclear, AI, or climate catastrophe reveal the next mutation of the problem. Sovereignty no longer merely nationalizes the sacred. It securitizes the apocalypse.

One theology treats religion as a limit on violence. Another treats religion as fuel for violence. One says rulers answer beyond themselves. Another implies that power has already secured divine alignment. One places judgment above war. Another folds judgment into war.

This distinction matters everywhere. But it should matter especially in a Jewish state, because Jewish history was not formed under the luxury of assuming that law, order, civilization, or sacred language make power innocent. Quite the opposite. Jewish history knows how easily elevated language can accompany exclusion, expulsion, selective protection, and death.

For that reason, Israel should resist one temptation more carefully than most states: the temptation to convert historical trauma into permanent moral pre-clearance.

The memory of persecution does not grant a state metaphysical innocence. It should produce sharper vigilance toward the moment when necessity becomes self-sanctifying, when security begins to sound like exemption from judgment, and when force begins to speak in the accent of destiny rather than responsibility.

A Jewish state must defend Jewish life. That is not in question. What is in question is whether it will preserve the capacity to distrust sacredized power even when that power is its own.

That is the harder task.

It is also the more Jewish one.

The deepest danger is not that religion enters politics.

The deepest danger is that politics learns how to speak like God.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)