A secular cosmology has the world revolving around us; Avraham Avinu saw the world as revolving around Hashem

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he most bizarre shiur that I can recall was delivered by a bare-headed American Jewish professor to a group of mostly-secular Israelis in a left-leaning Jerusalem think-tank.

The event — a lecture on the influence of Jewish sources on European political thought — wasn’t actually billed as a shiur. But presenter and venue apart, it felt like one.

Harvard professor of government Eric Nelson’s subject was the fascinating debate that broke out in early Enlightenment Europe about whether kings had a divine right to rule. The dispute pitted Catholics against Protestants, supporters of the old monarchical order against advocates of new forms of governance.

Both sides attempted to buttress their claims with Biblical sources. But, as the Christian scholars discovered, the Bible seems ambivalent about monarchy as an institution. So, in an extraordinary twist, they resorted to Gemara and Medrash to prove their point.

One scholar referred to a mysterious “Midrash Nahmani” which prompted some head-scratching from Professor Nelson, reading the scholar’s work hundreds of years later.

“There’s a Midrash Rabba and Midrash Tanhuma,” the professor said “but there’s no such thing as a Midrash Nahmani.”

Practically rotating his thumb in lomdish fashion, the professor shared his academic chiddush with a rapt audience.

“I realized where the Christian scholar had gone wrong. Since the work is called Midrash Rabba, he assumed that it was the work of the Talmudist, Rabbah bar Nahmani. So, he called it ‘Midrash Nahmani!’”

This memorable scene came back to me last week when I saw one of Trump’s more colorful posts on his social media platform.

It was a meme featuring the iron-visaged president striding towards the future from a darkened street scene, titled “HE’S ON A MISSION FROM G-D & NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT IS COMING.”

Posted hours after a federal court’s decision to strike down Trump’s tariff policies, it was the president’s signature bombastic style.

But it was more, because this is not just the sense of destiny that besets every occupant of the Oval Office. These are not just the retweets of a Republican president nodding to his evangelical base, who see him as the reincarnation of Cyrus the Great.

For some time now, Trump — never a man afflicted with an undue sense of modesty — has seen himself as a Heaven-sent figure.

You can see where he’s coming from, by the way. The average reader who survived double impeachment, two assassination attempts, the might of the Justice Department and all the cannonades of the media to storm back to power might think so, too.

But whatever the theology, Trump’s latent imperial tendencies (I call it “Trumpus Maximus”) are augmented by a sense of Divine mission.

For a decade now, the commentariat has been in paroxysms about Trump’s supposed threat to democracy. Often that raging has been way overdone: January 6 was certainly a disgrace, but it wasn’t the storming of the Bastille and the overthrow of the Republic that Democrats made it out to be.

But they have been right about one thing: Trump is a (upper case r) Republican who doesn’t have a (small r) republican soul. He sees himself alongside the great figures of American history, alongside other major era-defining leaders.

So, he’s impatient with some of the pesky, pedestrian political realities like term-limits that obstruct him.

That has turned Donald Trump into an unusual figure in US political history. Tongue-only-slightly-in-cheek, the last leader of the United States to believe so firmly in his Divine right to rule was George V, the British king who lost America to the Americans.

One implication of Trump’s unique status is that Israel finds itself in a fragile position when he’s in office. He was an outstanding supporter when in office the first time around. This time, he’s kept the munitions tap open. But as Trump confirmed last week, he’s keeping Israel’s government on a short leash when it comes to Gaza and Iran.

And unlike the days of Obama and Biden, there’s nowhere to turn to challenge the president. Barring some honorable exceptions, the Democrats are more or less toxic on Israel. And the Republicans? Yes, they’re pro-Israel, but more than they are pro-Israel, they’re pro-Trump.

Donald Trump has become a value in and of himself to vast numbers of his supporters. He has become the arbiter of Republicanism. If he turns on Israel, so will they.

So, all the rumblings of Israeli right-wingers that Bibi needs to show some spine and defy Uncle Sam are wrong. Bibi has done the wise thing: kept quiet and tried to influence the administration behind the scenes. Openly opposing the White House worked to a degree under Biden, when there was a political bloc predisposed to be anti-Biden and pro-Israel.

But with a monarchical president, the number of American politicians currently minded to defy Trump in support of Israel is close to zero.

World leaders who believe in their Heavenly mandate are a shekel a dozen. They always have been, and always will be. They come in autocratic form like Putin or Erdogan. They can be democratic figures like Barack Obama who clearly believed in some (more secular) version of his own destiny.

But leaving politics to the politicians, these figures are a study in something that affects us all: the human tendency to conflate our agenda with the Creator’s.

Most of us live our lives by trying to align our principles and our actions. Since we have to live with our conscience, we attempt to minimize the gulf between the two. Sometimes we do this by assuring ourselves that we’re in the business of doing Hashem’s work.

Often, that’s a surprisingly easy case to make — especially to oneself. But is it true, or just self-delusion?

At the end of the Akeidah, Avraham Avinu hands us the key to this puzzle. He calls the site of the near-sacrifice “Hashem yeira'eh,” meaning that Hashem is seen. The use of the passive tense is key here, because Avraham places Hashem at the center of events, to be observed by us.

A secular cosmology has the world revolving around us; Avraham Avinu saw the world as revolving around Hashem. The difference is whether we decide on an agenda and then kindly ascribe it to the Creator, or whether we work to identify His agenda and then try to make it our own.

Finally, any discussion about world leaders and their pretensions has to come back to one very important point. “Like streams of water,” Mishlei (21:1) famously says, “the heart of the king is in the Hand of G-d. He directs it anywhere He wishes.”

Given the incredible power he wields, a king loses his free will. Paradoxically, the figure with the most agency is the one with the least — reduced to a tool of Hashem’s Will.

Maybe it’s impossible to avoid obsessing about America’s first impeachment-proof, shot-proof president-king. But we can stop obsessing about whether the president is still all in for Israel or not. He’s not the right address anyway.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1064)