Matthew Miller was born in 1979 and brought up in a Reconstructionist Jewish community in White Plains New York. Things didn’t go well for him as a teenager and he dropped out of high school having got into drugs. As part of his rehabilitation he went to a teenage centre in Israel and then to a wilderness school in rural Oregon finally coming back to New York where he got seriously into music. He began to get seriously into Judaism as well, became part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, grew a beard and peyyot and started wearing tzitzit all day.
Matthew was a fanatic for Reggae music and rap and began writing and performing his music. As a Lubavitch Chassid he began to use only his Hebrew name Matisyahu. This was 2004. He began to perform his music with a band and then to record and became the most successful Chassdic reggae musician ever – admittedly a small field, but Matisyahu’s success went way outside of the Jewish community and performing to thousands of Jews and others he made Chassidic reggae mainstream – even scoring top ten hits in the USA.
All this time his music stayed deeply based in Judaism. One of his most popular tracks was actually a riff upon our Torah portion today – he called it King without a Crown and it was all about the covenant between God and each individual Jew, together with all Jews as a people.
The idea behind King without a Crown is that God is, as we will say on Rosh Hashanah, Avinu, our parent and Malkenu, our king. For Jews the covenant means that God, eloheynu melech ha’olam, our God king of the universe, rules on the basis of an agreement. God will care for us, show regard for every individual, men, women, children, from the tribal leader to the water carrier, the bible’s code for the most humble in society, be concerned for us, seek our welfare. We in return, for that is the meaning of covenant, will care for God. We will do what God needs us to do to repair the world, behave well and caringly towards each other. We will also observe what God needs for us to be able to pass on our tradition, Shabbat, the Festivals, being part of community.
Our King without a Crown is for Jews the ideal of a ruler, even more so than King Charles III. For sure if we fail to observe the Covenant things will go badly. As Ruby read for us. turn away from what God needs of us and our land will be devastated. Turn away from care and concern for others and only destruction and violence can result. Turn away from passing on values of love and compassion to future generations and those generations will live in fear. Turn away from God as guarantor of those values and how can you create a society that will last and be worth living in? When the Torah speaks about the consequences of turning to other Gods what it means for our day is turning towards the Gods of excessive materialism, of serving the ego and bowing down before the cult of personality, of worshipping ourselves and our ephemeral achievements. In the Bible’s time these things were represented in stone, wood and metal idols, today it may not be statues but idolatry is still there. Its fun to follow a person you admire on Instagram or Tik Tok but if you start to think that they can do no wrong and that must model every aspect of your behaviour after them, then that too is idolatry.
Judaism’s King without a Crown is our ideal. This ideal is what is expected of the kings who rule over Israel and Judah in times later than the Torah. They rarely measure up to it – which is a large part of the contents of the Books of the Prophets as the moral and ethical voices of their age criticise their actions and foresee the destruction of an uncaring society. Some rulers got closer to a true covenantal relationship with their people and these include the kings of Israel whose names come down for good in history, David, Solomon, Josiah.
A Jew should expect a covenantal relationship between those in power and those who are subject to that power. Care and protection in return for loyalty and goodwill. A King who kills thousands of innocent people in order to create an empire of coercion has broken this covenant.
Vladimir Putin has broken the covenant with his people that gives him legitimacy in the Jewish understanding of what it means to have the power to rule. With so many killed by whatever means, because a civilian dying due to an incendiary bomb or dying because of a chemical weapon still means that you have been murdered by the forces which are covenanted to protect you, it is over for the Putin regime. The massacre of Russia’s war against Ukraine has now been raging for 7 months on this Shabbat. And massacre it is as proven by the discoveries of mass graves in the Ukrainian towns of Izium and Bucha and who knows where else. Putin has succeeded in so breaking the covenant with humanity that there are now 7 million refugees from Ukraine living out of the country of which 120,000 Ukrainian refugees have found a home in the UK.
But whatever the danger Judaism says that you do not stand idly by while the blood of your neighbour is shed. Isaiah in our Haftarah said “for Zion’s sake I will not be silent”. He was prophesying there about the redemption of Israel from powers which had taken the land over and exiled the people but Isaiah’s words have a wider application to any destruction in the world where people are crushed and enslaved.
Judaism has a principle of the rodef derived directly from the laws around theft in the torah – whereby if someone is pursuing you to take your property and you have reasonable grounds to fear for your life, you are entitled and even required to defend yourself. This is extended in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 73a) so that a third party who can prevent the pursuer from taking the life of another is obligated to act as if he himself is in danger of his life. The Jewish experience in the twentieth century shouts out to us that if in the late 1930’s the world powers had acted to stop Hitler and Nazi Germany from killing their own peoples we could have avoided the murder of millions – the decimation of our own people and others.
It seems to me that a Jewish response to the Russian massacres cannot ever be to say that this is their business. Let these people struggle on amongst themselves – it is no business of ours. The covenant between the Russian ruler and his people is forever broken. He has no remaining legitimacy. We cannot stand idly by as witnesses to massacre. We cannot allow a pursuer to murder to keep himself in power. We cannot be party by our silence and inaction to the continuation of the violence. Even though we are having to deal with the effects of rising fuel prices and food supply troubles in this country we cannot allow President Putin and his supporters to murder unfettered.
When Jews pray for peace it must also be a call to action for our government and those who could prevent the escalation of violence. Our King without a Crown shows us the example of the standard against which we must hold rulers of nations responsible. We cannot be party to allowing continued mass murder on God’s earth. As the new year turns we must not forget about Ukraine. The Jewish community has been effective hosts and welcomes for many Ukrainian refugees, including many families in our community, but we also need to encourage our government to continue to support Ukraine and her people in their struggle to free their country from Russia, and to end Putin’s reign of terror, to wrest the blood soaked crown from his head, in the name of our King without a crown.
