Rabbi Eli C. Freedman, Senior Rabbi Jill L. Maderer, and Cantor Bradley Hyman lead a service marking Erev Rosh Hashanah at Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 6, 2021. REUTERS/Rachel Wisniewski

Rosh Hashanah symbolizes the evolution of the Jewish people and Israel, unlike any other holy days. The harvest festivals were all celebrated years before the Israelites appeared on earth. And they were adopted and adapted. But what we now call Rosh Hashanah is different. It was based on the Babylonian “King’s Day” on the First of the Babylonian month of Tishrei.

Indeed, all the months we now name in the Hebrew calendar were borrowed from Babylonia. But Rosh Hashanah is unique in what it tells us about politics and Judaism’s contribution to the evolution of democracy.

The Torah represents the dawn of egalitarian thought. In Europe, only in the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries do we find the rejection of the privileges of rank and nobility that led to the collapse of the caste, feudal, and slave systems. Greece and Rome had their respective reformers, yet nowhere in the classical world do we find a struggle to do away with class distinctions.

The Torah, however, did this well before Greece and Athens — it is the world’s first blueprint for a social and religious order that seeks to lessen stratification and hierarchy, and to place an unprecedented emphasis on the well-being and status of the common person.

The Torah addresses citizens in the second person — “you.” It was a written, public text, applicable and accessible to all. All public institutions in the Torah — the judiciary, the priesthood, the monarchy, the institution of prophecy — were subject to the law. The Torah specifies no nominating body for appointing leaders or representatives. Rather, the collective, the people, choose a king and appoint judges.

What the Torah proposes is the Western tradition’s first prescription for an economic order that seeks to minimize the distinctions of class based on wealth, and instead to ensure the economic benefit of the common citizen.

The Torah rejects land holding for either a king or priest. Instead, nearly the entire land is given to the people themselves, in an association of free farmers and herdsmen, subsumed within a single social class. The Torah further legislates that one type of tax, the ma’aser ani, the Poor Tithe, should not be paid to the Temple at all, but rather distributed to the needy. This is the first example  of taxation legislated for a social purpose (Deut. 14:28–29).

Almost none of this is found within the so-called democracy of Athens to which it is universally assumed we owe the concept of democracy.

The democracy of Athens was not egalitarian. Women, the poor, and slaves, had no role in deciding how to govern or indeed what the laws of the land should be. And although it is true that in Athens the people were supposed to be the ones responsible for legislation, the record of how they quite randomly appointed a person to rule and then deposed and often murdered him on a whim, indicates that it was a system very far removed from one in which every person matters.

As the Mishnah says in talking about Rosh Hashanah for the first time, rather than the first of the seventh month, “It is the day when all human beings pass before God.” Instead of being the King’s Day, as in Babylon, it is the people’s day, when we are reminded that we are all the children of one God and are called upon to remember and reflect on this, and examine who we are, what we do, and how we relate to other people.

Shabbat Shalom, Shana Tovah, and may this year bring peace.

The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.