Regular listeners to this podcast will notice a thematic semblance that connects this

week's conversation to the one from last week.

Then I spoke with the scholars Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Ziegler about their outstanding

new book on Israel's

Declaration of Independence. In the course of that conversation, we discussed how, as a matter of

scholarship, their study of Israel's founding document is consistent with a style and a manner

of the study of America's founding documents that was pioneered by thinkers like Martin

Diamond, Herbert Storing, and Walter Burns. Well, these political scientists probed America's

Declaration of Independence and the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, and subsequent

debates over the Bill of Rights and further amendments, they treated these arguments

in their historical and legal context, and they also studied how these texts relate to

the Western tradition of thinking about power and justice and citizenship and freedom

and equality.

But they also probed those texts in search of a deeper classical insight, that the law is, among other things, a moral teacher, and the highest law, the constitutional structures that constrain normal laws.

This higher law manifests foundational moral commitments that anchor a regime. Now, these scholars sought in the American

constitutional tradition not merely an understanding of how the Philadelphia delegates came to

compromise in Article 1 of the Constitution. They sought instead to derive from that political

settlement an understanding of the elemental concepts of equality and representation

that would form the matrix of the American order. That is the spirit of today's conversation,

too. We look explicitly at the American Constitution in search of its elemental concepts,

and focus in particular on the ones that might be useful for

Israelis at this hour of political instability. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host,

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