Ep. 279: Melachim I Ch.11 by Calev Ben Dor &Rabbi Irwin Kula

We felt that things were too good to last and now they go downhill, very fast. A king shouldn’t have too many wives – Shlomo has 1,000. A king’s role is serve God as leader of the people. Shlomo worships, or at least enables others to worship, a wide variety of pagan gods. Shlomo’s story has left me with a lot of thoughts. The pomp and the grandeur felt so foreign to us – that’s not how Jews do it. Humility is the goal and aspiration. But Shlomo gave a good argument for it – I want be a light unto the nations and so I want to build something grand that the world will take notice of. That makes sense. (R Yose in the Talmud Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 2:6 – says that he married so many wives in order to draw them close to Torah – in contrast to Rabbi Shimon b. Yohai who sees him acting out of lust). And that seemed to work for a few chapters. But the bigger they come the harder they fall. The Tanakh never lets us have it easy. The bigger the potential for Kiddush hashem, the bigger the potential for hillul hashem – it’s a thin line between sanctification and desecration. The gemara in Sanhedrin (104b) goes so far as to quote an opinion that Shlomo is among those who have no share in the world to come! We don’t need to go that far in order to see that like his father David in a different context – elevation and humiliation go hand in hand with one another. I’ve written the above to share my thoughts as preface to a special conversation that Calev Ben Dor had with Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of CLAL, who considers what Shlomo’s story has in common with our contemporary situation, where Jews are once again as affluent and as potentially influential as they were in Solomon’s time. Hebrew and English text for this chapter can be found here: https://www.sefaria.org/I_Kings.11