Covenantal rule gone bad

The totalitarian secret police punish for the possible crime rather than the already committed crime. 

Here the police perform the same function God and His angels perform when they expel Adam and Eve from the Garden in Eden. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is not for their having eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge but rather to foreclose their eating from the Tree of Life. 

Possible crimes are punishments that make sense in relationships, in treaties, as pre-emptions of possible betrayal but they don’t make sense as an instrument of a legal system. Possible crimes apply to the loss of privileges, not the loss of rights. In a totalitarian regime their are no rights – people only have privileges. 

Where all claims are claims to privilege rather than to right the society is based on the logic of voluntary association where there is no exercise of power. The covenant between the leader and the people is the essence of the totalitarian order. Totalitarianism is covenantal rule gone bad. 

The trouble with the rabbinic regime is that it too has morphed into a covenantal style of relationship between the people and the rabbinic rulers, and it too has gone bad. When a government punishes for possible crimes it has moved the justice system from a legal institution to a political institution. When the movement overrides the state it does so for the sake of privileging political interests over legal interests. When the halakhic rulings refer not to actual halakhic practice but to the possibility of halakhic practice we are moving into the domain of a legal system based on possible crimes, we are moving into the domain of halakha as politics rather than law.