Rav Shai's Torah on the Grow

Judaism knows nothing of impeachment from office. For Jews, power does not reside in an office (be it the president or a priest); for Jews, power resides with the person. When a previously influential person is perceived as no longer worthy of their influence, their power naturally diminishes. 

Judaism does not impeach, but it does excommunicate or shun. Elisha ben Abuya was the most famous Talmudic sage to be excommunicated. His transgression was heresy, and the sages’ concern was that he would influence others to follow him beyond the Jewish path. He had to be excommunicated, from the Rabbis’ point of view, precisely because they could not deprive him of his powers of persuasion. His punishment was not to lose his office, as in impeachment, but to be shunned by his community to ensure a safe distance between Elisha’s heretical ideas and open minds malleable to his logic.

The rabbis fantasized about how to prevent kings, who could not be excommunicated, from becoming corrupt. They imagined the king’s throne situated between two high-backed chairs of gold, one for the High Priest and the other for the Deputy High Priest. Every time the king would climb each of the six steps to his throne, a herald would proclaim a regal restriction from the Torah to remind the king of the King of kings. In the middle of his ascent, the herald would proclaim, “Do not bend the law” (Dt. 16:19). The next warning, from the same verse, is “do not recognize a face.” Should the king approach the limit lines of those restrictions, the priestly guardians of Torah are there to keep him on the path of justice. A society whose leaders “recognize faces,” who bend the law based on the identity of the parties, is a leadership susceptible to corruption. Such societies require the remedy of impeachment.