Efrat, Israel – “Judges and officers shall you establish in all of your gates… and you shall come to the Kohen – Teachers, to the Judges who will be [functioning] in those days. And you shall do in accordance with what they tell you… And you shall surely set up for yourselves a King …” (Deut 16:18, 17: 8-10, 14). 
Fascinatingly enough, the Bible records a number of different and distinctive leadership roles in the Biblical period in Israel, each of which has to be adequately defined and understood: King, Judge, Kohen-Priest and Prophet. Each of these functionaries played a major role; however, only when all four leadership roles operated in tandem, with each playing his “instrument” to perfection, and when at the same time each one successfully served to check and balance the others, could the Israelite nation hope to become a “holy nation and Kingdom of Priest-teachers.”  
The King must be the orchestra leader. He must serve as Chief Executive Officer par excellence, responsible for setting the theoretical policy and effectuating the proper functioning of a government dedicated to being a beacon of light and enlightenment, a model of morality and freedom, to all the nations of the world. The King must be the symbol of the King of all Kings, both for his nation as well as for all of humanity, and he must therefore discard the normal trappings of a powerful monarchy – the acquisition of many houses (Volvos today), the marrying of many wives (or “cavorting” with many mistresses) and the amassing of much gold and silver – in favor of his always bearing on his person a second Torah Scroll. (Deut. 17:15-20; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Hagiga 3). 
The next most critical functionaries were the judges, and when qualified, their legislative skills might bring them to the Sanhedrin, the highest court in the land.  The Sanhedrin dealt with great national questions; it sat within the Holy Temple borders, in the office of Hewn Stone or clear-cut decisions (Lishkat HaGazit), and was presided over by the Prince or President (Nasi),  who traditionally hailed from the family of Judah. These Judges not only decided the law which was to be followed by Israel, especially those laws which were involved in dispute and dissension within the ranks of rabbinic leadership but  even more importantly, the Sanhedrin had to extract and extrapolate new laws in response to changing circumstances; the critical function of the Sanhedrin was nowhere in greater evidence than after the destruction of the Second Temple, when our Sages transformed Judaism from a Temple-centered, Priestly-directed nation to a very different “Prayer-and-Repentance” oriented people, through whose legislative body of Elders the external Divine Voice from Sinai would continue to be heard throughout the generations.  
But perhaps the most fundamental of all functionaries were the Priest and Prophet, the Kohen and Navi, who had to complement each other despite (or perhaps because of) the natural tensions which (of necessity) developed between them, and whose awe-inspiring presence – especially that of the prophet – is so tragically absent today. 
I have previously commented on the fact that the Kohen-priest wore unique and special garments, and that the position of Kohen-priest was completely dictated by pedigree: only if your father was a Kohen-priest could you be a Kohen-priest. The Kohen represented the march of tradition, the ritual laws regarding praying and eating, ascetic fasting and celebratory feasting, the minutiae of religious observances from the moment the Jew rises in the morning to the time he/she goes to sleep at night, the life-cycle events from cradle to grave. 
But as crucially important as ritual detail may be for our Jewish continuity and eternity, and as an expression of the utter seriousness with which we look at Divine service, compulsive obsession surrounding our observances can destroy the very spirituality our religion is desperately attempting to foster, and turn a sincere inner religious emotion into an external “show” of one-upmanship.  This was the kind of degeneration occurring within the sacred walls of the Holy Temple itself, and it caused the prophets to speak out against the hypocritical sacrifices and the meaningless festival celebrations which left widows and orphans in the lurch. 
Today, we can see the tension between ethics and ritual in the area of Kashrut.  The major purpose of kashrut certainly included uniting the Jewish people into a cohesive, unique and separate ethnic entity, dedicated to the preservation of our faith. Instead, in the contemporary Jewish world, the results are the exact opposite. Is there any force in contemporary Jewish life which divides the Jewish people to a greater extent than Kashrut observance! More often than not, fervid religiosity is measured by which homes and restaurants I will not eat in or which Kashrut certifications I will not accept. Are we truly preserving the march of Jewish generations and the importance of binding traditions from parents to children when children refuse to eat in Sabbath observing parental homes because their parents do not abide by a stringency of “Kosher” milk (halav yisrael) or accept the Chief Rabbinate permissibility of selling the top soil of Israel to the Arabs during the Sabbatical year!
In Biblical times it was the prophet - devoid of special clothes or special pedigree – who reminded the Kohen priests as well as the nation that G-d desires first and foremost service of the heart, and that the true purpose of the ritual was to bring Jews together in love and compassion.   The prophet decreed animal sacrifices and festival observances as meaningless, reduced to empty forms and hollow attempts at bribing G-d, if devotees of ritual forget the orphan, the widow and the homeless (Isaiah 1). Tragically, the courageous voice of the prophet, whose major task is to properly define religious priorities, is sadly lacking today within our institutionalized, and all too often ossified, Jewish community. 

Shabbat Shalom