As Kabbalah teaches there are primarily – only – three states in which we all find ourselves, love, fear and truth

 

Abraham represented a life built on love, but love has disastrous side-effects, for through spoiling his firstborn Yishmoel, God-himself attests, that he became an “entitled” boy, and to this very day we suffer from his descendants incredible obnoxiousness!

Isaac represents fear of God, fearing to hurt another, which likewise had a disastrous side effect, for though fear can lead to justice, it can also lead to the disastrous side effect of his descendant Eisav, the progenitor of Rome, a harshness which instead of life’s main mission being the promotion of love, lived by the sword – though they believed themselves to be righteous, they had no tolerance for any way but their own perceived righteous.

 

And then there is Jacob, who did not believe man was capable of allowing his own intuition to be the determining factor of right and wrong, hence he was a student of God’s word, and in it he produced the Jewish nation, which as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks comments, as Paul Johnson (a famous historian) told him, what amazes him most about the Jewish people (historically speaking) is their unique ability to balance the communal with the individual.

 

In other words, the great challenge of mankind was “do you give free reign to human aspirations (like the west today) or do you limit the vagrancies of human desires? (like rigid religious based societies, say in Islam etc.)”

 

And only through Torah, God’s words, do we find the balance, and the balance is surprisingly simple, instead of creating a communal outlook, either almost anarchistic democracy, or almost totalitarian religious rigidity, we apply the right reality to the right situation!

 

Instead of painting everything in a broad stroke, well, it simply depends.

 

So in conclusion, yes, society must have law and order and simultaneously society must allow for individuals to find God!