The great pendulum that brought corrupt leaders to power across the globe is now swinging toward a just center. In the last week we have seen the slipping of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, of Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom and most improbably President Donald Trump of the United States. In each case corruption has been asserted without indictments, but that day may be coming.

Each of these powerful men have this in common: they hoped to gain power and credibility by manipulating the government they serve.

In Netanyahu’s case he made the outrageous promise to annex portions of Palestine if his government was re-elected. The outcome of the coalition-making process in Israel remains unsure, but the vote tally in the Parliament favors his rival Bernard Ganz. If Netanyahu is removed as Prime Minister, he may be subject to anticipated corruption charges.

Boris Johnson’s attempt to suspend Parliament was thwarted unanimously by an 11-member judiciary yesterday, making it more difficult for him to engineer the Brexit process in the absence of an economic settlement with the European Union.  It has been implied that he lied to the Queen, who is officially charged with the power to suspend Parliament.

President Trump’s slide is a work in progress. Nancy Pelosi, the cautious Speaker of the House, has launched an impeachment inquiry into alleged extortion of Ukraine’s President, using American military aid as conditional for the Ukrainian corruption investigations said to implicate Hunter Biden, son of potential Presidential rival Joe Biden.  If proven, this manipulation would resonate with the unconfirmed allegations of collusion with a foreign power to uncover opposition evidence in the 2016 election.

As the President has declared, this is not good for the United States.  We are already divided into political tribes that make compromise and negotiation impossible at every level of government and even among friends and families. It is no different in Israel and England, which are torn by issues of ethnic oppression and economic alliances. Democracy has been stalemated in nations that have been world exhibits of democracy.

But the pendulum is swinging or the wheels of the gods are slowly turning or the handwriting is on the wall:

mene mene tekel upharsin 

the unseen hand wrote at the banquet of King Belshazzar when his court had taken the vessels from the Jewish temple for their sacrilegious party. The prophet Daniel interpreted the words as ‘“numbered, numbered, weighed, divided” (Daniel 5:26-28), famously elaborated as “You are weighed in the balances and found wanting.” Words that declared fraud in the marketplace, but in God’s justice an end to the suffering of the captive Israelis.

This foreshadowed the abrupt overthrow of Belshazzar to a crazed life of alienation.

This story has limited application for the leaders under fire in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel. The process of  disentangling powerful leaders from office is more incremental, more like the “wheels of the gods,” which are said to “grind slowly.”  But there is a deeper satisfaction to believe that some unseen hand is moving toward inevitable justice.  We have smelled corruption in the United States for years.  Everyone smells it, even though they suspect different villains. We know there is corruption in some quarter.

So the agents of justice must move slowly, without rancor, toward the desired outcome. Each country must use the levers of democracy to prove the system works. We must believe that the mythical pendulum, the imagined wheels of the gods, and the foreboding handwriting on the wall have taken up the staggering cause of justice and will see it through to the healing of our nations.