Making Sense of the Covenant—How It Shows Up in Our Own Lives
This past shabbat we studied Lekh Lekhah, the third parashah (portion) in the entire Torah, the portion in which the scene shifts from the universal—think Adam and Eve, and Noah and his family, representing all of humanity—to the particular: God’s relationship with Abraham and Sara (initially named Abram and Sarai), the foremost ancestors of what was to become the community of the Israel.
It is in this parashah that God establishes God’s brit (covenant) with Abram, declaring “As for Me, this is My covenant with you: You shall be the father of a multitude of nations… I will maintain My covenant between Me and you, and your offspring to come, as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages, to be God to you and to your offspring to come” (Genesis 19:4-7).
On its face, this is what scholars call a “promissory grant.” It is a unilateral promise based, seemingly, on God’s beneficence and love. No demand for reciprocity is named. It is a grant, one can understand it, based on God’s desire to make God’s presence felt in this world through a relationship with community. Of course, to the extent that there is an implicit expectation of mutual obligation, that expectation is later made explicit, as, at the base of Mt. Sinai, God declares, “Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples” (Exodus 19:5). Here, the promise appears conditional—dependent upon our own fulfillment of our end of the bargain.
As Arnold Eisen teaches, later understandings of Jewish history merged these two understandings of covenant. When the people experienced the devastating destruction of the Temple and exile from the Promised Land, they understood it to be because of their failure to fulfill the precepts of Torah—their responsibilities under the covenant. By the same token, Jewish tradition understands these failures as not resulting in an all-out cancellation of the covenant. The union persists; it is indissoluble.
As we seek to unpack the meaning of Brit/covenant, a concept whose presence remains central to Jewish self-understanding (think the welcome rites of Brit Milah/circumcision or Brit Bat/welcoming a daughter into the covenant) this can be helpful. Covenant helps us find our way to God: without such a concept, God can seem out of reach, distant, beyond. With the concept, we understand the ways in which we are called upon to make this world more hospitable to God’s presence, a loving presence that will be with us no matter where we turn, how we misstep, or how we seek to repair.
