Why is covenant important to jews

Outline one reason why Abraham is important to Jews. Abraham is believed to be the founder of Judaism and he made a covenant with God, which still exists for Jews today. Additionally, Abraham sealed the covenant with circumcision, which is an important ritual for Jews today.

The Abrahamic covenant A covenant is a solemn agreement between two or more people. God and Abraham entered into a covenant that promised many descendants, a blessed nation and a Promised Land. Israel, the "wife", stands accused of unfaithfulness to her marriage covenant; idolatry is harlotry.

The concept of the "jealous" God Ex ; Dt etc. Scripture describes other occasions of "meeting" with God in covenant language, too. There are for instance "promissory" covenants, principally those with Abraham Gen.

Sometimes a covenant is accompanied by an external sign or token to remind the parties of their obligations. These correspond to a the environment, including all creatures, b humanity as a whole, c Israel as nation of faith.

Walther Eichrodt , in his Theologie des Alten Testaments , of which the first version was published in when he was professor at Basel, is credited with marking the beginning of a new epoch in Bible studies. Opposing the "tyranny of historicism in OT studies" he set himself " the problem of how to understand the realm of OT belief in its structural unity and how, by examining on the one hand its religious environment and on the other its essential coherence with the NT, to illuminate its profoundest meaning " Eichrodt , Contrary to earlier Bible scholars such as Kraetschmar, who viewed "covenant" as a late prophetic notion, Eichrodt argued that "the whole course of Israelite history, in which the religious sense of solidarity is bound up with the Sinai tradition, affords further evidence" that the covenant-union between God and Israel "was an original element in all sources, despite their being in part in very fragmentary form" ;further, "It must be noted that the establishment of a covenant through the work of Moses especially emphasizes one basic element in the whole Israelite experience of God, namely the factual nature of the divine revelation.

Eichrodt disclaims doctrinal bias: "We must avoid all schemes which derive from Christian dogmatism" Nevertheless, he commits an error to which systematic theologians are prone, the error of imposing an arbitrary system on the raw material of sacred text.

It is, indeed, possible to "explain," that is, to present, basic phenomena like the kingship of God, revelation, the liberation from myth, and the personal attitude to God, in terms of a covenant relationship, and Eichrodt is adept at finding textual support for this.

The error is not merely the arbitrary selection of "covenant" as a hermeneutic key, but the assumption that there is a consistent "system" to be unlocked by a unique key. Covenant language pervades scripture, but it is not the only language of scripture. Much of the richness of scripture derives from the diversity of its images, and to take any one of them as a definitive statement of doctrine, or in a strictly literal sense, impoverishes our understanding.

In the present instance, as we shall shortly see, it has also led to futile debate and conflict. Both concepts carry the following implications:. Covenant implies divine favor, collective human responsibility and vocation.

Early Rabbinic Judaism. Paul contrasted the covenant of Abraham with that of Moses and the covenant of the spirit with that of the letter. Christians soon adopted the notion that they had a new covenant through Jesus Christ, and that the old covenant with Israel was fulfilled, superseded or even displaced.

Jo ch anan Nappacha 12 was a leading third-century Palestinian teacher. Among his contemporaries was the Church father Origen d.

Both commented on the biblical Song of Songs; both interpreted it as allegory. For Origen, it stands for God, or Christ and his "bride," the Church; for Jochanan, it is an allegory of the love between God and his people Israel. Reuven Kimelman has analyzed their comments and found five consistent differences between them, corresponding to five major issues that divided Christians and Jews:.

Origen writes of a covenant mediated by Moses between God and Israel; that is, an indirect contact between the two, contrasted with the direct presence of Christ. Jochana n, on the other hand, refers to the Covenant as negotiated by Moses, hence received by Israel direct from God, as "the kisses of his mouth" Song of Songs Jochanan emphasizes the closeness and love between God and Israel, whereas Origen sets a distance between them.

According to Origen the Hebrew scripture was "completed," or "superseded," by the New Testament. According to Jochanan scripture is "completed" by the Oral Torah.

To Jochanan, Abraham remains in place and Torah is the "antidote" to sin. To Origen, Jerusalem is a symbol, a "heavenly city. Origen sees the sufferings of Israel as the proof of its repudiation by God; Jochanan accepts the suffering as the loving chastisement and discipline of a forgiving father. Judah [the Levite] son of R. But the Holy One, blessed be He, foresaw that the nations would get to translate the Torah, and reading it, say, in Greek, would declare: "We are Israel; we are the children of the Lord.

I have no way of knowing other than that My child is he who possesses My secret lore. So it was that conflict between Jews and Christians in the centuries of self-definition led to the hardening of metaphor into doctrine.

When the rabbis were not rebutting Christian attempts to appropriate the covenant they tended to drop the notion of "the covenant" as a specific object and to revert to a looser, metaphorical understanding. In this spirit they enumerated 13 covenants in connection with circumcision alone, 14 and even claimed that each mitzva was issued with 48 covenants to each of the , Israelites in the desert.

Covenants are made, broken, renewed. The lack of a covenant that is irrevocable per se creates anxiety. If the covenant is not permanent, what is? Clearly, then, the rabbinic concept of covenant is multi-faceted, flexible, non-literal. Only in the context of defense against Christian appropriations did the rabbis adopt the essentialist concept of " the covenant" as an object for claim and counter-claim.

Chosenness in Modern Jewish Thought. None of the mediaeval attempts to formulate a Jewish creed makes reference to covenant or chosenness amongst the core beliefs of Judaism.

Once the belief in universal human rights had become established in the West and Jews in many countries were being emancipated, the idea of chosenness became an embarrassment, since it seemed to imply inherent superiority of one nation over others; chosenness had become "politically incorrect.

Chosenness could, indeed, be reduced still further to nothing more than a simple historical claim, namely that the people of Israel had pioneered "ethical monotheism"; this is the position taken by the Liberal rabbi and leader Leo Baeck , Baeck, , following the philosopher Hermann Cohen The problem with such an interpretation is that it undermines the distinctiveness of Judaism.

Nevertheless, it draws out the vocational aspect of covenant. Franz Rosenzweig , like Baeck, was deeply influenced by Hermann Cohen. Unlike Baeck, he rebelled. In the third book of his Der Stern der Erloesung , 21 composed in the trenches in the First World War, he builds on the work of the Spanish Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi c , a selection of whose poems he translated into German.

Halevi, uniquely among the medieval philosophers, had stressed the chosenness of Israel, which he saw as manifest in special qualities characteristic of the Jewish soul. They do this together, in community, for it is on the community that the experience of revelation primarily rests.

But there is a difference. The people of Israel entered the kingdom of eternity at Sinai, and so are permanently "with the Father. At any rate, the Jew lives "in eternity" through adherence to the religious liturgy and mitzvot , and is thus outside the stream of history.

The nations of the world are still seeking eternity. They can indeed achieve this through their Churches, but they are not yet, in Christian parlance, "with the Father". There are thus two complementary covenants if Islam is to be reckoned with there must be at least three, but Rosenzweig does not develop his thought in that direction , each designed for and valid within its own community, one Jewish, one Christian.

Whether Rosenzweig consistently adopted the "two-covenant" position in later years, or whether he had always accorded higher value to the Sinai covenant, are matters of scholarly debate.

It is one thing to suggest that in the early days of Christianity gentiles had to experience "conversion" from their pagan background, hence to "come to the father. Adam the Second is the man of faith, seeking a relationship with his creator, asking why?

But Adam the Second is created alone, and is existentially alone. God then grants him a companion, Eve, forming the prototypical covenantal community which can seek reconciliation with and through God.

Adam the First and Adam the Second, aspects of what it is to be human, are conjoined in actual life through halakha, yet the essential duality remains a human characteristic. One might have thought that Adam was the prototype of all humanity, not just of the Jewish people, and Soloveitchik does indeed acknowledge a "universal faith community" However, "Any encounter with God, if it is to redeem man, must be crystallized and objectified in a normative ethico-moral message" Herein lies the uniqueness of Israel, i.

On the other hand, all humanity is linked through the practical needs of Adam the First. Co-operation amongst people of different faiths must therefore be at the secular, humanitarian level of Adam the Second. In a powerful essay on the theme of suffering Soloveitchik distinguishes between the qiyyum gorali the "allotted," "fated," or passive existence of the Jewish people as a normal people subject to the vicissitudes of history p.

On the former plane there is no answer to questions about their suffering. For the former existence, that of a "normal" people, the "camp" of Israel in biblical terminology, there is the brit goral "covenant of fate", or covenant of Egypt. Natural identity, for Soloveitchik, is common to all humanity; spiritual identity is unique to a particular religious community.

Both identities involve collective covenantal relationships with God. It is that transcendent thrust which the Covenant conveys. Yet Jewish law and the "hard" doctrine of the revealed Torah are precisely the areas in which Liberal or Reform 25 Judaism differs from Orthodoxy. Liberal Judaism had been shy of covenant, since the special relationship it implied between God and Israel did not sit lightly with the universalism emphasized in liberal circles, or with the identification of Torah as universal ethics.

Eugene B. Borowitz, in an influential article published in , introduced the term "covenant theology" to characterize what he saw as an emerging paradigm shift in non-Orthodox Jewish thought.

The San Francisco Platform of reflected the impact of the Holocaust and of the establishment of the state of Israel; there is less faith in human progress, less clarity on God, a greater appreciation of home life and ritual and of the place of Israel in Jewish life, a sense of the covenant theology that Borowitz and other liberals were then working out.

In Borowitz published a fuller expression of his views. Israel the nation is particular, limited, error-prone; God is infinite, perfect, universal. That kind of geopolitical framing can obscure the personal, even intimate nature of these covenants. Indeed, political leaders today still have state banquets as acts of foreign relations. A kabbalistic connection between salt and covenant can also be found in Rabbenu Bahya on Lev.

This commentary serves to highlight two important features of covenants: that they are very powerful forces , and that they must be held in balance to harness their forces for benefit and not for harm.

The notion that both parties have to compromise in order to have a successful relationship is familiar from human relationships, but radical when ascribed to divine ones! Covenant is a form of committed relationship—and the facets of the covenants revealed by the efforts of commentators traditional and modern to explain this curious reference in our parashah can be instructive to us as we think about the relationships in our own lives including our relationships with God.

How will we make them endure? Will they have impact beyond our own lifetimes? What intimate activities seal and reseal our commitments—especially during a time when physical proximity is limited? How can we keep them in balance and thereby harness their power instead of being consumed by it?

The Ben Ish Hai notes that there was a custom amongst the Jews of Baghdad to put salt on the dish that they used to gather pieces of bread whilst searching for hametz before Pesah. As we prepare for our upcoming sedarim, when we hope to sit down for a ceremonial meal together with some of those with whom we are in relationship, and as we continue to celebrate the ongoing relationship that God established with our ancestors, may we remember perhaps as we taste the salt water to reconsider, reseal, and strengthen all the covenants in our lives.