The first was the Lambeth Conference at Canterbury in The conference is the gathering, every ten years, of the bishops of the Anglican Communion — that is, not just the Church of England but the entire worldwide structure, much of it based in America and Africa. It is the key event that brings this global network of churches together to deliberate on directions for the future. That year I became, I believe, the first rabbi to address a plenary session of the conference. The two gatherings could not have been less alike.
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One was religious, Christian, and concerned with theology. The other was secular, American, and concerned with economics and politics. Both of them, though, were experiencing some kind of crisis. In the case of the Anglican Church it had to do with gay bishops. The question was tearing the Church apart, with many of the American bishops in favour and most of the African ones against.
There was a real sense, before the conference, that the communion was in danger of being irreparably split. A year earlier there had been a sharply divisive American Presidential election.
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New phrases had been coined to describe some of the factors involved — post-truth, fake news, flyover states, alt-right, identity politics, competitive victimhood, whatever — as well as the resurfacing of an old one: It all added up to what I termed the politics of anger. Was there a way of knitting together the unravelling strands of American society?
This was, in the seventeenth century especially, a key concept in the emerging free societies of the West, especially in Calvinist or Puritanical circles. To grossly simplify a complex process, the Reformation developed in different directions in different countries, depending on whether Luther or Calvin was the primary influence. For Luther the key text was the New Testament, especially the letters of Paul.
For Calvin and his followers, however, the Hebrew Bible was the primary text, especially in relation to political and social structures. That is why covenant played a large part in the Calvinist post-Reformation politics of Geneva, Holland, Scotland, England under Cromwell, and especially the Pilgrim Fathers, the first European settlers in North America.
In fact, they operate on different logics and they create different relationships and institutions. In a contract, two or more people come together, each pursuing their self-interest, to make a mutually advantageous exchange. In a covenant, two or more people, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to do together what neither can achieve alone.
It is more like a marriage than a commercial transaction. Contracts are about interests; covenants are about identity.
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Contracts benefit; covenants transform. What makes the Hebrew Bible revolutionary in political terms is that it contains not one founding moment but two. One is set out in 1 Samuel 8, when the people come to the prophet Samuel and ask for a king. God tells Samuel to warn the people what will be the consequences. He will take their property as taxation, and so on. Nonetheless, the people insist that they still want a king, so Samuel appoints Saul. Commentators have long been puzzled by this chapter.
Does it represent approval or disapproval of monarchy? People are willing to give up certain of their rights, transferring them to a central power — a king or a government — who undertakes in return to ensure the defence of the realm externally and the rule of law within. However, this was the second founding moment of Israel as a nation, not the first. The first took place in our parsha, on Mount Sinai, several centuries earlier, when the people made with God, not a contract but a covenant.
What happened in the days of Samuel was the birth of Israel as a kingdom. What happened in the days of Moses — long before they had even entered the land — was the birth of Israel as a nation under the sovereignty of God. The two central institutions of modern Western liberal democracies are both contractual.
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There are commercial contracts that create the market ; and there is the social contract that creates the state. When he was a year-old newlywed hired to be a rabbi at Oxford University, Shmuley Boteach was as surprised as anyone by his unintended vocation: Students caught up in superficial and unfulfilling relationships eagerly turned to the young rabbi for his insights on dating through his writings on the weekly Torah reading, he says.
The premise is simple but bold: Boteach rejects the conventional wisdom that love is the key ingredient to a happy, satisfying marriage and places lust front and center. Jacob waits seven years for Rachel and for him it feels like a few days.
The first thing Rebecca does when she meets Isaac is veil her face. But sex-starved couples need not lose hope, and even straying couples can find their way back to one another: If you put love and lust together, love stands no chance. Sure, lust has historically gotten a bad rap — long considered dirty, forbidden and sleazy — but Boteach makes the case for its comeback to save marriages that are disintegrating from nonexistent desire. And though the Englewood, NJ-based sexpert dispenses his relationship advice through the prism of Jewish wisdom, he believes that the messages and tenets are universal: