Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract

Following the publication in 2000 of his Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory and in 2005 of The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology, the American Canadian rabbi, scholar, and theologian David Novak has emerged as perhaps the most important political thinker within the Jewish tradition in the still very young twenty-first century. With his customary display of vast erudition and incisive thinking Novak has made an impressive endeavor in these books to formulate distinctively Jewish but broadly applicable answers to some of the age-old questions of political philosophy. For this effort he has already received much acclaim.¹

Novak’s goals are certainly very ambitious. Far from being a mere academic exercise, his theological-political project represents a bold attempt to replace modern liberalism. Rejecting what he sees as the “mythical” social contract foundations on which it is based as well as the political theories that have been erected upon them, he offers the blueprints for a better world, one in which the deficiencies of liberalism will be remedied but where the admitted benefits it has conferred upon humankind will still be retained. Whenever a thinker of Novak’s stature promises to do so much, it behooves us to listen carefully.

Covenantal Rights, Novak indicates, is a work of political theory and The Jewish Social Contract articulates a political theology. What exactly he considers to be the difference between these two disciplines is difficult to discern. But it is quite clear that his political theory is completely intertwined with his theology, just as his political theology is deeply theoretical. And, if we disregard their respective subtitles, it is also quite clear what place each of his two most recent books occupies in his overall project. Covenantal Rights seeks mainly to locate the foundation of human rights, properly understood, in men’s covenantal relationship with God. The Jewish Social Contract aims above all to explain how modern polities can be best sustained and utilized if they are conceived not as conglomerations of isolated individuals but as the products of social contracts agreed upon by disparate but mutually accommodating covenantal communities.

Novak’s theoretical efforts will no doubt attract the attention of many Jews who are ill at ease with modern liberalism but averse to anything that would tend to undermine its greatest achievements, especially its guarantee of religious freedom. Ultimately, however, his reasoning can be fully persuasive to only a small sector of the Jewish people. For Novak, a self-described traditionalist Jew, bases most of his positive recommendations on dogmatic premises that less traditional Jews simply cannot accept. And the political theology with which he wishes to replace liberalism rests on a belated and inconsistent appropriation of ideas that are only justifiable on the basis of what he considers to be his liberal adversaries’ invalid assumptions. It provides, in the final analysis, no solid justification for the preservation of religious freedom and is consequently of very doubtful use to the Diaspora Jews it is primarily meant to serve.

Dogmatic Foundations

David Novak rejects the idea of the state of nature as a “hypothetical—that is, fictitious, even mythical” condition.² He faults the modern social contract theory that takes this idea as its starting point both for its lack of “any real history and ontology” and for its essential inutility (JSC, 19). It is, at bottom, a way of thinking that “is insufficient to protect us from the anarchy most of us correctly fear.”³ Rejecting the social contract theorists’ focus on the primacy of individuals, Novak emphasizes the primacy of community, something that can “be really located in history—especially in Jewish history” (JSC, 19). For Novak, Jewish history is above all the record of his people’s interaction with the God who rules the entire universe.

The “real history” to which Novak refers is hardly distinguishable from the biblical narrative, taken quite literally. This is a matter of course for him because, as...