Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew

Preface

Preface In my 1961 article "Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community" lin the July Commentary', I introduced the term "Covenant Theology" to characterize an emerging paradigm shift in non-Orthodox Jewish thought. I thought then, as I do now, that the critical intellectual questions of beliefhave little to do with ourconventional community labels, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist. Rather, a very large part of modernized Jewry-including many nominally Orthodox-is made up of Jews who know that their Judaism must allow greater personal freedom than the one they inherited, though no consensus has emerged as to how. I was one of a number of thinkers seeking to speak out of and to the Jewish faith of this transdenominational group. To try to keep my meaning clear, I shall speak of this reference group as "non-Orthodox," though in prior writings I have also used the term "liberal" for it and in certain contexts will do so here as well. In the ensuing three decades I have tried to clarify what it meant to speak intellectually of Judaism as "Covenant," not as law, ethics, ethnicity, or nationality. This book presents a comprehensive theology pivoting on my understanding of "Covenant," a task I now begin by calling attention to a stylistic matter. I distinguish between the historic relationship between God and the Jewish people and that between God and humankind by using "Covenant" for the former and "covenant" for the latter. For all its reach, this book deals with but one aspect of my theology. To my surprise and consternation, the theological task I early set for myself refused to remain unified, but ramified into three independent, if correlated, foci of interest: (II the response to our culture, (2} the dialogue with Jewish tradition, and (31 the testing of these ideas in Jewish action. By 1963 my growing sense of what we have since come to call the "postmodern" mood had clarified sufficiently that I could specify the critical methodological change we required. In a paper to the Central Conference of American Rabbis meeting that year (published in the 1963 Yearbook as "Faith and Method in Jewish Theology") I argued against supinely accommodating Judaism to the general culture's models of truth, which in that era were essentially rationalistic ones. Instead, out of self-respect as well as belief in Judaism's ix Preface In my 1961 article "Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community" lin the July Commentary', I introduced the term "Covenant Theology" to characterize an emerging paradigm shift in non-Orthodox Jewish thought. I thought then, as I do now, that the critical intellectual questions of beliefhave little to do with ourconventional community labels, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist. Rather, a very large part of modernized Jewry-including many nominally Orthodox-is made up of Jews who know that their Judaism must allow greater personal freedom than the one they inherited, though no consensus has emerged as to how. I was one of a number of thinkers seeking to speak out of and to the Jewish faith of this transdenominational group. To try to keep my meaning clear, I shall speak of this reference group as "non-Orthodox," though in prior writings I have also used the term "liberal" for it and in certain contexts will do so here as well. In the ensuing three decades I have tried to clarify what it meant to speak intellectually of Judaism as "Covenant," not as law, ethics, ethnicity, or nationality. This book presents a comprehensive theology pivoting on my understanding of "Covenant," a task I now begin by calling attention to a stylistic matter. I distinguish between the historic relationship between God and the Jewish people and that between God and humankind by using "Covenant" for the former and "covenant" for the latter. For all its reach, this book deals with but one aspect of my theology. To my surprise and consternation, the theological task I early set for myself refused to remain unified, but ramified into three independent, if correlated, foci of interest: (II the response to our culture, (2} the dialogue with Jewish tradition, and (31 the testing of these ideas in Jewish action. By 1963 my growing sense of what we have since come to call the "postmodern" mood had clarified sufficiently that I could specify the critical methodological change we required. In a paper to the Central Conference of American Rabbis meeting that year (published in the 1963 Yearbook as "Faith and Method in Jewish Theology") I argued against supinely accommodating...