Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory by David Novak (review)

HUMANITIES 131 Humanities David Novak. Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory Princeton University Press. xiv, 240. US $29.95 In this book David Novak brings the rich insights of Jewish tradition to bear upon contemporary debates about rights. Central to these debates are questions about the origin of rights, the relation of rights to duties, how individual rights relate to group rights, and whether rights-based political theories and the polities they inspire are philosophically and practically viable. Since the Enlightenment, political liberalism, with its strong emphasis upon autonomy and individual rights, has been the prevailing view in Western philosophy and polity. Recently communitarians have challenged the individualism of the liberal view, and related notions of rights based on that individualism. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, says rights as understood today are like unicorns; they simply do not exist. Among other things, communitarians call for renewed emphasis upon tradition, common goods, and group relations in political theory and practice. The debates are lively and profound, reaching into foundational questions concerning the nature, purpose, and meaning of human life. Novak believes that to eliminate rights from modern political discourse is to risk elimination from the discourse altogether. He instead embraces rights talk, in part because rights-based political theories and polities have helped Jewish people move from an at best tolerated alien minority community to a fuller entry into modern political life. The deeper reason for his embrace is his conviction that rights have their >true origin= in a largely forgotten Jewish context. The burden of his book is to articulate a theory of rights from within the Jewish tradition, and to do so in dialogue with Western political philosophy. He says the >legacy of Athens is not the only alternative to the individualistic or collectivist excesses of modernity. The voice from Jerusalem makes its own alternative claims, claims that I am convinced are in truth superior.= According to this voice, rights have their origin in neither personal autonomy, nor social contract, nor creative capacity, but in God=s rightful claim upon human beings. By making human beings in the divine image, and giving them commandments to provide moral structure to the divinehuman relationship, God establishes a covenant relation with all human beings. The commands are mediated in a general way by the legitimate moral claims people make upon each other; additional commandments are revealed to the Jewish people in scripture. Novak claims that the Jewish tradition, >with its attendant legal system of Halakhah, is the best example of a historical community where the correlation of rights and duties and duties and rights seems to be without exception.= As the one who establishes and structures the covenantal relationship, God is entitled to worship 132 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 and obedience. God=s rights >are the foundation of all other rights and duties,= and contemplation B even contemplation of God B >is for the sake of the practice of the commandments.= If God is the ultimate source of rights, the penultimate source is the responses and claims of persons in community. In Jewish tradition, the primary good is the good of the community. Novak distinguishes community from society, in that the institutions of society must be instrumental to the welfare of the community. The community has >original rights.= Society has >derived rights,= in so far as these rights depend upon the community society serves. In many ways the community takes priority over the individual. A person=s authentic communal needs take precedence over her or his individual needs. Even an individual=s relationship with God depends upon the covenanted community, for we >can be whole persons before God only when we stand together with ... others.= Novak is as concerned to avoid the excesses of collectivist ideologies, whose regimes have savagely victimized Jews, as he is to avoid those of individualism. He avoids them in two ways. The first is by insisting that individuals are >never to be the instruments of the community in the same way that the community is at times to be the instrument of individual persons.= Even the redistribution of wealth called for in the Torah is not for the community as a collective entity. It is for...