Covenant and Conversation
In two sentences in Parashat Ki Tavo, the Torah summarises the entire relationship between God and the people of Israel:
You have affirmed [he’emarta] this day that the Lord is your God, that you will walk in His ways, that you will observe His laws and commandments and rules, and that you will obey Him. And the Lord has affirmed [he’emirkha] this day that you are, as He promised you, His treasured people who shall observe all His commandments. (Deut. 26:17–18)
Here, set out with disarming simplicity, is the dual relationship, the reciprocity, at the heart of the covenant. It is an idea made famous in the form of two jingles: the first, that of William Norman Ewer, “How odd/of God/to choose/the Jews”; the second, the Jewish riposte, “Not quite/so odd – /the Jews/chose God.”
Between God and the people is a mutual bond of love. The Israelites pledge themselves to be faithful to God and His commands. God pledges Himself to cherish the people as His treasure – for though He is the God of all humanity, He holds a special place in His affection (to speak anthropomorphically) for the descendants of those who first heard and heeded His call. This is the whole of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. The rest is commentary.
The English translation, above, is that of the Jewish Publication Society (1985). Any translation, however, tends to conceal the difficulty in the key verb in both sentences: lehaamir. What is strange is that, on the one hand, it is a form of one of the most common of all biblical verbs, leimor, “to say.” On the other, the specific form used here – the hifil, or causative, form – is unique. Nowhere else does it appear in this form in the Bible, and its meaning is, as a result, obscure.
In place of the JPS translation, “affirmed,” Aryeh Kaplan in The Living Torah reads it as “declared allegiance to.”1Aryeh Kaplan, The Living Torah: The Five Books of Moses and the Haftarot (Brooklyn, NY: Moznaim, 1981), ad loc.
Robert Alter renders it: “proclaimed.”2Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (W. W. Norton, 2008), ad loc.
Other interpretations include “separated to yourself” (Rashi), “chosen” (Septuagint), “recognised” (Saadia Gaon), “raised” (Radak, Sforno), “betrothed” (Malbim), “given fame to” (Ibn Janah), “exchanged everything else for” (Hizkuni), “accepted the uniqueness of” (Rashi to Ḥagiga 3a), and “caused God to declare” (Judah Halevi, cited by Ibn Ezra).
Among non-Jewish translations, the King James Version has: “Thou hast avouched the Lord this day to be thy God.” The New International Version reads: “You have declared this day that the Lord is your God.” Others have “agreed,” “acknowledged,” “said,” “lifted up,” “announced,” “obtained the agreement,” “distinguished,” and “caused to promise.”
What is the significance of this unique form of the verb “to say”? Why is it used here? The use of language in the Torah is not vague, accidental, or imprecise. In general, in the Mosaic books, style mirrors substance. The way something is said is often connected to what is being said. So it is here.
What we have before us is a proposition of far-reaching consequence for the two most fundamental questions humanity can ask itself. The first is: What is the nature of the bond between human beings and God? How can the finite relate to the Infinite? The second – I have argued that this is the key question to which the Torah is the answer – is: How, in human affairs, can we achieve both freedom and order? The world before the Flood, “filled with violence,” was a world of freedom without order: chaos. The Egypt the Israelites left was a world of order without freedom: slavery. How can we achieve both?
The profound answer given by the Torah to the first question is language, speech, words. Hence the importance, in this definitive statement of Jewish faith, of the verb meaning “to say, declare, affirm.” Since the days of Socrates, philosophers have tended to concentrate on just one function of language: its use to describe, or state facts. This gave rise to the key questions of philosophy and science: Is this statement true? Does it correspond to the facts? It is consistent with other facts? Can I be sure? What evidence do I have? What warrant do I have for believing what I believe? Language is the medium we use to describe what is.
We owe to the later work of Wittgenstein, developed further by John L. Austin and John Rogers Searle,3Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010); John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); John R. Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). the realisation that language has many other functions besides. We use language to classify, evaluate, express emotion, question, command, hypothesise, and imagine. There are literary genres like fiction and poetry which use language in complex ways to extend our imaginative engagement with reality. Sometimes we use it simply to establish a relationship. Malinowski called this phatic communion, where what matters is not what we say but the mere fact that we are talking to one another.4Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” in Charles K. Ogden and Ian A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan Paul, 1923), 296–336. More recently, Robin Dunbar has argued that human speech had its origins in “grooming behaviour.” See his Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
The philosophical-scientific mindset that sees the sole significant function of language as stating facts – taken to an absurd extreme in the early-twentieth-century movement known as “logical positivism” – is a kind of tone-deafness to the rich variety of speech.
The Mosaic books are, among other things, a deep set of reflections on the nature and power of language. This may have to do with the fact that the Israelites of Moses’ day would have encountered the first alphabet, the Proto-Semitic script from which all subsequent alphabets are directly or indirectly derived. Judaism marks the world’s first transition on a national scale from an oral to a literate culture. Hence the unique significance it attaches to the spoken and written word.
There is a radical statement of this at the very beginning of the Torah. God spoke and the world came into being. Unlike every ancient myth about the beginning of things, there was no struggle, no use of force. Instead, the key verb is simply leimor, “God said [vayomer], Let there be . . . and there was.” This is the use of language to create worlds.
That, of course, is divine – not human – speech. However, there is a human counterpart. There are things we can create with words when we use them in a special way. Austin called this use of speech performative utterance.5See earlier, “The World We Make with Words.”
So, for example, when a judge says, “This court is now in session,” he or she is not describing something but doing something. When a groom says to his bride under the wedding canopy, “Behold you are betrothed to me by this ring according to the laws of Moses and Israel,” he is not stating a fact but creating a fact.
The most basic type of performative utterance is making a promise. This involves the use of language to create an obligation. Some promises are unilateral, but others are mutual. Some are highly specific, others are open-ended. The supreme example of an open-ended mutual pledge between human beings is marriage. The supreme example of an open-ended mutual pledge between human beings and God is a covenant. That is what our two verses state: that God and the people of Israel pledged themselves to one another by making a covenant, a relationship brought into existence by words and sustained by honouring those words.
Hence the radical proposition at the heart of the Hebrew Bible. What is supremely holy is language, when used to create a moral bond between two parties. This answers the first question: How can the finite relate to the Infinite? The answer is: by words. It happens when God speaks and we listen (revelation), and when we speak and God listens (prayer).
It also answers the second question: How can there be, in the human situation, both freedom and order? It happens when we freely make a promise and undertake obligations, as happened in the covenant ceremony at Mount Sinai, the covenant Moses was about to renew with the next generation. This mutual pledge between the people and God was a relationship based not on power but on freely given consent.
Thus, the use of language to create a mutually binding relationship is what links God and humankind. The two verses mean: “Today, by an act of speech, you have made God your God, and God has made you His people.” Words, language, an act of saying, have created an open-ended, eternally binding relationship.
Hence the name I have given to my series of Torah commentaries: Covenant and Conversation. Judaism is a covenant, a marriage between God and a people. The Torah is its written record. It is Israel’s marriage contract as God’s bride. Conversation – speaking and listening – is what makes covenant possible. Hence the dual form of Torah: the Written Torah, through which God speaks to us, and the Oral Torah, through which we speak to God by way of interpreting His word. Judaism is the open-ended, mutually binding, conversation between Heaven and earth.
Despite the deep influence of Judaism on two later faiths, Christianity and Islam, neither fully adopted this idea.6To be sure, some Christian theologians speak of covenant, but a different kind of covenant, more unilateral than reciprocal.
There are no conversations between God and human beings in either the New Testament or the Koran that echo the dialogues in Tanakh between God and Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Hosea, Jeremiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, and Job. Judaism, the religion of sacred dialogue between Heaven and earth, remains unique in its profound focus on the use of language – through covenant on the one hand, conversation on the other – to create a moral bond between the Infinite and the finite.
That is what is set out simply in these two verses: Speaking a relationship into being, lehaamir, is what makes God our God, and us His people.