To Renew Our Days
Moses’ life was nearing its close. But there were two more commands he had to give the people. The last is the subject of the next essay. Here I focus on the penultimate command. The Israelites were about to cross the Jordan, and enter and take possession of the Promised Land. There they would begin life as a self-governing nation under the sovereignty of God.
With his prophetic eye turned to the furthermost horizon of the future, Moses had been warning the people throughout Deuteronomy, as we have noted time and again, that the real dangers would be the ones they least suspected. They would not be war or famine or poverty or natural disaster. They would be ease and affluence and freedom and prosperity. That is when a nation is in danger of forgetting its past and its mission. It becomes complacent; it may become corrupt. The rich neglect the poor. Those in power afflict the powerless. The people begin to think that what they have achieved, they achieved by and for themselves. They forget their dependence on God. At the very height of its powers, Israelite society might develop fault-lines that would eventually lead to disaster.
No one has set out the terms of the survival of a civilisation more starkly than Moses in Deuteronomy. Nations face their greatest danger at the point of their greatest success. Affluence leads to overconfidence which begets forgetfulness which leads to decadence which results in lack of social solidarity which leads in the end to demoralisation – the prelude to defeat. As historian Will Durant wrote: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”1Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325 (New York: MFJ Books, 1992), 665.
Israel’s very existence, said Moses, would depend on memory, mission, and morality – remembering where it came from, what it is called on to do, and how it is called on to do it. Hence the great 612th command, known as hak’hel, or national assembly:
At the end of every seven years, in the year for cancelling debts, during the Feast of Tabernacles, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God at the place He will choose, you shall read this law before them in their hearing. Assemble the people – men, women, and children, and the strangers living in your towns – so they can listen and learn to fear the Lord your God and follow carefully all the words of this law. Their children, who do not know this law, must hear it and learn to fear the Lord your God as long as you live in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess. (Deut. 31:10–13)
Once every seven years, on the second day of Sukkot in the year after the Sabbatical year, the king was to gather the people together in the Temple courtyard and read to them from the Torah – specifically, selections from Deuteronomy itself.2The details are set out in Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Ḥagiga, ch. 3.
Hak’hel was a re-enactment of the covenant ceremony at Mount Sinai.3Ibid. 3:6.
It was intended to remind the people of their history, the laws they are called on to keep, and the principles they must live by. It was to be a ceremony of national rededication – a renewal of their inherited and chosen destiny, a reminder of the duties they owed to their ancestors, to their descendants not yet born, and, primarily, to God Himself.
We do not know how this command was carried out in practice. Yet one thing is clear from the biblical record. It is what the leaders of the nation did at critical junctures in their history. Joshua did so at the end of his life (Josh. 24). King Josiah did so when the Torah was rediscovered during a restoration of the Temple:
Then the king called together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. He went up to the Temple of the Lord with the men of Judah, the people of Jerusalem, the priests and the prophets – all the people from the least to the greatest. He read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which had been found in the Temple of the Lord. The king stood by the pillar and renewed the covenant in the presence of the Lord – to follow the Lord and keep His commands, regulations, and decrees with all his heart and all his soul, thus confirming the words of the covenant written in this book. Then all the people pledged themselves to the covenant. (II Kings 23:1–3)
Some two centuries later, Ezra did so, laying the foundations for a nation reborn after the Babylonian conquest and exile:
So on the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand. He read it aloud from daybreak till noon as he faced the square before the Water Gate in the presence of the men, women, and others who could understand. And all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law. (Neh. 8:2–3)
Hak’hel has a significance that goes far beyond its specific details. It belongs to a unique form of politics – covenantal politics. Philip Selznick, in The Moral Commonwealth, explains:
The compact creates a self-conscious moral order. Most vividly at Sinai, the agreement with God is an agreement to uphold a code of responsible conduct. God’s commands are obeyed by fulfilling obligations to family and community; a social ethic is the linchpin of the covenant.4Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 478–79.
Covenantal politics are moral politics. They involve ideas of duty and obligation. They are interwoven with a particular view of the history of the nation, whose fate is seen as a reflection of its success or failure in honouring the terms laid down by its founders.
One nation in particular has constructed its politics in terms of a covenant, namely, the United States, whose Puritan founding fathers were saturated by the ideas of Deuteronomy, and which has continued, to the present day, to see itself in these terms.5See Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); idem, The Broken Covenant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
President Ronald Reagan, speaking at the bicentennial celebration of the American Constitution in 1987, described the constitution as a kind of “covenant we’ve made not only with ourselves but with all of mankind.… It’s a human covenant; yes, and beyond that, a covenant with the Supreme Being to whom our founding fathers did constantly appeal for assistance.” America’s duty, he said, is “to constantly renew their covenant with humanity…to complete the work begun 200 years ago, that grand noble work that is America’s particular calling – the triumph of human freedom, the triumph of human freedom under God.”6Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Ronald Reagan, 1987 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1989), 1040–43.
One consequence of this is that American presidential inaugural addresses are the closest equivalent in the contemporary world to hak’hel, a covenant renewal ceremony. Usually, the president recapitulates the nation’s history in the light of the principles and ideals of its foundational documents. The most famous example was a speech that was not an inaugural, namely, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which began with the words: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”7Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address” (Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA, November 19, 1863).
Covenant societies are “dedicated to a proposition.” They have ideals, and can be called to account for failing to honour them. And regardless of whether the president is personally religious or not, the speech will be religious in tone, biblical in language, and include, explicitly or implicitly, reference to God.
Here, for example, is Bill Clinton in 1997:
Our founders taught us that the preservation of our liberty and our union depends upon responsible citizenship…. The challenge of our past remains the challenge of our future – will we be one nation, one people, with one common destiny, or not?… The promise we sought in a new land we will find again in a land of new promise.… The greatest progress we have made, and the greatest progress we have yet to make, is in the human heart. In the end, all the world’s wealth and a thousand armies are no match for the strength and decency of the human spirit.8Bill Clinton, Second Inaugural Address (Washington, DC, January 20, 1997).
And George W. Bush in 2005:
America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation.... History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.9George W. Bush, Inaugural Address (Washington, DC, January 20, 2005).
And Barack Obama in 2009:
We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.10Barack Obama, Inaugural Address (Washington, DC, January 20, 2009).
The language of covenant is unmistakable: a commitment to the equal dignity of individuals as the image of God; collective responsibility and a sense of “We, the people”; loyalty to founding ideals; accountability to past and future; being a role model to the rest of humanity; and being under the judgement of Heaven. In no other democratic country do political leaders speak in these terms.11The closest equivalent was Václav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, 1993–2003.
American presidential inaugurals are best understood as a secular counterpart to the command of hak’hel.
There is nothing inevitable about the survival of nations. The pages of history are littered with tales of their decline and fall. Few indeed are those that have defeated this almost inevitable cycle. The fact that Moses saw the problem and provided a remedy makes him the most prophetic political leader of all time. The institution of hak’hel was central to this vision.
A civilisation that loses its sense of history and destiny does not survive. It must be kept alive by prophetic voices, taught in schools and homes, rehearsed in prayer, enacted in rituals, and renewed periodically in hak’hel-type moments. It must be religious, for if not, it becomes, as the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz constantly warned,12Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). a form of idolatry – a nation worshipping itself. It may sound strange, yet I truly believe that finding a contemporary equivalent of hak’hel is our most pressing task if the free societies of the West are to survive.