We are currently in the middle of Jewish American Heritage Month. To mark America’s 250th year of independence, President Trump recently declared this coming weekend a national Sabbath—from sundown on May 15 to nightfall on May 16. He is the first American president to make such a move. “This day will recognize the sacred Jewish tradition of setting aside time for rest, reflection, and gratitude to the Almighty … for our great nation,” stated his proclamation. While not everyone can get behind the president, everyone should be able to get behind the idea of a national Sabbath. Maybe a cleansing digital detox among family and friends to think about the gift this country has been to the Jews, and the contributions that Jews have made to this country over centuries, will help us enter the corridor to July 4 with sacred intention.
But there is more work ahead than merely gratitude. This is a time to mine the biblical roots of this country and to seek in them a platform for restoration. Although it may seem odd, I’d like to turn to a British intellectual, Life Peer in the House of Lords, and faith leader for thoughts on this American milestone. Jonathan Sacks (1948–2020) had an almost mythic view of America and its place in the world that might prove curative in this time of great fracture.
On Oct. 24, 2017, Sacks gave an address to the American Enterprise Institute . He praised the bonds of belonging and responsibility that are enshrined in the sacred concept of covenant, which he regarded as part and parcel of America’s origin story. He then made a plea: “Don’t lose the American covenant. It’s the most precious thing you have. Renew it now before it’s too late.”
Sacks referenced the social contract of America that still holds but warned that the social covenant of America—the dream of strong families, communities, and a shared narrative of human dignity—was at risk of eroding in a culture of grievance, victimhood, and self-centered politics. For Sacks, America was not only a country; it was also a concept. America on paper represents a storybook notion of human parity and autonomy under the shelter of God. How ironic it must have been to hear a British rabbi tell those who long ago broke free of British shackles that they needed to do a better job safeguarding the essential foundations that built their independence.
To understand the significance of America through this lens, we will travel through some of Sacks’s major works and essays on the idea of covenant, since it appeared often in his writing and teachings. He defined the term in several places, compared it to the word “contract,” and then explained why covenants were foundational to the Hebrew Bible and to all relationships of meaning and responsibility. In The Home We Build Together (2009), he explained: “Covenant is a binding commitment, entered into by two or more parties, to work and care for one another while respecting the freedom, integrity and difference of each.” He then expanded it to describe “politics without power, economics without self-interest.”
The Hebrew Bible presents any number of covenants. Abraham and God make a covenant between the pieces (Gen. 15:17-18) and then, two chapters later, Abraham accepted upon himself and his household the covenant represented by circumcision (Gen. 17:2-14), while God blessed him with land and the promise of a nation.
Mount Sinai presented the Israelites with a covenantal opportunity likened to marriage, with idolatry and adultery both identified in the Ten Commandments as extreme breaches of the fidelity that a true covenant demands (Ex. 20:2-14). This was unlike a typical treaty in the ancient Near East that was made between a strong power and a weak dependent. Those who were vulnerable would pay the price of protection: loyalty.
God at Sinai, according to Sacks in The Home We Build Together, offered divine protection, but not by forcing the exchange, as such treaties often did. Israel was free to choose: “The supreme power makes space for human freedom.” The inability to enter a covenant freely negates its validity. He believed that this covenantal arrangement between God and a people was absolutely revolutionary in its time and in its promise.
The distinctive feature of covenants was that they were free of power, whether economic, political, or military. Something higher and more transcendent prevailed, as he writes again in The Dignity of Difference (2003): “The use of power is ruled out by the requirement of human dignity. If you and I are linked because, one way or another, I can force you to do what I want, then I have secured my freedom at the cost of yours. I have asserted my humanity by denying yours. Covenant is the attempt to create partnership without dominance or submission…”
“Don’t lose the American covenant. It’s the most precious thing you have. Renew it now before it’s too late.”
While a covenant is often a formal relationship, it is decidedly not a contract. Sacks identified three key differences between the two in The Dignity of Difference. A covenant “is not limited to specific conditions and circumstances. It is open-ended and long-lasting. And it is not based on the idea of two individuals, otherwise unconnected, pursuing personal advantage.” Instead, for Sacks, it was about the “we” that gives identity to the “I.” That is not to say that contracts do not matter. Contracts establish the accountability that parties have to each other that are usually negotiated to protect individual interests. But as a way for bonds to form between people and within communities, contracts prove too transactional and impersonal. They are neither intense nor holy enough to sustain a relationship of shared values while negotiating differences.
In The Home We Build Together, Sacks suggested that covenants are not only formal in nature but characteristic of those who choose voluntarily to share a fate and destiny. He regarded this mutual acceptance of responsibility as one of the few ways to redeem the solitude of the lonely crowd without any certainty or guarantees of what is to come: “To enter into a covenant, like deciding to marry or have a child, is to take a risk, an act of faith in an unknown, unknowable future.” Such hope binds together Jews who do not share the same practices or beliefs, and citizens and immigrants who are drawn to a sense of collective concern and obligation with “love, dignity, and respect,” even if imperfect, as he wrote in One People: Tradition, Modernity and Jewish Unity.
And this brings us to America. Sacks, in several places, talks about America and its origins as an expression of a covenant tied by the cords of faith. He remarked in “The Idea that Changed the World,” an essay collected in Covenant and Conversation (2009), that every American president has cited the Bible in his inauguration address as an expression of personal faith and national destiny: “To this day American politics is based on the biblical idea of covenant.” He even wrote in that essay that, in many ways, the political language and culture of the United States reference the Hebrew Bible more in politics “than the Jewish state.” Political liberty and religious liberty, he stated, could exist hand-in-hand in America because of its founding ideals and the commitments of its founding fathers. “The unity of God is to be found in the diversity of creation,” wrote Sacks in The Dignity of Difference. Unity and diversity together not only reflect the divine mandate to fill the earth from the earliest pages of Genesis, they also undergird what it means to live as a covenantal Jew in America in the twenty-first century.
I do not make it a habit of speculating about what Sacks would have said had he been alive to witness current political trends across the globe, although I appreciate the temptation. There is something disingenuous and dishonest about putting words into the mouth of a scholar and sage who shared millions of his own words before his untimely death. Nevertheless, I wonder. Almost ten years after warning a rapt American audience that we were in danger of losing the cohesion that comes with his covenantal understanding of history, would Sacks have seen an uptick in American patriotism or an embarrassing ingratitude for all, that America stands for in the eyes of angry people ready to blame America for all their ills? Would he have still held fast to the idea of America’s freedoms or capitulated to a darker view shaped by the antisemitism that has raged in some American elite universities and beyond?
I like to think that he would have spoken eloquently on this milestone and applauded the attempts to resurface and revivify not only a love of country but a love of concept. I think he would have reminded us that we were created as a country with a mission of liberty for all and that we must return to the higher political ideals that shaped this country and bend the rugged individualism that can and has soured a once great collective consciousness. He might have cited his own work, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times (2020), where he was clear about his vision:
Covenantal politics … is about “We, the people,” bound by a sense of shared belonging and collective responsibility; about strong local communities, active citizens and the devolution of responsibility. It is about reminding those who have more than they need of their responsibilities to those who have less than they need. It is about ensuring that everyone has a fair chance to make the most of their capacities and their lives.
I can imagine Sacks at a podium, with his elegant oratory style and distinctive British accent, reading the words of the prophet Hosea: “And I will betroth you to me forever and I will betroth you to me with justice and judgment, with kindness and compassion that you will know the Lord” (Hos. 2:19-20). It is these qualities of justice and mercy that bound us then and that, 250 years later, bind us still.