‘Covenantal Community’ and Classical Reconstructionism

April 4, 2025
Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Rabbi Elyse Wechterman, Rabbi Katie Mizrahi, Rabbi Isabel de Koninck, Megan Doherty

Rabbi Deborah Waxman published this essay “‘Covenantal Community’ and Classical Reconstructionism” in December 2024. What follows is this essay, with commentaries exploring Waxman’s points by four other Reconstructionist rabbis: Megan Doherty, Isabel de Koninck, Katie Mizrahi and Elyse Wechterman.

What Is ‘Covenantal Community’?

The “torah” I have been teaching intensively since the world-shattering events of Oct. 7 and its aftermath has been about building “covenantal community across difference.” In this formulation, I am drawing on deep and longstanding Reconstructionist commitments, even as how I articulate it diverges from some “traditional” Reconstructionist language.

First off, what do I mean by covenantal community across difference? In one sentence, I mean voluntarily choosing to co-create communities where we agree to a set of values and then work to articulate norms that prioritize our interdependence over our individuality, that place abiding relationships over what people look like or believe or how they act within the agreed-upon norms. To use a very Jewish image, I mean creating the kind of community where each and every person can come together in our fullness on the eve of Yom Kippur to chant Kol Nidre together and, with the support and shared experience of other people, can atone for our sins.

voluntarily choosing to co-create communities...

I’m interested in juxtaposing “voluntarily choosing” with “work.” While it is understood that engaging in the Jewish community is entirely voluntary in the postmodern age, the amount of work and necessity of work it takes to remain in and build the communities we choose to enter are less understood or accepted. In our current North American context, volunteerism is considered a luxury, something we’ll do if we have time, energy, and desire. The concept of brit, which you use so artfully here, offers a counterpoint to the “If I feel like it” mentality of so many of us. To be covenanted to a community means I am obligated- even if sometimes I don’t want to or feel like engaging. – Rabbi Elyse Wechterman

Here is a more extensive explication. Since the beginning of the Enlightenment, liberal Jews have lived with splintered authority, or no Jewish authority at all. Most of us do not believe that halakhah, Jewish law, was handed down from God to Moses at Mount Sinai. We are choosing to be Jewish without submitting ourselves to rabbinic authorities who set and monitor the boundaries of our lives. We are also choosing as Jews to be deeply immersed in the secular world rather than shutting ourselves away in segregated communities. This means that we are taking authority onto ourselves, either individually or collectively, which is at once liberating and full of challenge.

This means that we are taking authority...

Rejection of rabbinic authority doesn’t always mean that we take authority onto ourselves (individually or collectively)- sometimes we give over authority to others implicitly, if not explicitly, and often without even realizing it. One challenge of living Jewishly in the post-Enlightment world is being ever mindful of when and to whom we cede authority in our lives. – Rabbi Isabel de Koninck

We have so many choices, including the choice not to be Jewish. We are Jewish because we believe or sense or know that there is wisdom and worth in the teachings and practices of our ancestors. The centrality of community and the recognition of our interdependence is at the core of these teachings. Yet it’s hard to create community and a sense of belonging on the local level and across continents. We live in a time of radical individualism, and social media pulls us ever further apart and ever further into ourselves. This is true even without devastating conflict, and it’s even more true in the post-Oct. 7 world. Each and every day, in each and every interaction, we have opportunities to make choices that help us to enact our highest values.

...including the choice not to be Jewish...

Modernity has indeed given Jews more choices about their life, practice and community affiliations than was available to Jews living before the Englightenment. History has shown us, however, that individual Jewish choices about practice and affiliation matter little, if at all, to those who harbor antisemitic ideas. What is our covenantal responsibility to Jews who have chosen to not be connected to Judaism or identify as Jews, but are nonetheless vulnerable to anti-Jewish actions? – Rabbi Megan Doherty

The centrality of community...

When Cain asks in Genesis 4:9 “Am I my brother’s keeper?” the answer, though it is never stated explicitly, is Yes. Yes, Cain, you are and always were your brother’s keeper. And your sin began when you forgot it. From this foundational text through the Rabbinic classical teaching in Pirke Avot 1:14, “if I am only for myself what am I?” Judaism has always recognized our interdependence as an essential part of the human condition. – Rabbi Katie Mizrahi

Covenant is an ancient Jewish concept that puts relationships at the center. Where the Torah and Jewish liturgy emphasize the hierarchal nature of covenant, with God as King or Judge, I, as a child of democracy, am emphasizing covenant on a horizontal axis. For many of us, it is in our relationships with family and friends that we experience the Divine, in the interactions we have with one another. After the teachings of Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, we can know that godliness is present when we bring to life the characteristics attributed to God, when we act with mercy or lovingkindness or in healing ways — to and with each other.

Building covenantal community means that we articulate our values and our commitments — across generations and across differences. We talk together to articulate norms that translate them into day-to-day living. We pledge to continuously build up the skills and the structures to nurture relationships. Guided by Jewish values and the needs and aspirations of other members of our community, we consider where and when we submerge our individual aspirations on behalf of something bigger than ourselves.

Building covenantal community means...

The other place in Jewish life where covenant/brit is broadly present is in contemporary practices around weddings and commitment ceremonies. Those of us who officiate often describe a ketubah as a brit or covenant and engage couples in articulating their commitments to each other and their future life together. The model of B’rit Ahuvim (Lovers Covenant), as opposed to Kiddushin (acquiring property), as articulated by Rachel Adler, is instructive. When couples and communities take the time to spell out their obligations to one another, they also create an accountability structure. When the inevitable breaches or misses occur, a brit provides the framework for return and repair. – Rabbi Elyse Wechterman

... across generations and across differences.

It is particularly challenging for Reconstructionists to create covenental community across generations because of our explicit commitment to evolving religious civilization. I might know intellectually that Judaism has never been static, and I might believe wholeheartedly that it is our responsibility to consciously engage in the process of creating the Judaism we want to see in the world but it will still be deeply uncomfortable for me when those who come after me choose to shape their Judaism in ways unfamiliar to me. This work requires a great deal of compassion and generosity of spirit from everyone who engages in it. – Rabbi Megan Doherty

A covenantal community does not run on autopilot; we need to tend to it continuously. It can be easy to do so in times of celebration. It’s really hard to do it in times of conflict. And that is the power behind the concept of covenant. It’s binding. It’s intended to last, maybe for centuries. It’s a religious metaphor that demands that we stay in stay in deep relationship even in times of struggle.

How Is Covenantal Community Grounded in Classical Reconstructionism?

I understand the concept of covenantal community to be deeply grounded in classical Reconstructionist commitments. It’s an effort on my part to bring them forward to the current moment in language that will be meaningful and hopefully inspiring. The Reconstructionist commitment to diversity as well as our attachment to complexity and nuance has too often translated into fuzzy or overly complicated explanations that can be misconstrued or appropriated. Take, for example, “peoplehood,” a term coined in the 1940s by the circle gathered around Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, which has been widely embraced in ways other than its originators intended. For classical Reconstructionists, peoplehood was intended to be a means to a set of content-filled, values-driven ends rather than an end in and of itself, which is how it has most often been understood. “Covenantal community” is about communicating the heft of this concept so that means and ends cannot be separated.

‘Community Across Difference’ as a Formulation of Kaplan’s ‘Unity in Diversity’

One of the greatest challenges that the Enlightenment era presented to Jewish self-understanding and self-organization was that Jews became individual citizens of nation-states. For the first time in our long and evolving history, the Jewish community — its institutions, its norms and mores but even more the integrating concept of “community” — no longer needed to be the central principle of Jewish life. Religious authority — and the means to compel conformity — was shattered. The religion of Judaism could be separated from an individual’s experience of being Jewish. Choice became an option, including the choice not only to convert (that is, join a different group or community) but to be nothing at all. Every major movement in Judaism in the modern era, religious or political or cultural, has been an effort, at least in part, to address this incredible disruption.

Non-negotiability of community. Kaplan’s efforts to articulate the ideology of Reconstructionism was very much in this vein and, as the first section of Judaism as a Civilization demonstrates, he was reacting to other efforts that he thought were problematic or insufficient for any number of reasons. One of these was classical Reform Judaism as articulated in the Pittsburgh Platform in 1885.[1] The Reform movement emerged as a response to modernity and embraced individual autonomy as a founding principle. For Reform Jews, individuals ultimately make their own decisions about how and when and where to be Jewish. Kaplan understood that there needed to be much more space in Jewish communal life for individual desires and aspirations but insisted that they needed to be mediated through community. “A community,” he wrote in 1948, “is a form of social organization in which the welfare of each is the concern of all, and the life of the whole is the concern of each.”[i][2] Even as Kaplan sought Jewish integration into American society, he was always fiercely countercultural in his insistence on the centrality of community.

...embraced individual autonomy as a founding principle.

In its context, this embrace may have been a healthy counter-balance to the prevailing cultural currents of European Jewish communities. In 21st century US Jewish communities, the surrounding culture is pathologically individualistic, fragmented and selfish. In our time, part of the appeal of religious participation is the return to a more community-centered way of life. Exchanging extreme autonomy (and its accompanying isolation) for the moral and practical support of longstanding community is a common theme I hear among those who join Reconstructionist congregations. – Rabbi Kate Mizrahi

“A community,” he wrote in 1948...

This idea echoes Rabbi Israel Salanter’s 19th century teaching that” Someone else’s material needs are my spiritual responsibility.” Kaplan’s innovation was in moving the locus of responsibility from the individual to the communal. – Rabbi Megan Doherty

...the centrality of community.

Alone, we cannot always arrive at the wisest and most righteous decisions and actions. We need others to arrive at “truer truths” and to encourage us to be better versions of ourselves. This idea is deep in Jewish tradition and expressed in many places, including the tales of Rabbi Yokhanan and Reish Lakish, study partners who argued fiercely to improve one anothers’ thinking (Bava Metzia 84a). – Rabbi Katie Mizrahi

Diversity as a reality and potential strength. In all his arguments, Kaplan made the case for vital modern Jewish communities that drew on the strength of Jewish traditions and that also took advantage of the possibilities of the modern era, including more robustly meeting the needs of individuals within community. He understood that, with communal authority so shattered by the conditions of modernity, modern Jews would be best served by embracing the inevitable diversity as a strength rather than insisting on any one standard, be it religious or political, that couldn’t be enforced. A commitment to diversity was an animating impulse in the founding of Reconstructionism. The key Reconstructionist metaphors “civilization” and “peoplehood,” while singular nouns, both contain and even celebrate multiplicity.

Kaplan was most explicit about this goal in his efforts to unite the various ideological and religious expressions of the Conservative movement, of which he was a leading if controversial and sometimes abused thinker and teacher. Trying to bridge the left, right and center wings of the movement, Kaplan frequently used the term “unity in diversity,” which he borrowed from the United States motto e pluribus unum.[3] The overlap is not coincidental: Kaplan was formulating Reconstructionism to Americanize the children of nearly 3 million Jewish immigrants who arrived from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1924, just as American society was grappling with their arrival along with 17 million immigrants from other countries. Part of the project of American democracy has long been navigating extensive and ever-changing diversity.

Part of the project of American democracy...

Reconstructionist Judaism is the first Jewish movement to emerge in the American context. When Jewish communities in other countries have engaged with Reconstructionist ideas, their resulting practices have often looked very different from US-based Reconstructionists. In this moment when American democracy itself feels threatened, how can Reconstructionst thinking and creativity help us respond to the new challenges we face? – Rabbi Megan Doherty

Pluralism as a strategy. Pluralism emerged in the years following World War I as one of the affirmative strategies to manage the reality of diversity, in sharp contradistinction to nativist, Christian supremacist homogenization that promoted the ideology of the “melting pot.” Horace Kallen, the foremost expositor of cultural pluralism, was involved in Jewish and Zionist causes and considered Kaplan among his mentors.[4] Kaplan refers in passing to the emerging strategy in Judaism as a Civilization,[5] and much of the Reconstructionist program can be seen as an effort to demonstrate robust cultural pluralism even as the theory itself was being worked out.[6]

Pluralism...

One important critique of pluralism as a strategy is that it often assumes a level of equality or equity among and between all of the diverse experiences and perspectives within a community (see Benay Lapee and others). In order to practice pluralism with integrity, it is important to investigate the resource disparities and power dynamics at play between various elements of a community. It is incumbent on anyone intent on leading a covenantal community to honor and contend with the ways that those differences impact the ability of a community to build relationships across these disparate groups. – Rabbi Isabel dr Koninck

Reconstructionism’s twin commitment to diversity and to finding unity within that diversity was an effort to inspire a new Jewish collective self-understanding within the reality of individual citizenship.[7] Kaplan and his circle were drawing on age-old Jewish understandings and revalorizing them for the modern moment with language like “civilization” and “peoplehood,” while trying to demonstrate how to bring them to life within the larger Reconstructionist program. “Community across difference” is a new locution for this same project — an effort to emphasize that which binds us together while also protecting and preserving our individual differences as well as the diverse sources from which we draw in formulating and performing our identities. Local community, as I have taught elsewhere, is the place where the academic concept of Jewish peoplehood can be brought to life in meaningful, if sometimes challenging, ways.[8] It is in community where we articulate and enact our commitments, where we voluntarily submerge our individual interests in the service of something larger, where we willingly hold ourselves accountable — as a meaningful expression of Jewish peoplehood. This is especially true in communities that are diverse, where we rub up against differences and learn from them, develop from them, gain capacity to better articulate our own beliefs and practices, open ourselves up to transformation and growth through multiple encounters with people who are not exactly like us.

...citizenship...

We must continue to widen our gaze and work to include and be transformed by those with previously or ongoing marginalized identities. Welcoming diversity must also account for the multiplicity and pluralism each individual inherently carries into the community. For example, yes, I am in a covenantal relationship with my Jewish community. But I am also in covenantal relationships with my children’s school community, extended family, friends, husband, children, professional colleagues, and even country. Others are equally covenanted to communities of identity different from their Jewish identities. Sometimes, the demands of those covenants conflict, and painful choices must be made. But most of the time, we carry our multiplicities of obligations and commitments within our wholly unified selves. Can this understanding of the multiplicity of our identities and commitments help us understand and potentially smoothe out some of the sharp edges our commitment to inclusion and diversity sometimes engenders? – Rabbi Elyse Wechterman

...ourselves up to transformation and growth...

One paradox of community across difference is that the ‘not exactly like us’ people we are encountering and engaging with over time need to be enough like us that we feel comfortable continuing to show up. An important function of community leadership is creating the structures and spaces for people to find their authentic common ground. – Rabbi Megan Doherty

A Note on Different Axes of Diversity

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