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.
“Community across difference” emphasizes that which binds us together, while also protecting and preserving our individual differences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In community, we articulate and enact our commitments. We voluntarily submerge our individual interests in the service of something larger, and we willingly hold ourselves accountable as a meaningful expression of Jewish peoplehood.
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.
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.
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]
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.
A Note on Different Axes of Diversity
From early on, the Reconstructionist commitment to diversity has led to awareness and embrace of individuals, classes and groups that have previously been marginalized or accorded secondary status. Kaplan was explicit in this in his 1936 argument that women should be granted religious authority on the basis of tikkun olam (“repair of the world”) both because of all they affirmatively could offer and because, with increasing opportunities for women in American society, otherwise they would exit the community.[9] This impulse led to the Reconstructionist adoption of ambilineal (one parent being Jewish) descent in 1967 out of the recognition that choosing to marry someone non-Jewish was not co-equal with a desire to exit the Jewish community.[10] It also fueled the inclusion of openly gay, lesbian and bisexual Jews as rabbis and community members in the 1980s and early 1990s (and, much later, trans Jews)[11] and is one of the (many) drivers of our current commitments to racial equity and inclusion of Jews of color.
Vitality comes not just through inclusion of previously marginalized groups but also because of the transformation that can emerge through such inclusion. The full implications behind these actions are not always immediately clear: The impulse behind Kaplan’s argument for a change in the status of women came more from egalitarian democratic commitments than from nascent feminism, and the scholar Deborah Dash Moore astutely observes that even as Kaplan was seeking to vitalize Jewish communal life through broader engagement and participation, he did not fully intend to usher in the extensive adoption of feminism that ultimately emerged in the Reconstructionism.[12] And transformation, while vitalizing, can also be profoundly discomfiting. This was abundantly clear in the moves towards greater inclusion of gay, lesbian and bisexual Jews in the 1980s. Where many of its proponents saw the effort as an obvious outgrowth of the intentional democratic commitments leading to women’s equality as well as its liberatory feminist implications, at least some older, “classical” Reconstructionists found the effort unsettling and without precedent. This is an important reminder of the core Reconstructionist principle that context shapes beliefs and understandings, including generationally, and that even acceptance of the Reconstructionist definition of Judaism as the “evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people” doesn’t ensure comfort or confidence around evolution within our own lifetimes. And yet evolution continues: Thirty years later, there was unanimous embrace of the Reconstructionist commitment to validate trans Jews.
In our day, the most contentious issue roiling the Reconstructionist community and the American Jewish community writ large is around political stances, especially in regard to Zionism and anti-Zionism. Let me first assert my strong belief that the binary of Zionism and anti-Zionism is unhelpful in how much it flattens nuance. Kaplan himself was vociferous in his efforts to invest Zionism with new meanings after the political goal of independent statehood was achieved in 1948, arguing forcefully in A New Zionism and other places that the raison d’être of “Greater Zionism” should be to cultivate the well-being of “worldwide Jewish peoplehood” rather than, as David Ben-Gurion insisted, a prioritized orientation towards and building up of the Jewish state, including an unyielding focus on aliyah. It is profoundly unclear to me whether political stances, about which there is extensive evidence of shifts and transformations (sometimes quite significant) over a person’s lifetime, is coequal with other identities described above — gender, race, sexuality. While I am not certain of the answer, I am sufficiently aware of Reconstructionism’s longstanding commitments to paying attention to Jews and Jewish communities on the margins to continuously query this category and to be humble enough not to make declarative statements. As I argued at the beginning of this essay, since the onset of modernity, formal Jewish authority has been shattered, even as Jewish communal leaders and foundation professionals and lay people demand hard and fast boundaries.
Covenant
Beyond the millennia-old Jewish relationship with the concept of covenant that I described at the start of this essay, covenant too has deep roots in classical Reconstructionism. In the mid-1950s, following the establishment of the State of Israel, Kaplan urged world Jewry to voluntarily adopt a covenant that would bind them together as “one united People.”[13] He sought for Jews in all our diversity to voluntarily affirm Jewish peoplehood as the mandate that binds us together — rather than halakhah, a political vision or some other single standard. This effort was closely related to the longstanding Reconstructionist preoccupation with generating standards, ethics and norms for Jewish behavior, beginning with an early project of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, 1942’s “Toward a Guide to Jewish Ritual Usage,” which was updated in 1961 at the request of members of the earliest Reconstructionist congregations, and extends through David Teutsch’s masterful three-volume A Guide to Jewish Practice and the ongoing work of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College’s Center for Jewish Ethics. Indeed, the “seal” of the Reconstructionist movement, introduced originally in 1944 and appearing in various forms for the next 25 years, included ethics/musar as one of the “spokes” connecting Eretz Yisrael to Jews in America and around the world. In the absence of supernaturally revealed religion and the promise or threat of eternal reward or punishment, a robust ethical system becomes an essential means to articulate what it means to be a “good” Jew (or person) — to other Jews and to the rest of the world — whether or not there are meaningful consequences for violations.
Kaplan’s “covenant idea” was an effort to give substance to the concept of “peoplehood,” which was very quickly adopted by the Jewish community and, within a generation, by broader society.[14] “Peoplehood” could encompass Zionism, even Ben-Gurion’s narrow, statist vision and go beyond it, legitimating deeply secular identities and non-Orthodox Judaism and giving substance to the emerging concept of ethnic (extra-religious) Jewishness. “Covenant” would spell out the substance and prevent “peoplehood” from becoming an end in and of itself.
Kaplan’s covenant idea was closely tied to his concept of “organic Jewish community,” which he proposed as a solution to the “chaos” that dominated Jewish communal life since the beginning of modernity. Drawing on the thinking of philosopher John Dewey, Kaplan and his disciples argued for an organic community organized on democratic principles and open to reform and evolution. It should make space for all the constituent parts of the Jewish civilization, which prioritizes religion but includes diverse elements and expressions, including, in Kaplan’s words, “that nexus of a history, literature, language, social organization, folk sanction, standards of conduct, social and spiritual ideals, esthetic values”[15] and would include all Jews, of whatever orientation, who affirmatively identified with the Jewish people. In this way, a form of authority would be democratically generated by the Jews governed by it, willingly accepted and applied in a values-driven and planful manner rather than by inequitable distribution of financial resources or the power of one agency or communal sector over another. (Both covenant and organic community were ultimately deemed by Jewish communal leaders as too utopian to be implemented.)
The importance of norms. Kaplan envisaged concentric circles of organic Jewish community, beginning with local, then national, then international. (On the national and international level, Kaplan was inspired by the World Zionist Congress and the World Jewish Congress; on the local level, his thinking inspired what emerged as Jewish community relations councils.) When I speak or write about covenantal community, I am arguing primarily for supremely local efforts, with communities bound together through networks like the Reconstructionist movement. Central to this vision is the invitation for each community to generate norms expressive of their values and personalities and articulating what accountability looks like for themselves. I show examples (including those generated for Evolve) but do not prescribe them since for them to be maximally effective, they are best co-created by the community of people who agree to be bound by them. However, the influence of American individualism seems overpoweringly present in discussions about covenantal community, since the generation and acceptance of collective behaviors and boundaries are the elements of “covenantal community” that my interlocutors most often misunderstand.
Conclusion
I regularly argue with a colleague about the importance of believing in a “big myth” and how such a belief can at once undergird and illuminate the life of an individual and a community. He is an observant Jew and makes his personal home in an Orthodox community, even as professionally he has been immersed in pluralistic Jewish settings. He advocates for the “myth” of halakhic Judaism lived out in a halakhically observant community. For myriad reasons, I cannot find a comfortable place for myself within his mythic Judaism. But I am deeply at home, in ways both comfortable and growthfully challenging, inside the myth of covenantal community, which is defined by a binding sense of Jewish peoplehood brought to life in locations where individuals willingly adopt a covenant of abiding relationship and community across difference.
[1] Kaplan’s critique deeply influenced the formulation of the Reform movement’s 1937 Columbus Platform that began a slow process of the Reform movement moving ever closer to many Reconstructionist positions. The need to rethink this part of his magnum opus was one of many reasons why Kaplan declined to update it in subsequent decades.
[2] The Future of the American Jew, p. 325.
[3] For further discussion of this, see Chapter Two of my dissertation, “Animating Metaphors: Reconstructionist Efforts toward Jewish Unity,” in Ethnicity and Faith in American Judaism: Reconstructionism as Ideology and Institution, 1935-1959.
[4] William Toll, “Horace M. Kallen: Pluralism and American Jewish Identity,” American Jewish History, Vol. 85.
[5] Chapter 26, note 9, p. 528
[6] I discuss this extensively throughout my dissertation.
[7] This goal, so ambitious that it may be inherently paradoxical, is an example of why it can be difficult to communicate Reconstructionism succinctly. It also directly led to the shape and history of the Reconstructionist movement, since in its contradiction it led to Kaplan promoting Reconstructionism as a methodology rather than a denomination and choosing to stay within the confines of the Conservative movement, no matter how uncomfortable its leaders frequently made it for him and his followers.
[8] See this recording for Limmud’s 2021 Global Day of Learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25JkDEZ6i2s
[9] “Kaplan made his argument in “The Status of the Jewish Woman,” first published in The Reconstructionist in 1936 and reprinted in his 1948 book The Future of the American Jew. For further discussion, see my article “‘A Lady Sometimes Blows the Shofar: Women’s Religious Equality in the Postwar Reconstructionist Movement” in A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America.
[10] Jacob Staub, “A Reconstructionist View of Patrilineal Descent” in Judaism 34/1 (Winter 1985): 97-106. http://archive.jewishrecon.org/resource-files/files/Reconstructionist%20view%20on%20patrlineal%20descent.pdf
[11] Rebecca T. Alpert and Jacob J. Staub, “The Making of Gay and Lesbian Rabbis in Reconstructionist Judaism, 1979-1992,” in Devotions and Desires: Histories of Religion and Sexuality in the Twentieth Century United States, chapter 11, edited by Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather White. University of North Carolina Press, 2017, pp. 214-233.
[12] “Judaism as a Gendered Civilization: The Legacy of Mordecai Kaplan’s Magnum Opus” in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, Winter 2006, pp. 172-186.
[13] Mordecai M. Kaplan, “The Principles of Reconstructionism,” The Reconstructionist, March 18, 1955/Adar 24, 5715, 22.
[14] See my dissertation, p. 106.
[15] Judaism As a Civilization, p. 178.
