IB World Religions 6.1.1. B'rit: the Covenant and the Jewish Expression of Monotheism Notes

6.1.1. B'rit: The Covenant and the Jewish Expression of Monotheism

B'rit and its partners

1. B'rit (covenant) is the agreement Jews hold God made with Abraham and with the whole people at Sinai. Jewish monotheism is stated less as a count of how many gods exist than as a bond with one God who makes promises and keeps them.
2. The Hebrew idiom is to cut a covenant, karat b'rit, from the old practice of passing between the halves of a divided animal. Genesis 15 stages exactly that, with a smoking fire pot moving between the pieces while Abraham sleeps.
3. A b'rit binds both sides. God takes on obligations in it and the people take on obligations in return, which is why the prophets can put God in the dock as readily as they indict Israel.
4. The Tenakh sets out a series of covenants. The one with Noah covers all humanity, the one with Abraham narrows to a family, Sinai takes in a whole people, and the covenant with David settles on a royal line.
5. Shabbat is itself called a sign of the covenant in Exodus 31. The weekly rest carries for the whole people the function that circumcision carries for the individual.
6. Only the Noahide covenant is made with everyone. Jews therefore do not hold that non-Jews must keep Torah, only the seven Noahide laws the rabbis drew from Genesis 9, which is one reason Judaism does not seek converts.
7. Every Jewish movement treats the covenant as still in force. What they dispute is what its terms require and who may restate them, and that dispute runs through the rest of Judaism.

Abraham and circumcision

1. Genesis 12 opens the story with a call and a promise. Abraham is told to leave his country for a land God will show him and to become a great nation through which all families of the earth find blessing.
2. Genesis 15 turns the promise into a covenant through the ceremony of the divided animals. It adds descendants as many as the stars, and four hundred years in a foreign land before the return.
3. Genesis 17 supplies the sign. Every male of Abraham's household is circumcised, and the covenant is to be cut into the flesh of each generation on the eighth day.
4. Names change at that point. Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah, and Jews read the renaming as the covenant reshaping the person who enters it.
5. The Abrahamic covenant is unconditional in form. God swears to it, and the tradition holds that later unfaithfulness can bring punishment but cannot dissolve the promise.
6. B'rit milah, the covenant of circumcision, remains ordinary Jewish practice at eight days old. Jews describe the child at that moment as entering the covenant of Abraham our father.

Sinai and the whole people

1. The Sinai narrative in Exodus 19 to 24 makes the covenant national. God recalls carrying the people out of Egypt on eagles' wings, and then sets out terms.
2. The offer is conditional in its wording. If the people keep the covenant they will be a treasured possession, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
3. The people answer before hearing the details: na'aseh v'nishma, we will do and we will hear. Rabbinic tradition treats that order as the model of Jewish obedience, practice first and understanding after.
4. The terms are the mitzvot. Deuteronomy 5 restates the Ten Sayings for a new generation and insists the covenant was made not with ancestors only but with everyone standing there that day.
5. Sinai is therefore not remembered as a finished event. The liturgy speaks of Torah being given today, and at Shavuot Jews mark the giving as something each generation stands under.
6. The covenant is renewed after each break. Joshua renews it at Shechem, Josiah after the scroll is found, and Ezra after the return from Babylon, which sets the pattern of return the prophets keep pressing.

Covenant as monotheism

1. The Shema states the belief in a sentence: Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Jews recite it morning and evening, and it is addressed to the covenant people rather than to the world at large.
2. That wording ties oneness to belonging. God is one and God is ours, so Jewish monotheism arrives as a claim about whom Israel is bound to as much as about how many gods there are.
3. Jews describe this God as acting in history. Deuteronomy 5 grounds the commandments in the exodus rather than in creation alone, so the covenant partner is known by what he is held to have done for this people.
4. The Shema is not only recited. Jews write its words on parchment inside the mezuzah fixed to the doorpost and inside the tefillin worn at weekday morning prayer, so the claim is attached to the house and to the body.
5. Election follows from the covenant. Exodus 19 calls Israel a holy nation, and the rabbis read chosenness as a heavier load of obligation rather than a claim to superior worth.
6. Amos puts it sharply: you only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities. Election raises the standard instead of granting exemption.
7. The movements differ over what the covenant now obliges. Orthodoxy holds every mitzvah given at Sinai binding, Reform and Liberal Judaism hold the ethical obligations binding while treating ritual ones as open to change, and Conservative Judaism holds the law binding while accepting that it develops.

Israel as people

1. Israel is first a person. Jacob is renamed Israel after wrestling through the night in Genesis 32, and his descendants are the B'nei Yisrael, the children of Israel.
2. The word then names the people. Am Yisrael is the Jewish people as a whole, and Klal Yisrael stretches to include those who keep little of the practice, since membership rests on covenant rather than on belief.
3. Jewish identity is therefore not a matter of assent. A Jew who abandons observance is still counted a Jew, and the tradition treats the tie as unbreakable from the human side.
4. Descent has been the ordinary route in. Orthodox and Conservative halakhah counts a person Jewish if the mother is Jewish, while American Reform since 1983 also accepts patrilineal descent where the child is raised as a Jew, so some people are counted Jewish by one movement and not another.
5. Conversion is the other route. Judaism discourages rather than seeks it, but a convert who studies and appears before a Beth Din is held to enter the covenant fully and is called a child of Abraham and Sarah.
6. Size is not the ground of the claim. Deuteronomy 7 states that God did not set his love on Israel because they were more numerous than other peoples, and Jews today number roughly fifteen million worldwide.
7. The Diaspora scattered the people without dissolving it. Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities developed distinct custom while holding the same covenant, and Jews still argue over how far integration can go before it becomes assimilation.

Land and state

1. Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, is written into the Abrahamic promise. Jewish tradition has treated people, covenant and land as three parts of one thing rather than as separate topics.
2. Some mitzvot apply only there. Agricultural laws such as the sabbatical year and the tithes are tied to the soil of the land, so a large part of Torah lay dormant through the long exile.
3. The land carries obligations as well as promise. Leviticus 18 warns that the land will vomit out its inhabitants if they defile it, so holding it is presented in the text as conditional on conduct.
4. Exile did not remove the land from practice. Jews turn towards Jerusalem to pray, break a glass at weddings in memory of the Temple, and close the Pesach seder with next year in Jerusalem.
5. The modern State of Israel, founded in 1948, is a political fact that Jews read religiously in very different ways. Its Law of Return grants citizenship to Jews worldwide, which turns the question of who counts as Jewish into state law as well as halakhah.
6. Religious Zionism treats the state as the beginning of redemption. Some ultra-Orthodox groups such as Satmar and Neturei Karta reject a Jewish state before the Mashiach comes, and other Haredi communities use its institutions without granting it religious meaning.
7. The non-Orthodox movements shifted over time. Reform's Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 rejected any national restoration and defined Jews as a religious community, while Reform and Liberal Judaism later became supporters of Israel and continued to insist that Diaspora life is fully legitimate.
8. Diaspora Jews differ over what the state asks of them. Some read supporting it as a covenant obligation and others read criticising its policies as an obligation of the same covenant, while Israeli law's reliance on Orthodox authority for marriage and conversion remains a live grievance for Conservative, Reform and Liberal Jews.