The Two Covenants
Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father, who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.’ Matthew 6:9 NASB
Our – In the past a few notable Christian scholars attempted to assert that Jesus’ statement concerning the communal relationship to God was unique, that is to say, that prior to his use of the plural “our,” Jews thought of God in terms of unique individual relationships combined to make up a theocratic society. They thought of God as “my God,” not “our God.” Fortunately, subsequent thinking removed this mistaken claim from Christian theology. It was simply a case where Western philosophical ideas infected theological assertions; where Greco-Roman individualism displaced proper understanding of the communal nature of the God of the Tanakh.
Jonathan Sacks makes the point from a Jewish perspective:
“Judaism is a communal faith . . . Judaism is not addressed to individuals. Nor is it addressed to humanity as a whole. . . . Emuna, that key word of Judaism, usually translated as ‘faith,’ more properly means loyalty—to God, but also to the people.”[1]
We should note not only that Sacks rightly asserts Judaism is communal but also, quite importantly, that it is notuniversal. Not surprisingly, those same theologians who once claimed that Jesus was the first to introduce a collective pronoun to address God were also proponents of the universal Christian evangelical claim that God was for everyone through faith in Jesus. Just mouth the “sinner’s prayer” and the God of the Bible would rescue you from Hell. There was no attempt to assimilate the rescued sinner into a biblical life-community. The Church would do, no matter what doctrinal deviations it claimed with regard to God’s chosen people who, by the way, happened to be Jewish.
The idea of communal assimilation was, unfortunately, not limited to the “Christian” convert. Judaism faced the same problem time and again as one empire after another asserted power over the globe. Maimonides (the Rambam) wrote about this Jewish problem centuries ago:
One who separates himself from the community, even if he does not commit a transgression, but only holds aloof from the congregation of Israel, does not fulfil religious precepts in common with his people, shows himself indifferent when they are in distress, does not observe their fasts, but goes his own way as if he were one of he Gentiles and did not belong to the Jewish people—such a person has no share in the world to come.[2]
Sacks summarizes:
What is clear from this passage is that there are two components of Jewish belonging, not one. There is the acceptance of Jewish law (forbidden foods, the Sabbath and so on). There is also, separately, the acceptance of Jewish identity, namely a willingness to be part of the often tragic terms of Jewish history. (‘persecuted and oppressed’). The late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik called these, respectively, brit ye’ud (the covenant of destiny) and brit goral (the covenant of fate). Destiny is what we do. Fate is what happens to us. One is a code of action, halakha. The other is a form of imagination, the story we tell ourselves as to who we are and where we belong.[3]
Robinson Crusoe might have become a Christian but he could certainly never have become a Jew.
Topical Index: assimilation, identity, community, Matthew 6:9
[1] Jonathan Sacks Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Exodus: The Book of Redemption (Maggid, 2010), p. 90.
[2] Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva, 3:11 cited in Jonathan Sacks Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Exodus: The Book of Redemption (Maggid, 2010), p. 88.
[3] Jonathan Sacks Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Exodus: The Book of Redemption (Maggid, 2010), p. 89.
