September 25, 2008
Savvy real estate agents have this advice: “Three things make for a successful transaction — location, location, and location.”
I know little about real estate, so I can hardly comment on that. But I can guarantee the validity of a parallel remark about Judaism. “Three things make for a successful relationship: covenant, covenant, and covenant.”
From beginning to end, the Torah is about that and only that: God covenants with Adam and Eve, then with Noah, and, finally, with Abraham. Adam and Eve fall short of their side of the bargain and are expelled from Eden. Noah comes through, and to this day, say the rabbis, God sustains a Noahide covenant with non-Jews. The Jewish covenant with Abraham is the one that the rest of the Torah celebrates, first and foremost at Sinai, but again here, as Israel is about to inherit its Land. “You all stand here today,” God announces, “to be admitted into a covenant.” Several chapters later, God calls heaven and earth as eternal witnesses to this binding agreement.
God remains faithful to the relationship
even if we sin against it.
None of these covenants comes as a surprise to us, certainly not the Jewish one that is repeated as a veritable litany, not only in Torah but by the rabbis who commented on it. The rabbis posit another covenant, however, that does prove somewhat astounding. There, too, we are supposed to live by it, and there, too, God calls heaven and earth as witnesses. But it is a very strange covenant, so strange that the Gemara, which introduces it, begins with the frank admission, “If it were not recorded in Torah, we would never dare claim it.” Its oddity is that even though we are to live by it, it is not made with us; nor, however, is it made with anyone else! It is made with God’s very own attributes — as if God makes the covenant with a personified version of the very things that make God God.
The 13 attributes in question form the centerpiece of Yom Kippur. They are the ones God shows Moses on Mount Sinai: “Adonai, Adonai — El rahum v’hanun (compassionate and merciful God).” God says to Moses, “Tell Israel that whenever they mention these attributes, I will pardon them.”
We should wonder how God can make a covenant with impersonal attributes. Most commentators think the attributes are qualities that are then personified as if they are another of God’s covenantal partners. That way, we enter Yom Kippur in fear of our sins, but knowing we are not alone. We have God’s very attributes on our side, even arguing our case.
But there is another reading. Relationships depend not only on whom we make them with, but on the character of the interaction by which they are lived. So the attributes are not the personification of another partner; they are the essence of the manner in which true covenants are pursued. All our relationships will prove fulfilling to the extent that we define them by God’s attributes.
The talmudic tale even stipulates what there is about the attributes that make them so essential. “They begin by mentioning ‘Adonai’ twice,” the rabbis explain, to show us that God remains faithful to the relationship even if we sin against it. God says, in effect, “Adonai [the first time] indicates that I am here before you sin; Adonai [the second time] says that I am here after you sin as well. Just express repentance, and you will find me ‘a compassionate and merciful God.’”
Every relationship is its own covenant, and the best ones are meant to be lasting. But they endure not just because of the two persons involved, but because of the kind of trust on which they are based. Both parts of a covenant — the partners and the relationship — require eternal witnesses. So heaven and earth are summoned for them both: here, in our sedra, they testify to the partners; in the Talmud, they attest to the foundational attributes that bring true partnership about.
This Shabbat, we explore covenantal partners; on Yom Kippur, we celebrate the covenantal relationship. From now until then, we are to keep both in mind. By establishing bonds with the people we love on the basis of “Adonai Adonai, compassionate and merciful,” we say, in effect, “Let us covenant to be like God, bringing heaven and earth to testify to each other and to the terms by which the two of us will live. We promise to ‘be there’ both before and after the times we sin against each other. That is what God promised Israel. How can we do anything less?”
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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