That Which Stands: Reclaiming Covenant in American Jewish Life

American Jews are witnessing a distinct “Golden Age” draw to a close.¹ The evidence seems to indicate that an emerging trend — “the Jewish vacation from history ended” — is here to stay, to borrow a phrase from Franklin Foer. This impulse makes factual sense: it is tempting to view history as the enemy. After all, history carried swords, stormed houses, incited pogroms, massacred villages, and decreed conversion. In his 2024 piece for The Atlantic, Foer rightfully emphasizes the improbability that Jews have survived in the face of unrelenting persecution. However, a strange and somewhat cosmic paradox surfaces if we conceive, as he does, of Jewish flourishing as an utterly ahistorical phenomenon: a Judaism that is so eager to escape its history begins to require it. What we need is a renewed and active covenant, a revitalized communal framework that binds us with a continued sense of meaning.

What we need is a renewed and active covenant, a revitalized communal framework that binds us with a continued sense of meaning.

Foer's mode of gauging Jewish thriving mirrors a prevailing mindset amongst Jews that has proved curiously inadequate at leading the way forward. Jews during the supposed Golden Age were secure, prosperous, and acculturating. Antisemitism as a collective binding force seemed to be waning, and hopefully so. Yet a now infamous Pew study from 2013 found that a staggering 73 percent of American Jews responded that their Jewish identity was based on remembering the Holocaust, the most common response.²

This ought to seem incongruous. In an American setting truly conducive to cultivating richer Jewish life, our connection nonetheless came to be largely rooted in a defensive reflex. American Jews ostensibly thrived, while Judaism, in its broadest form, did not. This anxiety is hardly a new phenomenon. Indeed, the twentieth-century philosopher Simon Rawidowicz, in his essay, “Israel: The Ever-Dying People,” draws a direct line back to Abraham, who feared he would have no children to carry on his legacy.³ But the truth is that upholding such an approach today, which often speaks of “continuity” as its supreme virtue, is ultimately myopic, neglecting the profound substance Judaism contains beyond its own self-preservation. Describing Judaism exclusively through the vocabulary of “securing” and “maintaining,” or clinging to lingering feelings of trauma, guilt, and victimhood in order to engage people sells short our aspirations. The journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon further contends that rhetoric squarely focused on continuing the line can make it seem as though Jewishness is no more than a constant friction between individual freedom and coercion in the big picture.⁴ A reactive Judaism becomes unmovable and unmoved: it offers – and, perhaps more importantly, asks – the bare minimum.

And so, I would like to advocate the covenant as a different answer to Foer’s premise of the “Jewish vacation from history,” and suggest that perhaps we should not pack our suitcases just yet. Foer concludes his essay with a powerful line from the Passover Seder, part of Ve-hi Sheamda in the Haggadah, “In every generation, our enemies rise up to destroy us.”⁵ This assertion, though, is missing the essential context preceding it: “That (hi) which has stood for our ancestors and us.” The key to our dilemma might lie in that ambiguous hi, which alludes to the covenant forged in the Book of Genesis that is retold in the prior paragraph of the Haggadah. Ve-hi Sheamda recognizes that Jewish survival exists very much within, and not above, the prism of history, and that perpetuation must be self-motivated, embodying more than seeking aberrations from difficult periods. During this fragile post-October 7 juncture, amid a well-documented surge of interest in Jewish affiliation, it is imperative that we engage in the longstanding Jewish act of cheshbon ha-nefesh, soul-searching. It is time for American Jews to reclaim our sense of covenant.

The very word itself might initially sound heavy or overbearingly theological. Can it really serve as an effective model to guide communal discourse today? Rembrandt completed a pen-and-ink drawing in 1658 titled “God Making His Covenant with Abraham,” in which God, accompanied by angels, appears before Abraham, who is so overwhelmed that he collapses to the ground, unable to face what he sees. Today, many still associate the notion of a covenant with a theatrical display of divine majesty. In order for the covenant to resonate with American Jews now, in a largely secular age, its drama must be translated into lived experience: it must be active rather than distant, ethical rather than entirely spectacular, and woven into contemporary life so that it is immediate, participatory, and real.

The covenant entails a commitment that, though inherited from our ancestors, is freely chosen by us. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, proposed a system in an influential essay from 1982 called the “Voluntary Covenant.” Greenberg was acutely aware of the near impossibility of speaking in religious terms following such devastation. “No statement, theological or otherwise,” he warned, “should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.”⁶ Greenberg maps the covenant through several chronological stages and arrives at a striking conclusion: the Jewish people overwhelmingly decided to rebuild Jewish life after the Shoah. In the United States, communities were established, families were formed, and Jewish institutions were founded. Greenberg theorizes that the covenant has evolved over time in a direction that places more expectation on human free will. His central insight is that what matters most about the covenant now is not necessarily its devotional demand, but the assertion inherent in what we do, since “every person who steps forward to live as a Jew” in the modern world “can be compared to a convert.”⁷ Yet Greenberg qualifies that the covenant does not end there. In fact, this is precisely where it begins, as a convert “must make certain commitments and express certain beliefs.” In Greenberg’s eyes, making these commitments is a “testimony of hope.”⁸

This perspective remains resonant. We must be deeply grateful that the organized Jewish life that has taken shape in the United States has become extraordinarily robust. The Jewish Federations of North America alone distributed $3 billion in 2024, a substantial increase from previous years.⁹ But it has in turn become much easier to take that abundance for granted, slowly fostering complacency. Let’s recenter ourselves on the novelty of Greenberg’s formulation: we are performing genuinely hopeful acts. The Jewish experience carries significant meaning whether it is lived under strain or in relative ease. The danger of confining our relationship with Judaism to being solely about the fact that we are still here is that it leaves us exposed to teleological contradictions. By such thinking, moments of tragedy, in fact, bring the whole enterprise into question. Yet the empirical reality is that they do not. The journalist Bret Stephens even coined a new term – “October 8 Jews” – to describe the large number of Jews who have newly reconnected and taken initiative.¹⁰ We must utilize this moment of reset to facilitate a shift towards connection that remains regardless of circumstance. It is true that conditions have changed for Jews in the United States. There’s no point in glossing over reality. We have learned far too often that we can never rationalize or stand idly by when new threats to Jewish welfare arise. But the act of living as Jews in the wake of disaster means that there is something deeper that we can capture.

To understand more deeply, it helps to adopt the distinction that the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi sets forth in his pioneering book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Yerushalmi outlines the implications of these two different ways of relating to the past. The discipline of history, with its clear-cut chronology, fabricates a feeling of distance.¹¹ We must be wary that while living with this illusion can be most appealing, it is impossible to maintain when, as Foer would have it, history begins to feel menacingly tangible. Yet Yerushalmi describes a second concept in sharp contrast to the first. Memory is a visceral force residing constantly within the Jewish psyche that embeds the cognition of what came before into the current moment, rather than making it seem as though we analyze from afar. Yerushalmi’s framework, if applied today, can deepen our appreciation for what we bear and refine our intentions as members of that unfinished arc. We must consider the deceptively simple question of what our role is as twenty-first-century Jews in the United States. The Golden Age taught us that the fortitude and comfort of institutional life should not minimize the leap of faith that is, and always has been, being Jewish. This choice is not only something we consume or preserve, but something we achieve. Stressing a deepened appreciation for the resonance of our actions will encourage individuals to see their Judaism as consequential and a manifestation of agency. The covenant can give that agency a shape: it does several things for those who take it up.

The Golden Age taught us that the fortitude and comfort of institutional life should not minimize the leap of faith that is, and always has been, being Jewish. This choice is not only something we consume or preserve, but something we achieve.

First, the paradigm of covenant fulfills the lofty and nearly insurmountable task of embracing our history despite all of its cruelty. By awakening the force of memory, the covenant draws upon the intensity of hope demonstrated by our forebears and acknowledges our bond with them. The immense promise for us now resides in resolving as a collective to hold tighter to our own tradition, which will prove more challenging than debating what signifies an ominous return to history. Religious observance might seem to be the most obvious application of covenant, but the many other outlets in which American Jews express themselves are equally important and applicable. We need not invent new strategies, yet we need a profound ontological shift. As Emma Lazarus, whose legendary words greeted multitudes of Jews as they arrived from sea to begin new lives, wrote in her 1883 essay, “The Jewish Problem,” the very survival of the Jewish people “evinces the vitality of a singularly well-equipped organization...”¹² We must no longer allow our consciousness of the covenant, that organization, to fall by the wayside.

Next, thinking of Jewishness as a process of deliberate commitment rather than a prescribed trajectory can restore the spirit, too swiftly neutralized in the contemporary landscape, that what we do matters. We cannot assume that everyone shares an effortless connection to our heritage. Institutions have done an excellent job focusing on the larger milestones, but setting the precedent that these constitute the extent of Jewish life is tenuous. When individuals feel that their actions have a covenantal stake, that everyday moments are not drained of this first-hand opportunity, the apprehension of burden gives way to a sense of empowerment. Consider the prerogative of choosing to be bound. Professor Mara Benjamin proposes in her book, The Obligated Self, that the analogy of motherhood and its concrete responsibilities can elucidate the internal complexity characterizing a relationship of obligation. She explains that “Our freedom consists not in casting off all that binds us, but rather in recognizing that our boundedness and our agency are each parts of greater whole.”¹³ Benjamin poignantly suggests that obligation is not only placed upon us from the outside but comes into view and attains clarity as life unfolds. She describes a process in which “we can be oblivious to the fact of being tied to the world until various experiences open our eyes to it.”¹⁴ Duty becomes part of an earnest affiliation, nurtured by our actions.

In this vein, living with an awareness of the covenant, of inhabiting a continuous strand of memory, can redeem Jewish life from the Sisyphean pragmatism of continuity. Rawidowicz’s layered account of the “ever-dying” attitude concludes with a potent and nearly euphoric pronouncement: “We, the last Jews! [...] let us be the last as our fathers and forefathers were. Let us prepare the ground for the last Jews who will come after us, and for the last Jews who will rise after them, and so on until the end of days.”¹⁵ Perhaps the startling cognizance of our vulnerability can breed the feeling of tremendous opportunity. A covenantal mindset can create a liberatory realization of what we carry, encouraging us not to flee from the dynamism of our Jewish inheritance nor view it as an unshoulderable weight, but instead to draw strength from it, immerse ourselves in it, and wrestle with it. Neither the shadow of a long history nor the worry over an uncertain future should impede the urgency of the present moment: the call of our own tradition yearning to be brought forth today.

It is fitting that the Passover Seder is still the most observed ritual among American Jews. Despite all the turmoil, we will buy matza at the local grocery store, pull the stained and worn-out Haggadot from the cabinet, and compare the details of charoset recipes. We conduct the evening commemorating the Exodus as though we ourselves were physically there. It is precisely occasions like this that will sustain Jewish life. These rituals allow us to live beyond time, not because of any external fortune, but because of our own tradition. When it comes time to sing the Ve-hi Sheamda and recite that small but powerful word, hi, we too will be part of that ongoing covenant: a radical testimony of hope to that which stands.

Sources Cited:

Benjamin, Mara. The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought. Indiana University Press, 2018.

Foer, Franklin. “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” The Atlantic, March 4, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/.

Greenberg, Irving (Yitz). “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity After the Holocaust.” In Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, edited by Eva Fleischer. Ktav Publishing House, 1977.

Greenberg, Irving (Yitz). “Voluntary Covenant.” In Contemporary Jewish Responses to the Shoah, edited by Steven L. Jacobs. University Press of America, 1993.

Jewish Federations of North America. “Amid War, Jewish Federation giving rose $1 Billion in 2024.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.jewishfederations.org/blog/all/amid-war-jewish-federation-giving-rose-1-billion-in-2024-504789.

Lazarus, Emma. “The Jewish Problem.” The Century Magazine 25, issue 4 (1883): 602–611. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924079601062?urlappend=%3Bseq=618.

Pew Research Center. “A Portrait of Jewish Americans.” Accessed June 25, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/.

Rawidowicz, Simon. “Israel: The Ever-Dying People.” In Israel: The Ever-Dying People, and Other Essays, edited by Benjamin C.I. Ravid. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.

Stephens, Bret. “For America’s Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8.” The New York Times, November 8, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/opinion/us-jewish-israel-sept-11.html.

Ungar-Sargon, Batya. “How The Obsession With Jewish Continuity Perverts Our Liberal Values.” The Forward, September 14, 2017. https://forward.com/opinion/382679/how-the-obsession-with-jewish-continuity-perverts-our-liberal-values/.

Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. University of Washington Press, 1996.