Covenant Without Consensus

How Deep Disagreement Can Still Sustain Shared Citizenship

Societies do not ordinarily face their greatest difficulties because everyone has forgotten the importance of agreement. The more difficult problem arises when citizens disagree about matters they regard as fundamental and cannot resolve those differences without compromising convictions central to their identities.

Israel’s relationship with its ultra-Orthodox communities illustrates this challenge. Many disagreements about military service, education, employment, and religious authority are expressions of deeper differences concerning the meaning of obligation, the purpose of life, and the relationship between Judaism and the state.

These differences cannot simply be negotiated away. Nor should the success of a democratic society be measured by its ability to make everyone understand religion, citizenship, and human flourishing in the same way.

The relevant question is whether people can remain responsible to one another when their understanding of that responsibility differs.

Jewish tradition offers a moral vocabulary for considering the problem. Its concept of covenant, or brit, concerns a relationship sustained by obligations extending beyond immediate preference or advantage.

Covenant is not a substitute for law, constitutional principles, or democratic institutions. But it may help explain why citizens who cannot agree on everything nevertheless possess enduring responsibilities toward one another.

Covenant and the Meaning of Obligation

The biblical covenant at Sinai established a relationship between God and the people of Israel expressed through commandments, communal responsibilities, and continuing religious obligations. It was not simply a contract among individuals pursuing private interests.

The account in Exodus includes the people’s acceptance of the covenant. Jewish tradition also preserves extensive debate concerning the nature of that acceptance, the obligations it established, and the authority of subsequent interpretation.

The important point for contemporary public life is that covenant involves obligations whose significance cannot be reduced to whether they provide an immediate personal benefit.

The Hebrew Bible repeatedly connects the religious life of Israel with responsibilities toward other people. Commands concerning the stranger, widow, orphan, poor, and vulnerable establish that relationships with God cannot be separated entirely from obligations within society.

The prophetic tradition develops this theme with particular force. Isaiah 58, for example, criticizes religious observance that neglects injustice and suffering. Religious fidelity is measured not only through ritual performance but also through the treatment of other human beings.

These sources do not provide a direct legislative solution to the modern conscription controversy. Their contribution is more fundamental: they challenge the idea that a community can understand faithfulness entirely in terms of preserving its own institutional boundaries.

Covenant links identity with responsibility.

Mutual Responsibility Within Jewish Tradition

A related concept is arevut, the idea of mutual responsibility. The Talmudic formulation that Israel is responsible for one another appears in Shevuot 39a.

Its immediate theological setting differs from that of modern democratic citizenship. Nevertheless, it expresses a concern that remains relevant: the conduct and welfare of members of a community cannot be understood as entirely private matters.

For Haredi Jews, mutual responsibility may include preserving religious learning, supporting families, maintaining charitable institutions, and helping others observe Jewish law. Such practices are not incidental to communal life. They are important expressions of religious solidarity.

For non-Haredi Israelis, mutual responsibility may be expressed through military service, taxes, public institutions, employment, or voluntary activity.

These forms of contribution are not always interchangeable, and difficult questions remain concerning their relative burdens. Nevertheless, mutual responsibility offers a way to begin the conversation without presuming that only one community understands service or obligation.

It also creates an uncomfortable question for every community: whether its conception of responsibility takes adequate account of those whose lives fall outside its immediate boundaries.

Religious commitment can generate extraordinary solidarity among insiders while leaving outsiders insufficiently protected. National identification can create similar problems when collective welfare is defined too narrowly.

A serious covenantal ethic must attend to both dangers.

Disagreement Is Part of Jewish Religious Life

Jewish tradition is not characterized by the absence of disagreement. Rabbinic literature preserves sustained arguments concerning law, interpretation, practice, and communal responsibility.

Pirkei Avot 5:17 distinguishes disagreement pursued for the sake of Heaven from disagreement that lacks that purpose. The distinction does not mean that every dispute is equally principled or that legitimate disagreements are incapable of resolution. It means that the motivation and manner of disagreement possess moral significance.

This tradition matters because Israel’s religious and secular communities sometimes speak as though the existence of profound disagreement demonstrates the failure of shared life.

Disagreement itself is not the failure. The failure occurs when opposing communities cease recognizing that their decisions affect people whose convictions they do not share.

The rabbis whose debates became part of Jewish tradition did not necessarily expect argument to end in uniformity. Their disagreements occurred within a larger commitment to the importance of the questions under consideration and the obligations of religious life.

Modern democratic disagreement operates through different institutions and rests upon principles that cannot simply be equated with rabbinic discourse. Yet there is a valuable parallel in the recognition that meaningful disagreement need not destroy relationships of obligation.

The Problem of Power

Religious and secular communities do not negotiate from positions of equal institutional power.

Government can establish laws, allocate resources, regulate education, and enforce military obligations. Religious political parties can influence legislation, negotiate coalition arrangements, and seek protections for their institutions.

Those forms of power are legitimate within appropriate legal boundaries. But neither governmental authority nor religious political influence guarantees that a particular outcome is morally defensible.

Without a sense of reciprocal obligation, political competition can become an effort to impose costs on others while preserving advantages for oneself.

Secular Israelis may come to believe that religious communities claim privileges without acknowledging the burdens of other citizens. Haredi Israelis may interpret legal interventions as evidence that the wider society regards their way of life as something to be dismantled.

The resulting distrust makes even reasonable policy proposals more difficult to evaluate.

A covenantal perspective changes the questions that participants bring to the dispute. Instead of asking only what one’s own community can preserve or demand, it requires considering which legitimate interests of others must also be protected.

For religious communities, that includes recognizing the sacrifices made by those who defend the country and maintain shared institutions. For state authorities, it includes ensuring that policies designed to establish equal obligations do not unnecessarily destroy religious freedoms.

This approach does not eliminate power, but it subjects its exercise to a broader moral standard.

Who Belongs to the Covenant?

A difficulty arises when religious covenant is offered as a framework for the political life of Israel.

The biblical covenant has a particular relationship to the Jewish people. Israeli citizenship, however, includes Muslims, Christians, Druze, and others who do not understand themselves as participants in that religious covenant.

It would be a serious mistake to make equal citizenship depend upon participation in a Jewish theological relationship.

The State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence promises equality of social and political rights irrespective of religion, race, or sex, alongside freedom of religion and conscience. Those commitments establish a civic obligation that extends beyond a shared Jewish identity.

Any use of covenant as a political metaphor must therefore distinguish Jewish religious commitments from the equal standing of citizens before the law.

The religious idea may inspire a broader ethic of responsibility. It cannot replace the legal guarantees through which a democratic state protects those who do not share the majority’s faith.

This distinction is particularly important because a community can sincerely understand its own religious obligations while holding views about public life that conflict with the freedoms of others.

Religious sincerity does not settle those conflicts. They require institutions capable of protecting equality, adjudicating disputes, and limiting the use of coercive power.

What Covenant Can and Cannot Accomplish

A covenantal approach does not promise an end to disagreement over conscription, school curricula, public funding, or religious authority. Those conflicts involve concrete interests, legal requirements, and sometimes competing rights.

Some will require legislation. Others will require judicial review, administrative oversight, or negotiated accommodations.

What covenant can contribute is a moral expectation that participants remain accountable to people beyond their own constituencies.

It asks religious communities to consider whether their political demands impose burdens upon others that they would be unwilling to bear themselves. It asks state authorities whether equal civic obligations can be achieved through arrangements that minimize unnecessary interference with religious life.

It also asks the wider society to recognize contributions that may not be adequately captured by economic or military statistics, without allowing such recognition to become an unlimited exemption from civic duties.

These are demanding questions because they do not permit any community to treat its own interests as the complete measure of justice.

Living with Differences That Remain

Pluralism is sometimes understood as the willingness to tolerate beliefs that other people hold. That is necessary but insufficient for a society whose citizens share defense institutions, public revenues, schools, transportation systems, and political authority.

The more difficult form of pluralism requires people to negotiate real obligations despite continuing disagreement about their ultimate meaning.

A Haredi Jew need not become secular to participate in such a society. A secular Israeli need not accept the religious authority of the Torah to recognize the legitimate claims of Haredi citizens. An Arab Israeli need not participate in Jewish religious covenant to possess equal civic rights.

Their common life depends upon institutions that protect those differences while establishing obligations that can be justified publicly.

Covenant, understood with these limitations, provides not an alternative to democracy but a moral challenge within it. It reminds communities that political membership cannot be reduced to the rights they claim for themselves.

The continuing relationship imposes obligations even when agreement is incomplete.

Whether that idea has practical meaning will depend on what each community is prepared to protect, contribute, and relinquish. The next question is therefore not simply what covenant means, but what responsibilities it should require.

Notes and References

1. Exodus 19–24, particularly Exodus 19:5–8 and 24:7, on the covenant at Sinai.
2. Leviticus 19:9–18, 33–34; Isaiah 58, on holiness, justice, and obligations toward others.
3. Babylonian Talmud, Shevuot 39a, on mutual responsibility.
4. Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 5:17, on disagreement for the sake of Heaven.
5. Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (Continuum, 2002). His treatment of religious particularity and human difference provides a useful comparison, though the political argument advanced here is the author’s own.
6. State of Israel, Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948.
7. Pew Research Center, Religion, Politics and Public Life in Israel, March 8, 2016.