https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hc3pYViHP_g
So many people look at the Ten Commandments as central to the whole of Exodus, but actually I think the covenant in chapter 19 is even more central and the Ten Commandments is the key part of it. But I say that because here we’re in a country, this is the master narrative of freedom that has shaped this country. And many people don’t understand the links. So I was fascinated, Leon Kass, who’s a friend of several of us, he points out, you know, the Greeks had monarchy, aristocracy, democracy. They sort of run through all three of those. So Pharaoh is monarchy, ultimate tyranny. But when Moses is the sole leader, he’s a kind of good Pharaoh. And Jethro says to him, no, you can’t do it all yourself. But Jethro, in effect, introduces an aristocracy. You choose these good men to be the judge. Now, the covenant is quite different. It will bring in the entire people. And you have a very different idea. And it’s a contractual relationship. It’s a contractual relationship. But unlike the Hittite covenants, the whole people, all that the Lord says we will do, that’s the origin of the consent of the government. Right. Well, and that seems to tie into the notion that was relevant to, well, even people like John Stuart Mill, like founders of classical liberalism, in some sense, that the the arrangements by which a free people might organize themselves politically and trade are dependent axiomatically on an underlying ethos. And that ethos is it is essentially covenantal, it’s contractual. And that also ties into something else we discussed earlier, which was the idea that when when God revealed himself as the spirit that judged the tyrant and he told Moses to tell the Pharaoh to let his people go, he didn’t say, let my people go. He said, let my people go so that they may worship me in the desert. And that’s the idea of ordered freedom instead of freedom as chaos, which is just the desert. So yeah. So God seems to need a people. Right. Exodus is about the founding of a people. What do you need to make a people in this story? They have a story. They they were in bondage and they got let out. It’s a heroic story. Right. And then there’s a covenant. I make you a promise. You make me a promise. And the last thing is what happens in this book is he gives them a bunch of things to do together to celebrate their new relationship with each other and with God. And that so so the rituals are vital because they can be the people, my people. And then they can remain a treasure to him. How do you view, Larry, the relationship between the idea of a covenant with God and the idea of a contractual relationship and the later political ideas of social contract theory that people like Hobbes developed that what binds this is actually a voluntary contract between people. That’s not exactly what we’re saying. There’s a voluntary contract between people, but it’s people in relationship to a higher revealed order. It’s not merely a social contract. So in so in in the American Revolution, first of all, those are two different things. Contract with God and contract with one another. But they merge. And so when they’re working out what they’re going to do about the king and about the parliament, they’re saying we don’t have a contract with him and contract, contract law grandly understood governance, God’s governance of the universe. It’s wrong for that for him to do that. God doesn’t see God has chosen to make his people free. Right. And that means they have to be a party to the transaction. Right. Right. Right. So that so that idea of the merging. Just one second. The idea of the merging is extremely interesting because maybe it’s something like this. So you imagine that there’s this attempt to cobble together a vision of the fundamental uniting transcendent spirit. And that’s a pattern. And that pattern manifests itself in multiple ways. But there’s if it’s if it’s a merging of the idea of the contract between people and the contract between the ultimate, then what you have is this dawning idea that the fundamental central nature of a contract between people has to reflect a transcendent order for it to be a priori valid. And we’d say, I think the way we would respond to that instinctually would be imagine you got the better of me in a contractual deal. Well, the idea that you got the better of me is an indication that the deal itself has violated some implicit order. And it’s in some sense unfair. You’ve got one over me. Right. If it was merely a social contract, then well, whatever we agreed on would go. And it can’t be. It has to be a social contract that reflects some sort of higher order implicit order. And I think those are the same thing. But the the contract is necessary, too, because God made his people free. And so if I make you do it for your benefit by force, you’re not a party. And God is apparently very interested in our being a party to the contract. And I think it’s important to to keep not to over. I mean, that we have to keep in mind somehow the absolute character of the divine, of the divine, of God himself, the ultimate principles. They’re not conditional. They’re not conditional on what we do. And with, on the other hand, the the condition, the conditional character of our own engagement with that, which can happen or not happen. In some sense, it’s like you can have a fire burning very, very hot, but you can be closer or further to that fire. The fire is burning hot, whether you are close to it or far from it. But you can choose to move away from, you might say, the unconditional nature of that burning of that. You can say the fire of God’s burning love. And of course, we’re going to see here just in later here, the very images, image of purification in the fire and in the need to abstain from abstain from sex and wash your clothes and all these preparatory purificatory rights. But I think we need to be careful not in any event to to make it seem as if God’s activity is conditional on ours, that he chooses us and that our choosing is within that choosing of us. And because of the weight of our will, to what extent we can engage with and realize, be realized ourselves in God’s activity does in a fundamental way depend on what we do. So there’s still a voluntary subjugation to that. But the ethos isn’t a consequence. It’s not an emergent consequence of the contract between man and God. No. But Jordan, there’s a contrast here with the Greeks and the Romans. In other words, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy is all about government. This is not. This is about forming a people. And the alternatives are on the one hand, organic societies linked with blood, kinship or hierarchical linked by power. And this is unique. Now you have the Hittite treaties and so on, but they were very narrow. And I wouldn’t use the word contract so much as you’re doing. The covenant adds to law a moral dimension. It’s a morally binding pledge. The Lord gives his promise and they do. So is the covenant what the founders referred to as what was self-evident? No, that’s the truth behind it. No, it’s we the people. That’s the covenant. OK. But of course, the American Constitution is a covenant with the citizenry under God, whereas the Jewish covenant is a covenant with God. And that is unique. I mean, the Hittite covenants, you can cite God, but he’s a partner in this one. He himself is making a pledge. And so do you also see that as counterpoised to, let’s say, the Greek idea that… Absolutely. …they’re just the playthings of the gods, right? They’re just arbitrary forces operating the background who have no interest in a relationship in some sense with you. Well, the Greek suspicion of democracy, certainly Plato and Aristotle’s suspicion of democracy, was that it was mob rule. It descended into mob rule because there wasn’t that verticality of the covenant. That is to say, the idea that you have this flat egalitarian plane and that the prize is freedom too much, raw freedom, that is not constrained or ordered towards any kind of transcendent. So it’s too much desert. But you’ve got to say there’s a problem with this too. In other words, you have an ideal, each one, and then a corrupted form. And there’s a very simple problem. The Lord keeps his promise and humans don’t. Well, the Jews could go on trial, actually. It’s very interesting that you raise this because the Jewish mentality is that he is obliged as well. And there is an extremely famous story of rabbis, Orthodox Jews at Auschwitz, the largest of the death camps of the Nazis, put God on trial for breaking the covenant. Elie Wiesel affirmed that this actually took place. This is not apocryphal. And here is the amazing thing. They gave God a lawyer. They gave God a prosecutor. And the prosecutor won. These religious Jews found God guilty of breaking the covenant. But here’s the punchline for Jews anyway. And after they said, and God is found guilty, they said, and now it is time to davin minchah. It is now time for the afternoon prayer. He broke the covenant, but we’re having the afternoon prayer. But in the scriptures, the stress is on the renewal of the covenant with the people, isn’t it? Well, clearly. It breaks down. You raised it. The Jewish mentality is what you said. There is a relationship between covenant and contract. In fact, a man has a contract with a woman when they marry. It’s called the ketubah, and it means contract. The concept of contract is very deep in the biblical and later Jewish mind. Do you think that the essential ethos of a contract is that it’s a binding agreement as long as both parties abide by the spirit of the contract? That is amazing. They found God guilty and then did the prayers. So you are guilty, but we’re keeping our side. See, it’s possible. I mean, first of all, Ash, which was hard to imagine the worst thing, but they were probably imagining we’re all going to be killed, every Jew. That was Hitler’s aim. Hitler actually thought God said he would not let the people be destroyed after Noah. I’m going to kill them all and then look up and say, how about that God? And so from the point of view of the way the world looked to them in Auschwitz was he’s going to kill all of us, but we were promised not. And if he’d succeeded in that, that would have been a breach of the covenant. One of the things that always struck me as so interesting about the Old Testament accounts of the Jewish attitude towards God was that the Jews always assumed axiomatically that no matter what happened in some sense, both personally and socially, they were at fault and took responsibility for it. And so, and it was like the axiomatic assumption of God’s goodness. And it’s sort of like the act. It’s a statement of faith, right? It’s the axiomatic assumption of God’s goodness, all evidence to the contrary in some real sense. And I’ve been trying to puzzle that out because I do believe that it’s morally incumbent upon us to do good, regardless, let’s say, of the degree to which we’re persecuted or insulted or tortured or hurt is that none of that, no matter how intense it becomes, no matter how justified, you know, I’ve talked to people in my clinical practice in my private life who were terribly tortured in their, when they were children, for example, they have brutal histories. And you’d think, man, if that person did something evil, you’d think, well, how could you avoid it? And yet I’ve seen people come out of that who’ve refused to do evil, despite all that. And then you’re sort of starstruck with amazement at their moral fortitude. But part of it is the decision. I don’t know how it’s linked exactly, but it’s the decision to hold axiomatically the proposition that being itself is good. And you’re morally obliged to participate in that goodness, regardless of the circumstances, both sociological and psychological. And that’s such a good moment for us to perhaps transition into 20 because it’s precise. I would argue, you said this so beautifully here now, it’s precisely the making of the covenant that you might say in some sense allows for them to receive the revelation of the law.