Pensée juive sur L’Exode 6:7

When we delve into our historical existence we come to an important realization regarding our ‎‎‎Weltanschauung. The Torah relates that the Holy One concluded two Covenants with ‎Israel. ‎One Covenant was made in Egypt. “And I shall take you unto Me for a people, and I will be ‎to you a ‎God” (Exodus 6:7). The second Covenant was at Mount Sinai. “And he [Moses] took the ‎book of ‎the covenant … and he said: ‘Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord made with ‎you in ‎agreement with all these words’” (Exodus 24:7-8). (The third Covenant, in the Book ‎of ‎Deuteronomy (28:69), is identical in content and purpose to the Covenant of Sinai.)⁹ What is ‎the ‎essence of these two Covenants? It appears to me that this question was already answered at ‎the ‎beginning of our essay. Just as Judaism distinguished fate from destiny in the realm of ‎personal ‎individuality, so it also differentiated between these two concepts in the sphere of our ‎national-‎historical existence. The individual is tethered to his nation with bonds of fate and chains ‎of ‎destiny. In accordance with this postulate, one can say that the Covenant of Egypt was a ‎Covenant ‎of Fate, and the Covenant of Sinai was one of destiny.‎

While the Covenant of Egypt was concluded without the consent of the people of Israel (the ‎Holy ‎One took them unto Him before He consulted with them: “And I will take you unto Me as ‎a ‎people” (Exodus 6:7), the Covenant of Sinai was offered to them before it was promulgated. ‎The ‎Holy One sent Moses to tell them His message, and Moses returned to the Holy One with ‎the ‎people’s answer. The halakhah perceives the Covenant of Sinai as a contract which is valid ‎if ‎written with the consent of the obligated party, in this case, the community of Israel. ‎The ‎proclamation that “We shall do and we shall hear” (Exodus 24:7) is the foundation of the Torah.‎¹⁵

These mistakes are outgrowths of the primary error made by secular Zionism when it wished to ‎erase both the feeling of isolation and also the phenomenon of shared suffering from our history ‎books. The beckoning of the Beloved must open the eyes of all of us, even the most confirmed ‎secularists. The State of Israel was not and will not be able to abrogate the covenant of, “And I will ‎take you unto Me as a people”(Exodus 6:7) and put an end to shared fate, the source of Jewish ‎aloneness. The State of Israel is as isolated today as the community of Israel has been during the ‎thousands of years of its existence. And perhaps the isolation of the State is more pronounced ‎than in the past because it is so clearly revealed in the international arena.‎