…one family, one nation: the children of Israel. He intervenes in their history. He makes a highly specific covenant with them at Sinai – not at all like the general one He made with Noah and all humanity after the Flood. The Noahide covenant is simple and basic. The Sages said it involved a mere seven commands. The Sinai covenant,…
…the Noahide covenant: “He who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God He created man” (Gen. 9:6). This was the first declaration of the principle that human life is sacred. As the Sages put it, “Every life is like a universe. Save a life and it is as if…
…As with the tenth plague, these were no mere miracles intended to demonstrate the power of the God of Israel, as if religion were a gladiatorial arena in which the strongest god wins. Their meaning was moral. They represented the most fundamental of all ethical principles, stated in the Noahide covenant in the words “He who sheds the blood of…
…you can sort of visualise these words, but listen to them carefully. They are the sixth verse of the ninth chapter of Bereishis, the key sentence of the Noahide covenant. Shofech dam adam be’adam damo yeshafech. Can you hear that? A, B, C, C, B, A. In other words, there is a kind of mirror image between the first half…
…all in God’s image, formed in His likeness. We share a covenant of human solidarity (the Noahide covenant). We are fellow citizens of the world God made and entrusted to our care. As Redeemer, however, God is particular. Whatever His relationship to other nations (and He has a relationship with other nations: so Amos and Isaiah insist), Jews know Him…
…the general one He made with Noah and all humanity after the Flood. The Noahide covenant is simple and basic: it involved a mere seven commands. The Sinai covenant, by contrast, is highly articulated, covering almost every aspect of life. This aspect of God is signalled by the use of the four-letter name for which we traditionally substitute the word…
…truths. We have already seen one in our study of Succot. Judaism embraces both the universal and the particular, the universality of our humanity, given religious force in the Noahide covenant, and the particularity of our people’s relationship with God, epitomised in the covenant at Mount Sinai. The Jewish calendar gives weight to both. There is the cycle of the…
…createdness. “Thou shall not murder” restates the central principle of the Noahide covenant that murder is not just a crime against man but a sin against God in whose image we are created. So the fourth, fifth and sixth commands form the basic jurisprudential principles of Jewish life. They tell us to remember where we came from if we seek…
…made with Noah and through him with all humanity. That covenant, set out in Genesis 9, involved no human response. Its content was the seven Noahide commands. Its sign was the rainbow. But God asked nothing of Noah, not even his consent. Judaism embodies a unique duality of the universal and the particular. We are all in covenant with God…
…because what were Jesus and Paul doing? They were spreading sheva mitzvos bnei Noach, the seven Noahide Laws, and therefore, since they were dealing with Gentiles, they don’t have to keep Shabbos, and they don’t have to have a Brit Milah, and that’s exactly what they were doing. They weren’t dissenting from Judaism, they were taking sheva mitzvos bnei Noach,…