What Does the Covenant Require?

Like Moshe Koppel, I too would like to see in Israel a society where adherence to Jewish religious norms is self-generated by the country’s Jewish community, or communities, rather than state-imposed. I also share several of Koppel’s specific policy recommendations. The observance of kashrut, for example, would certainly be enhanced if the state were to remove itself from the business of supervision and enforcement—except for the need, in this area as in all others, to interdict consumer fraud (as when someone falsely affixes an Orthodox Union sticker to a product not supervised by that organization). It works in America, Koppel persuasively shows, so why not in Israel?

I am inclined to go even farther than he when it comes to the issue of marriage, or rather the use of state power to compel all citizens—Jews of all kinds, Muslims, Christians, confirmed atheists, etc.—into a religious form of matrimony. This may be the single most egregious violation by Israel of human-right standards accepted in every Western democracy. Conceptually, forcing an atheist to undergo a religious ceremony in order to vindicate the right to marry is as otiose as forcing a Jew to attend church in order to vindicate the same right. To me, most arguments against a civil-marriage option in Israel smack not only of bad faith (in the sense of being driven by ulterior considerations of power) but of truly bad faith (in the sense of being inimical to halakhic Judaism and to Jewishness). Here, too, Koppel’s “it works in America” is very persuasive.

Finally, I am in agreement with two central pillars of Koppel’s larger quarrel with contemporary political theory. Thus, he ably debunks John Rawls’s distinction between, on the one hand, “comprehensive theories”—Rawls’s disdainful term for, mostly, religion—which in the Rawlsian scheme must not be allowed to form the basis of general legislation, and, on the other hand, ideologies espousing so-called “public values” that a majority may impose on a minority through the majoritarian democratic process. (My own critique of Rawls would stress his lack of any nuance or subtlety concerning religion in general and more specifically the nature of religious normativity.) Similarly, Koppel usefully explodes the tired canard that secularism, or what the French call laicité—i.e,. the choice for strict separation of church and state—is somehow “neutral,” when it is nothing of the kind.