As Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik has explained, the Torah is a covenant of being, not of doing.** The goal is the completion of being, the full realization of humanness. It is not a utilitarian contract designed for useful ends so that if the advantage is lost, the agreement is dropped. The covenant is a commitment on the part of each partner to be

The Torah is an extended wrestling with the question of human association.

It is easy to misunderstand this dynamic by thinking of it in purely legalistic terms, as a divine-human barter of sorts, on the order of, “I, God, give you life, now you give me worship.” This makes God’s granting us life look less like a gift and more like a bloodless business transaction. But this is not Judaism’s approach (though there are text

This story is not a simple morality tale, it is a provocation, an invitation to a conversation—or maybe a debate. That is true of the other stories in the Torah as well. Summarizing Auerbach’s conclusions, novelist Dara Horn notes that when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, “merely to read for the plain meaning of the text is to engage in an interpreti