An Impersonal Covenant

For nearly a year, I’ve been immersed in studying the Jewish philosopher and famed heretic, Baruch Spinoza. What began as a self-initiated study later evolved into a year-long study group I am currently facilitating for people across the country who are equally intrigued by Spinoza’s book, The Ethics. I have been totally consumed by the experience, often wondering: How does an excommunicated Jew and his heretical philosophy fit into my personal framework of Judaism as a form of life?”

Spinoza’s definition of God is radically different from what many of us are used to. For Spinoza, God is not a personal being with emotions or a will to be obeyed. Instead, he describes God as “a substance that is absolutely infinite,” meaning that God is the very essence of everything that exists, the underlying reality of the universe itself. In The Ethics, Spinoza says that God consists of infinite attributes, each one expressing eternal and infinite essentiality. For him, God is not separate from the world; rather, God is the world. Everything that exists is a manifestation of this one substance. There’s no divine intervention or personal relationship; God is the natural order, the laws that govern everything around us. This idea challenges the personal God of traditional theology, asking us to think about the divine as something impersonal and universal—something we engage with not through worship or obedience, but through understanding and alignment with the very structure of the universe.

As Shavuot approaches, I find myself sitting with a question that feels particularly alive right now, especially as I hold my study of Spinoza and my study of Talmud side by side: How might a shift from a personal God to Spinoza’s impersonal God change the meaning of the covenant made at Sinai as the Rabbis understood it? And, perhaps more pressing, how does this reframe the covenant at a time when it is claimed both by those seeking to build a world of liberation and by those who use it to justify violence, nationalism, and harm?

Shavuot has always been a time to reflect on the covenant—the precise moment in our shared origin story when the people received the Torah at Sinai, the binding agreement between us and God, the contract that would shape us into the Jewish people. In traditional understandings, the covenant is relational: God commands, we obey (or not). The Torah is the vehicle for this divine relationship, a personal contract with God that demands our loyalty, our commitment, and our action. But what happens when God is not personal? What happens when God, in the Spinozan sense, is instead the very substance of the universe, a force that governs all things within the universe? The covenant shifts from an agreement with a personal deity to a commitment to live ethically, to align ourselves with the ethical and rational order of the universe.

From this perspective, the mitzvot are no longer commands from a personal God; they are guiding principles that help us live in accordance with the structure of the universe. The stakes of the covenant shift to focus upon how we live together, how we work toward justice, and how we align ourselves with the laws of the universe or human society.

The question of the covenant is alive in our world today, and its meaning has perhaps never been more contested. While our  covenant is claimed by those who seek to build a world with liberatory potential for all people, a world where justice, equity, and human dignity are at the center, it is also claimed by those who would use it to justify violence, war, and the marginalization of others. As SVARA Fellow Binya Kóatz recently wrote:

In an era of calamity from this country to Israel/Palestine and beyond, we see that societies aren’t saved by adherence to religious law alone. Bible thumpers attack God’s children for how they dress and who they are. Arms wrapped in leather and holy text have shed blood. Prayers have been uttered in the midst of wanton destruction.

This tension—between the covenant as a tool for liberation or as a justification for domination—feels especially urgent in light of the daily desecration of life we see happening around us. Spinoza’s philosophy doesn’t offer a personal God to whom we can turn for favor or punishment. Instead, it challenges us to engage with the world and to shape it ourselves. It invites us to see the divine not as a personal force with a plan for humanity, but as the order that governs the universe. In this light, the covenant isn’t about pleasing God, but about aligning ourselves with a moral order, recognizing that our actions have consequences not just in a theological sense but in a practical, ethical sense that affects the world we live in.

In my reflection on this, I also returned to the recent writing of my teacher , Laynie Soloman, who reminded us that Torah can be both life-giving and deadly. In their essay, Laynie brought us this text from Yoma 72b:

אָמַר רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן לֵוִי, מַאי דִּכְתִיב: ״וְזֹאת הַתּוֹרָה אֲשֶׁר שָׂם מֹשֶׁה״, זָכָה — נַעֲשֵׂית לוֹ סַם חַיִּים, לֹא זָכָה — נַעֲשֵׂית לוֹ סַם מִיתָה. 

וְהַיְינוּ דְּאָמַר רָבָא: דְּאוֹמֵן לַהּ — סַמָּא דְחַיָּיא, דְּלָא אוֹמֵן לַהּ — סַמָּא דְמוֹתָא.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: What is the meaning of that which is written: “And this is the Torah which Moses put [sam] before the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 4:44)? If one merits, the Torah becomes a potion [sam] of life for them. If one does not merit the Torah becomes a potion of death for them. 

And this idea is what Rava said: For one who treats Torah as a craft, it is a potion of life; but for one who does not treat Torah as a craft, it is a potion of death.

This powerful image suggests that Torah, like the covenant, is not neutral—it can be transformative, but it depends on how it is engaged with. As Laynie writes, “One who can approach Torah as a craft, Rava teaches, can help use it for good. One who can’t will use it for harm.” This idea resonates with my thinking about the covenant. The covenant isn’t inherently good or bad—it depends on how we engage with it. Just as Torah can be wielded for life or for death, so too can the covenant be claimed as a force for liberation or for destruction. It’s not just about following the commandments; it’s about how we craft those commandments, how we interpret them, and how we live them out in the world.

Laynie goes on to reflect on how the violent elements in Torah cry out to be addressed, and I can’t help but wonder if, in the context of the covenant, this also applies. When we claim the covenant, we must not only ask how we live it, but also what we are doing in its name. The covenant, like Torah, can be a force for justice and liberation, or it can be twisted into something deadly. The key, as Laynie suggests, is in how we craft it. We are responsible not only for how we live but for how we interpret and apply the covenant. And as we face this moment of crisis, with the covenant claimed by both liberators and oppressors, we must ask ourselves: How are we crafting the covenant? How are we engaging with the world around us in ways that are just, ethical, and aligned with a vision of liberation for all people?

The rabbinic tradition offers us important insights into this question. David Kraemer notes that the Talmudic Rabbis were not merely transmitting divine commands but were engaging in a process of interpretation that often distanced them from a literal, personal understanding of God. Kraemer writes in Reading the Rabbis, “But why, if the gemara supports the Mishnah’s law, does it go out of its way to show how difficult it is to prove that law from scripture? The answer, in my understanding, is that the gemara has an interest in demonstrating its ultimate distance from scripture.” What Kraemer highlights here is that the rabbis’ authority did not come from following a personal God’s will but from their intellectual engagement with the tradition, a process that involved reinterpretation and adaptation to new circumstances.

Kraemer’s reading resonates with Spinoza’s approach to understanding the world through reason and intellect rather than submission to a personal deity, a man on a cloud if you will. The same tradition that would later reject Spinoza for his proposition of an impersonal God seems to be rooted in the notion that it is the role of the rabbis to not only interpret Torah, which are believed to be the words and laws of God as transmitted at Sinai, but to generate Torah themselves. This radical shift in what constitutes Torah lays a foundation for future thinkers like Spinoza to expand upon. It also suggests that the source of reason, of ethics, of law is from the rabbis themselves. 

The rabbis understood Torah not as a personal, direct command from God, but as an abstract principle—an intellectual and ethical framework that humans could engage with through reason. Barry Scott Wimpheimer’s Talmud: A Biography also sheds light on this shift. He writes, “The text describes Moses as receiving Torah ‘from’ Sinai. The sentence makes Sinai (rather than God) the object of the preposition ‘from’—the mountain is the source of this teaching. This displacement of God is not incidental; it reflects a broader rabbinic substitution of the abstract value of Torah for the concrete God whose tangible home in Jerusalem no longer exists.” For Wimpheimer, this shift marks a crucial moment in the evolution of Jewish thought. This reimagining of the covenant parallels Spinoza’s impersonal God.

If the covenant, in Spinoza’s terms, is no longer about a personal God with a specific will for us, then it becomes about our intellectual and ethical responsibilities. The mitzvot are no longer commands from a deity but principles for how to live justly and harmoniously. But the covenant also remains a force that shapes the way we engage with one another and with the world. How we engage with the covenant—whether as a force for justice or as a tool for domination—depends on how we craft it. 

As I reflect on Shavuot, I am aware of the heavy responsibility we bear in how we claim the covenant. The world is torn by violence, hatred, and injustice, and the covenant is being claimed by those who seek to use it to justify harm. But we also have the potential to reclaim the covenant as a force for liberation, justice, and deep and abiding love. It is up to us to newly and continually craft the covenant in ways that bring life, that bring healing, and that bring us closer to a world where all people can live with dignity and experience freedom.

This is the radical potential of the covenant—one that we must continue to claim, not simply as obedience, but as a call to build a better, more just world for everyone.