Covenant Without Vigilance Is Just a Prayer

A reply to Liel Leibovitz's "The Jewish Obligation to Save America," Tablet, July 2, 2026

In the spring of 1940, a Dutch Jewish diarist named Etty Hillesum wrote in her journal that she still believed, against all visible evidence, that life was beautiful and meaningful. She was right to believe it. She was also dead within three years, at Auschwitz, having believed it the entire time. Faith and outcome are not the same thing. A civilization can be worth saving and still be lost by the people who loved it best, if loving it is the only thing they do.

This is worth sitting with before getting to Leibovitz's essay. His argument is, in its bones, a good one: America is a covenantal nation, not an ethnic one, and covenantal nations renew themselves through public, unsettling arguments about first principles that, so far, have always ended in the covenant's favor. The King was defeated. Slavery was abolished. The Civil Rights Act was signed. He is not wrong about the pattern. He is wrong about what the pattern requires of the people living inside it, which is where his essay quietly performs the inversion it never names: it treats renewal as something history does to a nation, rather than something particular people have to do to their institutions, on a schedule that does not wait for essays.

Every renewal Leibovitz cites had a mechanism. 1776 had an army. 1865 had a war and, before it, a party built for the specific purpose of stopping the expansion of slavery. 1964 had the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a Justice Department willing to use federal power against state power. None of these renewals were accomplished by people writing that the country's spiritual architecture would sort itself out.

That is the trouble with reaching for the covenant as an argument against despair. The theology is sound. The application skips a step. Leibovitz writes as though the radicals elevated to prominence in New York City primaries are simply the latest bad news cycle to be absorbed by a nation with a two-and-a-half-century track record of absorbing bad news cycles. But we spent June documenting exactly why that absorption reflex no longer works on this particular machine. In The Scandal That Isn't One, we traced how NYC-DSA's slate converts every exposed tweet, every recovered post, every documented affiliation into proof of persecution rather than disqualification. Exposure used to be the mechanism history relied on to correct course. Here, exposure is the fuel. Leibovitz's optimism assumes the old feedback loop still closes. It has been engineered not to.

None of that is covered by "history always has happy endings." History has happy endings for the people who show up to the meetings where the endings get decided. It does not have happy endings for people who write essays about how it will work out and then go back to their weekend.

Here is the part of the essay that should trouble a New York reader specifically. Leibovitz is right that fleeing to Israel while America burns is not a plan, it is a closet with a nicer view. But the alternative to fleeing is not simply staying and believing. It is staying and doing the specific, unglamorous, occasionally tedious civic labor of knowing what the new operating environment actually is. We wrote a field manual for exactly that in When the City Stops Protecting You: the practical, procedural work of situational awareness, precinct council attendance, and documentation that a covenant actually requires when the public safety architecture itself has been redesigned around a different set of assumptions. That is not cynicism.

That is covenant, applied.

Abraham did not renew his covenant by trusting that the outcome would be fine. He walked to the mountain. The walking was the test. The belief was not the whole of the story; it was the precondition for a specific, difficult, physical act.

So yes: America is a covenantal nation, and covenantal nations are always being reborn, and the pessimists writing off the country as the next Poland are almost certainly wrong about the ending. But the ending they are wrong about was never guaranteed by the theology. It was earned, every time, by people who treated the crisis in front of them as a set of names, dollars, and mechanisms to be interrupted rather than a mood to be outlasted. Leibovitz tells his readers, correctly, to stop whining and get ready to work. He does not tell them what the work actually is. We intend to keep doing that part.

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