Session 31: Parashat Ve'etchanan
"Let America Be America Again," Langston Hughes, 1935
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Parashat Ve’etchanan includes the text of the Shema, Judaism’s central affirmation of God and God’s covenant with the Jewish people. The covenants God makes in the Torah create a blueprint for how communities create shared identity and moral obligation deep and thick enough to persist across time and space. For this reason, covenants are a good metaphor for understanding how citizens belong to and interact within modern liberal democracies.
Covenants are aspirational: they establish a shared ideal toward which individuals and societies can strive. This, in turn, makes it possible to measure the gap between reality and aspiration, as Langston Hughes does in his poem, “Let America Be America Again."
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