When a Nation Forgets Its Covenant

by Ram ben Ze'ev

When a Nation Forgets Its Covenant

Throughout our long history, the Jewish people have faced enemies in every generation. Empires have risen against us, armies have marched against us, and rulers have sought to erase us from the earth. Yet the Torah teaches something that history repeatedly confirms: our greatest danger has never been the nations alone, but what happens when we forget who we are.

From the beginning, the Jewish people were not created simply as another nation. At הר סיני (Har Sinai — Mount Sinai), we entered into a covenant with G-D. That covenant defined us. It set us apart from the nations. It established that our survival would not depend merely on power, territory, or politics, but on faithfulness to the Torah and the commandments.

Moshe warned the people clearly in דברים (Devarim) 8:11–17. When prosperity comes, when strength grows, when the nation becomes secure in its land, the temptation will arise to believe that our success is the work of our own hands. The danger, he said, would not come first from outside enemies but from forgetting the One who brought us into the land and saying in our hearts, “My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.”

This warning was not theoretical. It became the pattern of our history.

The northern kingdom of Israel did not fall because its army was weak. It fell because it abandoned the covenant. The First Temple was not destroyed because the Babylonians were powerful alone; the prophets made clear that the people themselves had turned away from the Torah. The same message echoed again before the destruction of the Second Temple. Internal division, corruption, and the abandonment of spiritual responsibility weakened the nation long before the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem.

Every generation since has lived with this lesson: when the Jewish people are faithful to the covenant, we endure; when we abandon it, we expose ourselves to danger.

Today we face a situation that should trouble every Jew who still remembers the covenant.

The modern State of Israel is a remarkable political achievement, but it was largely founded by movements that sought to redefine Jewish identity without Torah. Many of its architects openly rejected the idea that Jewish nationhood depends upon our relationship with G-D. They sought to create what they called a “normal nation,” a state like any other, governed by secular ideology rather than by the covenant that created the Jewish people in the first place.

The result is a profound tension at the heart of the Jewish state. Israel carries the name of the people who wrestle with G-D, yet much of its leadership operates as if the covenant no longer defines us.

This has consequences.

When Jewish identity becomes detached from Torah, the meaning of being Jewish begins to dissolve. When national survival becomes a matter only of politics, strategy, and military calculation, the spiritual foundation that sustained us for thousands of years begins to weaken. When leaders treat the Jewish people as merely another political society, the covenant that binds us to G-D is pushed aside.

Even more troubling is the growing willingness among some Jews to sacrifice other Jews in pursuit of ideological goals, political ambitions, or international approval. This danger becomes painfully real when leaders are willing to risk Jewish lives in wars whose justification is far from unquestionable. In the present conflict with Iran, a war launched during a period of relative calm following the Gaza ceasefire and while negotiations with Iran’s leadership were publicly underway alongside America, many cannot escape the feeling that those negotiations served merely as a distraction while military plans were being finalised. The cost of this decision is already being measured in Jewish lives. Reports speak of a dozen or more Jews killed, yet the government has taken the unusual step of removing street cameras and restricting the reporting of deaths and injuries, preventing the public from seeing the full human cost of the conflict.

None of this denies that Iran is an enemy, nor that there have been many times in the past when decisive action against such threats would have been unquestionably justified. But on this occasion the circumstances raise grave questions. When the truth about the price of war is hidden from the people, and when Jewish lives become collateral to political strategy, something deeply dangerous has entered our national life. A people bound together by covenant should never see one another as expendable.

Jewish history teaches that external enemies rarely destroy us alone. What truly endangers us is the erosion of the spiritual bond that holds us together as a people under G-D.

For the first time in our long history, we face a possibility that should alarm us deeply: that the greatest threat to the Jewish future may come not from those who hate us, but from our own abandonment of the covenant that defines us.

Yet the story of the Jewish people has never been one of final collapse. It is always a story of return.

The prophets cried out to generations that had strayed far from Torah. They did not speak in gentle language. They warned that a nation cannot sever itself from G-D and remain secure.

But they also insisted that the door of תשובה (teshuvah — return to G-D) is never closed.

The covenant has never been cancelled. It cannot be erased by politics, ideology, or secular nationalism. It still stands exactly as it did at Sinai.

What remains is our choice.

We can continue to drift into assimilation, redefining Jewish identity until it becomes indistinguishable from the nations around us. Or we can remember that the Jewish people exist for a reason greater than politics or national pride.

We were created to live in covenant with G-D.

The warning from our history is unmistakable. Nations that abandon their foundations eventually collapse. A people who forget their covenant eventually lose themselves.

But the promise of the Torah is equally clear: when the Jewish people return to G-D, G-D returns to us.

The time to remember who we are is now. Not when the danger has already overtaken us, not when the consequences are already irreversible.

Now.

Before it is too late.

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Bill White (Ram ben Ze'ev) is CEO of WireNews Limited, Mayside Partners Limited, MEADHANAN Agency, Kestrel Assets Limited, SpudsToGo Limited and Executive Director of Hebrew Synagogue