‘The Law is Not in Heaven’: Authority and Covenant in Jewish Political Thought” with Sarah Greenberg,

This talk is drawn from Greenberg’s book manuscript, “The Law is Not in Heaven”: Authority and Covenant in Jewish Political Thought, which argues that Jewish conceptions of covenant provide resources for rethinking hegemonic ideas of authority in the Western political tradition. By reading across the Jewish textual canon, Jewish thought, and political theory, her book explores covenant as both a foundation for authority and a foundation for disobedience and dissent, and, thus, as an alternative to dominant understandings of both religious and political authority via a model of command and obedience.

Sarah Greenberg is a political theorist and currently a lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard, where she teaches classes on social and political thought, religion and politics, and research methods. Sarah received her PhD in Government from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school, she specialized in church-state policy in representing the Reform Jewish Movement to Congress and the Administration as assistant legislative director at the Religious Action Center.