Aryeh-Leib Thorne

<!-- INTERNAL DRAFT — VERIFY all dates, quotations, and links before publication. Prepared Monday, 7 September 2026 / 25 Elul 5786. -->

Beyond Tolerance: Covenantal Pluralism and Non-Domination

Monday, 7 September 2026 / 25 Elul 5786

Tolerance is a good word until it becomes a small one.

It can mean restraint: I will not strike you, censor you, or use the state to make your conscience look like mine. That restraint matters. Jews, especially, should be wary of any politics that forgets how quickly a majority’s “common sense” can become a minority’s cage. But tolerance can also carry a colder meaning: I will permit you to exist, over there, provided your existence does not trouble my habits. I will leave you alone—and ask nothing of myself when you are pushed out of the room.

That is not a covenant. It is a truce.

A recent Dispatch Faith essay by Michael Reneau and Iqbal Akhtar, recirculated by TaxProf on September 6, asks us to move beyond this thin settlement. Their proposal, covenantal pluralism, draws on the work of Chris Seiple, W. Christopher Stewart, and Dennis Hoover, who gave the term a sharper public vocabulary in 2020. Its central promise is demanding and beautiful: a positive, mutual obligation to protect one another’s freedom to be wrong. Not agreement. Not polite silence. Protection.

As a talmid, I hear in that phrase both a warning and an invitation. The warning is against the fantasy that a free society survives by making ultimate questions private, weightless, and invisible. The invitation is to recover an older political grammar: brit, covenant, in which freedom is not merely a possession I defend against you but a responsibility I help secure for you.

This is where covenantal pluralism meets non-domination. To be free is not only to be left alone by an official who happens to be benevolent. It is to stand with enough civic standing that no person, faction, campus office, or government can arbitrarily place your conscience under its thumb. Non-domination names the condition; covenant names the work. One describes what freedom must feel like. The other asks what neighbors must do to make it durable.

The distinction is not academic. In a plural republic, the question is never simply whether Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists, or anyone else are “tolerated.” The question is who has the power to decide when a minority’s practice becomes inconvenient, suspicious, or politically disposable—and whether the rest of us will contest that power before it reaches our own door.

A Pittsburgh upbringing teaches this in a particular key. The city has hard edges: steel, rivers, hills, weather, old neighborhoods pressed against one another. Yet its civic life has also been built by people who learned, sometimes the hard way, that a bridge is not a declaration that both banks are the same. A bridge is a load-bearing commitment to connection. Jerusalem adds another register: emunah, faith that a people can be bound to one another without first being made identical. The brit does not erase difference. It gives difference a place, a duty, and a limit.

So covenantal pluralism is not multicultural decoration. It is a republican discipline. A covenantal republic does not ask citizens to surrender their convictions at the public square’s door. Nor does it hand every community a veto over everyone else. It asks for reciprocal restraint and reciprocal courage: no coercion of conscience, no contempt for the vulnerable, no use of “neutrality” as a disguise for selective exclusion, and no demand that one group carry the whole burden of defending pluralism.

This also clarifies why tolerance alone can fail in the face of antisemitism. Antisemitism is not merely an impolite opinion that a tolerant person should dislike. It is a recurring political technology: a story that makes Jews seem alien, secretly powerful, collectively guilty, or less entitled to safety than the majority. It thrives when institutions treat Jewish fear as a public-relations problem rather than a civic emergency. A university may praise inclusion while leaving Jewish students to calculate whether a classroom, student event, or residence hall is safe. That is not robust pluralism. It is permission without protection.

Akhtar’s forthcoming Yale talk, scheduled for October 7, is tellingly framed around “Beyond Tolerance” and the fight against antisemitism. According to Yale’s event description, he argues that durable resistance depends on structures of mutual obligation among religious communities, so that the security of one tradition is understood as bound to the security of others. That is the right direction. Jewish safety cannot be secured by asking Jews to become smaller, quieter, or less visibly Jewish. Nor can Muslim safety be secured by asking Muslims to prove that their freedom will never unsettle anyone. The covenantal test is harder: will we defend the other’s standing precisely when the other’s presence is politically inconvenient?

Institutions make this test visible. B’nai Brith Canada’s new Campus Climate Report Card appears, as of this draft, to be a pilot based on a small sample and a mix of student survey data and qualitative review. Its initial assessment of four universities reportedly uses 28 criteria across administrative policies and actions, campus conduct and climate, and Jewish life. The organization reports red or failing/critical marks for administrative response or climate at McGill, York, and the University of Toronto, even while traditional Jewish-life indicators remain stronger. These are serious findings, but they should be treated as an accountability prompt, not a license for name-attacks on presidents or a substitute for fuller evidence. The point is not to shame an institution into a press release. It is to ask whether its rules work when a minority needs them.

That question should be universal. Does the Muslim student have a real remedy when a prayer practice is caricatured? Does the Jewish student have a real remedy when antisemitic slogans are laundered as political sophistication? Does the Christian student have room to speak without being presumed hostile? Does the nonbeliever have equal civic standing without being told that conscience belongs only to the religious? A covenant is tested at the point where an institution could look away and chooses not to.

There is a conservative insight here, in the best sense of the word: ordered liberty is stronger than enforced uniformity. A faith secure in its own truth need not ask the state to abolish its neighbors. A republic secure in its constitutional commitments need not flatten its citizens into interchangeable units. Indeed, the ability to disagree without domination may be one of the last forms of shared national loyalty available to us.

But covenantal pluralism is not sentimental. Protecting my neighbor’s freedom to be wrong does not require me to call every belief wise, every practice harmless, or every argument immune from criticism. It requires a line between persuasion and coercion, argument and intimidation, accountability and collective punishment. I may try to teach; I may not make your civil standing conditional on conversion. I may answer your theology; I may not recruit the police, the dean, or the mob to make you disappear.

On 25 Elul, near the end of a year and the threshold of another, this feels less like a slogan than an accounting. What kind of neighbor have I been? Have I wanted liberty only for the beliefs I recognize as decent? Have I mistaken my silence for solidarity? Have I allowed a community’s isolation to reassure me that its danger was not mine?

The covenantal answer begins small and becomes constitutional. Learn the neighbor’s tradition well enough not to caricature it. Defend the neighbor’s right to remain unconvinced. Build institutions where complaints are heard before they become crises. Share power so that no group must beg for the rights promised to all. And remember that non-domination is not achieved once, in a founding document, but renewed in the daily choices of citizens.

Tolerance says: I can live with you. Covenant says: your freedom is part of my obligation. Non-domination says: neither of us should live at another’s mercy. Between Pittsburgh grit and Jerusalem emunah, that is a sturdy bridge—strong enough for disagreement, and strong enough to carry us together.

Sources (VERIFY before publication)