Ki Tavo 5771 - Covenant & Conversation - Thoughts on the weekly parsha from the Chief Rabbi

Here's an experiment. Walk around the great monuments of Washington. There at the far end is the figure of Abraham Lincoln, four times life size. Around him on the walls of the memorial are the texts of two of the greatest speeches of history, the Gettysburg address and Lincoln's second inaugural: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. . ."

A little way away is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial with its quotations from each period of the president's life as leader, most famously "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Keep walking along the Potomac and you come to the Jefferson Memorial, modelled on the Pantheon at Rome. There too you will find, around the dome and on the interior walls, quotations from the great man, most famously from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . ."

Now visit London. You will find many memorials and statues of great people. But you will find no quotations. The base of the statue will tell you who it represents, when he or she lived, and the position they occupied or the work they did, but no narrative, no quotation, no memorable phrases or defining words.

Take the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. Churchill was one of the greatest orators of all time. His wartime speeches and broadcasts are part of British history. But no words of his are inscribed on the monument, and the same applies to almost everyone else publicly memorialized.

It's a striking difference. One society -- the United States of America -- tells a story on its monuments, a story woven out of the speeches of its greatest leaders. The other, England, does not. It builds memorials but it doesn't tell a story. This is one of the deep differences between a covenant society and a tradition-based society.

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