The article compares the socio-political models patterned on the return to Sinai, as envisaged by Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993) and David Hartman (1931-2013). For Hartman, Sinai − the collective memory of the place to which man constantly returns − shapes halakhic hope and responsibility, urging to combine prophetical morality and political demands into a covenantal perspective. Whereas Hartman’s reflection is engagée in so far as it looks to the complexities of Israeli political reality as the background of a renewed Jewish Covenant, Soloveitchik understands the return to Sinai within a more existentialistic framework, bringing a blend of East European Jewry outlook and German philosophical tradition into the American debate. He aims at intellectual, spiritual, and identitarian resistance. Particular attention is paid to the complementarity between the Exodus experience and Sinai revelation; the transition from a covenant of fate into a covenant of mission; the interweaving between freedom, slavery, time-awareness, and storytellin
