ABSTRACT
Halachic Judaism says the rules and regulations that define the daily, day-to-day, practice of Judaism, also deals fundamentally and basically with that pathway towards. Unlike the liberal tradition in Western culture, which takes up the cause of individual human rights directly, halachic Judaism achieves the protection of such rights by insisting on what it calls the practice of the mitzvoth. The opposition between rights and responsibilities that characterizes both halachic Judaism and the Transcendentalist views of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau also dictates a special relationship to the requirements of speaking and address. The linguistically playful Emerson is not only here recovering the history of American Protestantism, which is to say Puritanism, and the essentially subversive meaning of the word "protestant", but, in no more than two words, he is also recovering, through rewriting it. Sacvan Bercovitch comes to America through Jewish socialism, which, it turns out, is one contemporary branch of the Jewish religion.
