This is the most foundational of Jewish self-understandings, held across every denomination though pitched at different registers, from a literal, eternally binding election in Orthodox and Haredi thought to a vocation of ethical witness, more symbol than metaphysics, in Reform and Reconstructionist theology. The tradition has always insisted that chosenness names responsibility rather than privilege, a people bound to a higher standard of conduct and answerable for failing it, a reading pressed hardest by the biblical prophets, who threatened judgment on Israel precisely because of the covenant rather than in spite of it.
The Holocaust forced a further round of covenant theology in the twentieth century. Some thinkers, most starkly Richard Rubenstein, argued that the scale of the catastrophe made a traditional covenanting God untenable. Others, Emil Fackenheim prominently, argued the opposite, that the covenant survives as an unconditional command to Jewish continuity itself, sometimes summarized as a 614th commandment not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory by allowing Judaism to disappear. These are positions within Jewish thought, not settled doctrine, and denominations continue to differ over how literally the covenant's promises and demands should be read today. The covenant remains the ground on which the tradition's other core beliefs stand, distinguishing Judaism's self-understanding as a people in relationship with God from traditions organized primarily around individual salvation.