Jack Ross on the debate over chosenness and Israel:
I'm crazy to be taking time to do this while I'm spending my last night in the house where I grew up, but here goes. The discussion goes to the very heart of my foremost criticism of where you're coming from, and that is to frame the whole problem as a religious issue. I.e., when you use terms like "religious left", I find that extremely misleading.
In sum, the motivation for problems of dual loyalty and the like is not religious per se, but secular ideology. It is not the Boro Park settlers who bother with niceties about a bond between America and Israel. It is the more secular types who believe in the ideology of global democratic revolution, which includes but is not limited to neoconservatism.
I agree with your statement of a while back that Israel is the "royal road to neoconservatism". But they are committed first and foremost to their ideology, and while it is very often motivated by initial Jewish parochialism, the embrace of Zionism follows ideology, not religion. In the vast majority of cases, religion only comes in as a convenient excuse after the fact.
Witness the rather recent case of the (barely at this point) left-neocons like Stephen Schwartz and Bernard Henri-Levy, who only embraced religion as an afterthought to their ideological turn, and in so doing pontificate about it with deep ignorance.
As to how my beloved rabbi [Ellen Lippmann] came into this discussion, I do not know and can not directly comment on the sermon which was referred to, but I suspect that it mostly focused on the prophetic idea of "a light unto the nations", which exists independently of any debate over whether the Jews are a nation or a mere religious community or something in between.
So in short, while I agree in principle with the protest that "chosenness" is a theological concept that should not be part of a political discussion, context is everything and it came down gravely against this poor woman. This is exactly what is fundamentally wrong with Zionism, that it introduced such theological concepts into politics.
Weiss again: Jack, that woman's conflation is very conventional in Jewish life. And in Jewish leadership. If Islam is being tested by its failure to honor free speech and women's rights, and Catholicism by its celibacy/pedophilia problem, why shouldn't Judaism be tested by the near-absolute affiliation of religious institutions with a state practicing apartheid? Isn't this a religious crisis? I'm not anti-Jewish. For me Jewishness is Jewish secular culture, my inheritance. Oh well, I'm tired.
Was anything said?
A major concern in early Zionism was the issue of dual loyalty. And it won't go away especially now that the international wandering tribe has a powerful formal state, the most powerful by far in its region, not to mention the full backing of the world's only superpower to the extent its referred to as "the 51st state."
Only in the USA, and to a lesser extent European countries, is the importance of separation of formal religion and state a significant reality.
At least the Christian West finally realized the Crusades and Inquisition should not be repeated with more such religious justification and pious zeal.
There's a price to be paid if one's tribe or people get their own state. The test of virtue is power.
Else we will be fighting biblical and Koran wars forever, with the means always justified by the ends.
When secular ideology is wedded to religion via the use of selected history, and the use of dual purpose religious slogans
and principles, you get the worst of both worlds.