I think Baruch Spinoza said similar things in Amsterdam and got excommunicated. Matt Miller in the Washington Post. Miller, come to Israel and then talk about chosenness.
As a Jew I'm familiar with this issue in another context. According to the Torah, Jews are said to be "the chosen people." Though this was a relatively affirming thing to be when you're a kid in Sunday school - who wouldn't want to be part of the club chosen by the Man Upstairs, after all? - as an adult, I've never taken it seriously. With all due respect to Jews who take this notion literally, it's always struck me as presumptuous, if not offensive.
As it happens, the congregation we belong to in Los Angeles is "reconstructionist," meaning it adapts Jewish thinking to modern life. One of Reconstructionism's chief tweaks has been to reject the idea of "chosenness" altogether. I'm sure some Jews frown on this edit, preferring to retain the idea of Jewish exceptionalism. But to many of us it's only common sense to affirm that other religions and groups can be terrific, too.
Surprisingly (or not) the attribution of the title “chosen people” to a primitive past is not as easy as attributing animal sacrifices to a primitive past. Particularly in view of recent bruising event(s): genocide in Europe, thinkers have pondered and navel gazed regarding “chosen-ness”, we are chosen to be in the spotlight, we are chosen to be in the hot seat, we were chosen to be at the cutting edge of modernism, we were chosen to bring monotheism to the world, we were chosen to bring “messiah” to the world. All these thoughts create emotional connections to an idea, whereas animal sacrifices have not been pondered nearly as much as “chosen-ness”.
I blanch at the “God, who chose us” blessings and my rational faculties appreciate the work done by Reconstructionist Judaism to set the record straight. But it ain’t an idea easily dropped considering how much thought has gone into it.
“Particularly in view of recent bruising event(s): genocide in Europe, thinkers have pondered and navel gazed regarding “chosen-ness”, we are chosen to be in the spotlight, we are chosen to be in the hot seat, we were chosen to be at the cutting edge of modernism, we were chosen to bring monotheism to the world, we were chosen to bring “messiah” to the world.”
Darn, it’s just not fair!
“But it ain’t an idea easily dropped considering how much thought has gone into it.”
Ah, so that’s why we gotta kill off the Palestinians! Makes perfect sense. I mean, when compared to expunging the insanity from Israel, which is the easier job? But thanks for admitting Zionists are suckers.
Recently, similar sentiments were communicated at the synagogue in my locale (Not in California) here in the US.
Is this a sign that a shift is taking place within the American Jewish community?
Its a great concept, not one to be ashamed of.
Ultimately, it does NOT mean the sense of trivial privilege that superficial thinking on the question concludes.
It means a sense of intimacy, a closeness, between God and an individual Jew, and the community of Jews. And, it means an obligation to “keep my commandments”, with the reward of “rain in its time”. “Rain in its time” is a metaphor for all things in balance, the way things are supposed to be.
The literalist only adoption, and the literalist only rejection, are both superficial engagements with the concept.
There are no coincidences in life. It is no coincidence that you were born Jewish, into a liberal family, that applied the sensitivity of the obligation to heal all things in the ways and places that one encountered.
In some senses, focusing on Israel (or even US national politics angle), rather than seeking to heal your family, or the Hudson Valley community, is a renunciation of what it means to be chosen for responsibility, partially a rejection of where you were placed.
I love the concept, including the promise of the land of Israel, not conquest as in a repetition of Joshua, and not exclusive residence as in the fascist Arab-free theme. The concept is to be a moth to a flame, attracted to home even after a long absence.
.” The concept is to be a moth to a flame,”
That’s right, little mothy, that flame is your home, you just fly right in. It’s nice and warm! Yes, yes, you are the Lord of the Fires!
Holy Mackeral, are you dumb, Witty! And I bet you didn’t even get the Sax Rohmer reference.
Oh, that’s a classic! Like “a moth to a flame”… Sure, Richard!
What happens to the moth drawn to the flame? The last Russian Czar truly believed he was chosen too, and he too so loved that concept, and how many believed the same, and for how many centuries? And so it was, right up until that family’s arupt end.
You insult someone who is responding seriously and thoughtfully to the issue at hand. It reminds of a school yard bully who can’t help but twist anything said by the weak kid into something sing-songy just to drive home who gets to ‘own’ the playground and who doesn’t.
And then, as often as not, a little chorus of ‘yeah, that’s right’ follows. This kind of mean-spirited carping, with public support from the community, deserves to be named and called out. It’s got nothing to do with supporting a point of view of Palestinian rights.
The same human sentiment that makes me want to stand up for Palestinians (because of how they are treated by Israelis) makes me want to stand up for Richard even when I disagree with his views.
Witty has a very good view of “chosenness”. Maybe a wide-spread view, maybe even a dominant view, as well, but what others think (and how rabbis decode Talmud and Torah on this subject is beyond my ken). Keeping commandments is not so far, possibly from Islam’s notion of “submission”, but maybe more action-oriented. I’m obviously even less knowledgable about Islam than about Judaism.
On the subject of the (beautiful reward) the reward of “rain in its time”, two thoughts.
First, Israel exists in a parched region of the earth, but grows its population (as the Palestinians also do) by rather excessive (in my view) reproduction and also, as the Palestinians do not, by immigration of persons carrying the label “Jew” from around the world who never lived there before. And water is scarce. God gave mankind (or Jews) dominion over the world (if you take the Bible as a measure of what God did) at a time when people (and Jews) lived sparsely and lightly upon the earth. This is no longer how they live, in Israel or elsewhere. Seems to be something misunderstood (or something contradictory or in error) in the commandments.
Second, mankind as a whole (but “the West” in particular) is “poisoning the soup” in the vast enterprise which might well be called “behaving as if nothing were wrong after learning that global warming is the necessary outcome of such behaving”. The winds and the rain (and not the “rain in its time” mentioned by Witty) and the rising sea levels and the extinctions and the storms and the massively disrupting changes in weather promised as consequences of global warming do not appear to me to be the benefices promised by God to those who kept his commandments.
“benefices promised by God to those who kept his commandments.”
Yeah, yeah, and Ashley came back, victorious, and married Scarlett!
Look, I only won my Prize for Scripture Knowledge at North Shore Synagogue because I transcribed a list of the Kings of Judah on my shirt-cuffs, but even I know that the Israelites did not keep God’s commandments, and God was not amused. So basically we went from “chosed” to “hosed”. (Oy)
The Zionists greatest crime, to me, is that they pervert Judaism and portray it as a religion of spiritual victory, because that, they feel will help with their nationalistic ends. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it is not.
“Moth to a flame” Good Lord, Witty! GIVE IT UP!
Witty finally reveals the dark shadow of the Zionist/Israel project as a death wish
“Witty has a very good view of “chosenness”.
And moths have asbestos wings.
The sentiment of Jewish attraction to the land, among those that have any religious references, will not disappear.
The religion does not depend on superstition and does not conflict with science. The caricature does conflict with science, but that is literally a straw-man argument (not addressing the point raised).
Religion is of subjective emotion and relations, not of objective politics.
Prayer for example is not a brainwashing, not a self-telling that x is y. Its an invitation to relationship.
“What is God? What does God want?” are inevitably paradoxical questions, zen koans. There is no material answer. There are only subjective answers.
The process itself sobers.
It remains in a state of question, even after 40 years of prayer and meditation. And, that state of question is more accurate than the state of imagined knowledge even of politics.
Wow! That made sense! I think it’s very tawdry kind of special pleading, made especially obscene by the cruelty of Israel’s actions, and made personally unbearable by recent religious pronouncements from Israel, larded with non sequiters and rhetorical ‘warmedy’, but what do I know.
In fact, I think I’ll go stick my hand in a flame.
In another life, Witty would have made an excellent Church of England vicar = they tend to burble incomprehensibly. From what I remember, having attended a few hatch/match/despatches.
Funny story regarding conflict w/ science. One of my Hebrew school teachers was Mrs. Anemer, the wife of Rabbi Anemer at Young Israel. We were kind of hammering her about what we learned at public school about dinosaurs, the age of the earth, etc. We were kids and she wasn’t all that patient. She finally blurted out, “What, they put a bunch of bones together and tell you that they make up these creatures and tell you how old they are! They don’t know! Anyone can put bones together and tell you a story!”
One of my fonder memories.
mooser, you are a funny guy, but i’m sorry, you just can’t compete with the comic stylings of the zen master. that last comment by the hovering, self-actualized demi-god was too much. i can see him seated in the lotus position, several feet off the ground (no strings or wires!) shrouded in a light haze of incense offering advice to novitiates while simultaneously delivering a swift judo chop to his enemies.
oh my. a good laugh is the best medicine.
German Jews claimed the right to “lead the way” of the German people to unified German nationhood. Non-Jewish Germans thought their cultural choices and legacy had merit as well; perhaps added merit and pertinence given that the land was German. Therefore, Germans resisted Jewish attempts to “lead the way.” Jews call it antisemitism. Others might call it resistance to an outside force attempting to take undue authority, or even patriotic defense of one’s own culture and native land.
Other people have deep feelings of attachment to their land and history, not just Jews.
PG, I read your comment as excusing the Holocaust by calling German anti-Semitism a patriotic response to German Jewish policies that affected the entire country.
It’s a known trope of the revisionist camp, which seeks to portray anti-Semitism just about anywhere as fundamentally a human and reasonable reaction to a pre-existing situation where Jews exerted control or created the conditions that merited a response.
It’s kind of horrific. For shame.
I’ll challenge you on the facts. Can you show how the development of German nationhood was somehow a Jewish project?
The distortion of the concept of chosenness has been the excuse for quite of a bit of antisemitism, so it’s interesting you’d bring it up here.
I know few people who take the concept literally in the way being implied here. The most visible proponent I know of interpreting chosenness as superiority is Meir Soloveitchik. You can read his articles in Commentary, which are well-written, and decide for yourself whether his ideas are so awful, remembering that even his articulation of the idea of chosenness is much more sophisticated than “we are better than you.”
I think it’s disgusting to have to deal with crap like this in a world where the two other monotheistic religions have over a billion followers apiece and aggressively prostheletize. There is no need for a Jew to apologize for being proud of his culture and faith.
I might also point out that excoriating Israel for articulating an idea of chosenness is more about Christian superiority than Jewish superiority if you’re being true to your own philosophy. If Israel is simply a Western settler-colonialist outpost no different than the colonial outposts of Britain, France, or Belgium, Christian countries who raped and pillaged under the guise of bringing Christianity and civilization to the natives, any notion of chosenness that Israel projects is a mimic of Christian chosenness, not Judaic chosenness.
Of course, Israelis have never tried to convert the natives as the Christians did, and most of them are not religious Jews, suggesting that this is a land conflict and has little to do with religion.
Of course, this falls by the wayside when your MO is to find as many bad things to say about Judaism as you can.
a translation:
The most visible proponent I know of interpreting chosenness as superiority is Meir Soloveitchik. You can read his articles in Commentary, which are well-written, and decide for yourself whether his ideas are so awful, remembering that even his articulation of the idea of chosenness is much more sophisticated than “we are better than you.”
the jewish ideal of choseness as superiority is a beautiful thing, but it’s much too complicated a concept for a gentile to understand.
I might also point out that excoriating Israel for articulating an idea of chosenness is more about Christian superiority than Jewish superiority if you’re being true to your own philosophy. If Israel is simply a Western settler-colonialist outpost no different than the colonial outposts of Britain, France, or Belgium, Christian countries who raped and pillaged under the guise of bringing Christianity and civilization to the natives, any notion of chosenness that Israel projects is a mimic of Christian chosenness, not Judaic chosenness.
if there is anything unseemly about the jewish ideal of choseness as superiority, it’s really the fault of christians.
I think it’s disgusting to have to deal with crap like this
your killing my high, man.
Of course, Israelis have never tried to convert the natives as the Christians did…
In other words, they preferred to kill or expel the natives, because if they converted them to Judaism they’d have to consider them as having equal rights in a Jewish State.
most of them are not religious Jews
Most Israelis, especially those in control, consider themselves ethnically Jewish and as such believe they have superior rights to those who are not ethnically Jews. Racism and feelings of ethnic superiority. The religious aspect is merely the flimsy cloak to hid the ugliness.
“the jewish ideal of choseness as superiority is a beautiful thing, but it’s much too complicated a concept for a gentile to understand.”
Hey, Glenn Beck! Go distort someone else statements. I don’t respond kindly when someone does that with mine. This is not at all what I said.
“if there is anything unseemly about the jewish ideal of choseness as superiority, it’s really the fault of christians.”
There’s nothing unseemly about it. It’s just hypocrisy to call attention to it in the way that it’s being done here, and more than a little hateful.
“your killing my high, man.”
You’re high? That would explain the way you think.
“this is a land conflict and has little to do with religion.”
That’s why Israelis prefer to call the WB Judea and Samaria. Always has been and always will be Jewish land. That’s a religion.
Since I believe that we are all made of stars, I would conclude that we are all chosen people … In the meantime that “chosen” thing for Humans only is not fair to other forms of life …
To those who believe that the Jewish people are the chosen people as the people through whom the Creator would reveal “himself” to the human world. I gotta say, quite a revelation.
So, every Jew is the Creator’s point man as in a combat squad? No one is selected to be “point man” unless the squad leader is concerned about enemy troops up ahead. So who’s G-D’s enemy? Before you answer, remember that the enemy selects a “point man” too.
As far as “repairing the world,” is G-D a cobbler, and the Jews his little elf workers? How about those who think he’s a real estate agent?
Odd, that the noun “G-D” means man cannot characterize, describe, or limit the Supreme Being, including by mere human imagination, yet man insists, using most especially anthropomorphic words. God made a contract with a select group of people? So now he’s a contractor?
Maybe G-D’s a witch.
Phil’s right: hocus pocus.
How about this one, which has a dark past: “Divine Providence.”
OK, if we give credence to the chosen people thing, mustn’t we do the same to the rest of the bronze age writings of unknown authorship (or do we continue to play pick and choose). Meanwhile, what about the opportunity that presents itself today to those who recognize that with time running out (on account of perpetual wars + global warming + economic decline = doomsday), either we rise up en masse in pursuit of a better world, or times are going to be mighty harsh for the few who somehow survive to the end of this century. Given, the nightmarish scenes that lie ahead, if we continue down the path we’re on, seems to me that, like it or not, know it or not, if there is a universal responsibility now, it’s for us to find ways to turn things around. And it’s here, as it turns out, that Jewish-Americans, by being players in one of (if not the) conflict that’s most likely to turn into something akin to an apocalypse, are presented with an opportunity to help prevent this unthinkable. An opportunity, I might add, that’s not of our own choosing, since it’s been thrust upon us by people who claim to be Jews (Zionists) who insist that they speak not only for the Jewish settlers in their Zionist settler-state Israel, but for Jews everywhere. Which brings me back to the one about our being a chosen people. Never knew quite what to make of this, having as a teenager decided that the bible was for the superstitious, and myself being of the you are I, I am you, we are one (authentically but not uniquely Jewish) persuasion, but there’s no denying that on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there’s a significant Jewish presence. More so, right now on the Zionist Jewish settler (every Israeli Jew who isn’t actively supporting justice for Palestine) side than on the Palestinian side, but those dyanmics are changing. What it boils down to is that, for whatever reason, Jews are center stage in the I/P conflict, that it could go either way (apocalypse or turnabout), that Jews are not the only players, but that we may have a key role to play. Let’s see, the three requirements for bringing about change, Vison, Plan and Spirit; with Vision, say, a just and peaceful world; Plan, a work in progress; and Spirit, the all for one and one for all in pursit of a better world?
oops again, the concluding ? should be a period, not ?