[Based on a d’var Torah delivered by the author on the 68th anniversary of his becoming a bar mitzvah]
Chosenness in Biblical Texts
From where does the traditional belief that Jews are the Chosen People derive? Oddly enough from the Haftarah, the prophetic reading, that accompanies the first chapter of the book of Vayikra (Leviticus).
Vayikra was traditionally known as Torat Kohanim, instructions for the priests. The text sets the story just after the erection of the mishkan, the tabernacle, the central facility in the life of the Israelites on their 40-year journey through the wilderness. But according to modern scholars, most of text appears to have been developed and ultimately written by competing groups of pro-priestly scribes in the middle of the first millennium BCE, both to describe and to authenticate their role in the operation of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Whether you accept the story as historical or as a retrojection, here we have a plethora of laws, rules and regulations about rites and rituals, all guided by the priestly perception of an order to the universe. Notably, this order was marked by a belief in the integrity of things as they were presumably fashioned by a supernatural Creator, a belief reinforced by boundaries established to separate the pure from the impure and the permitted from the prohibited.
The first and the second Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed long, long ago. Consequently, the laws, rules and regulations in Vayikra have no material bearing on us today. We could not follow them, even if we wanted to do so. So, we can choose to move on. And I do.
Isaiah Comforts the Exiles in Babylonia By Calling Them “Chosen”
The haftarah for the first reading of Vayikra is quite another matter. Like 20 other haftarot, it is drawn from the biblical book of Isaiah. That book begins with stories regarding a prophet who advised four kings of Judah from roughly 740 BCE to maybe the 690s BCE. But the haftarah selection read today was written about 160 years after that Isaiah, and about 50 years after Jerusalem was destroyed. The author is commonly called Deutero-Isaiah by contemporary biblical scholars.
It seems that Deutero-Isaiah was even writing after the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon in a bloodless coup in 539 BCE. Whether it was written before or after Cyrus’s famous edict allowing exiles from various kingdoms to return home is unclear. What is clear is that Deutero-Isaiah was attempting to rally the exiled Judean community in Babylon as part of an effort to get members of that community to return to Judea. Perhaps to buoy their spirits, to increase their self-esteem, he referred to them as “My chosen one (bekhiri).”[1] Here Deutero-Isaiah was invoking a concept found in the book of Deuteronomy where Moses assures the Israelites that of all the peoples on earth, Yahweh their God chose them to be his am segula, “his treasured people” (Deuteronomy 7:6).
In that period, when a nation was defeated in war, its people adopted the gods of their conquerors. Deutero-Isaiah is reassuring Israel that they have not been abandoned or despised by God. Rather, even though the Temple has been destroyed and they have been exiled to Babylonia, they remain God’s chosen and should now return to Jerusalem.
Modern Jews have considered the notion that Jews are a chosen people nothing short of scandalous, implying that the idea entails antidemocratic claims of Jewish superiority. — Rabbi David Ellenson
Jewish Struggles with Chosenness in Modern Period
While rites and rituals regarding animal and grain sacrifices in the Temple have long disappeared, the notion of Israel’s chosenness remains alive today. It appears in most Jewish prayer books, regardless of denomination, in the blessing before the Torah reading where God is blessed as asher bakhar banu, one who chose us, mikol ha’amim, from all the nations. This idea also appears in the Aleinu prayer at the end of the morning service, and these words are part of the extended Kiddush.
Yet inclusion of the notion of chosenness in the Torah blessing was not always the case. Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, the Reform movement’s premier scholar of liturgy for more than 50 years, has written that the reference to chosenness in the Torah blessing goes back “at least to the second century C.E.,” but there were also “parallel texts in use” with alternative language. One such text included the phrase “Who chose this Torah … And took pleasure in those who do.” Another blesses God for commanding la’asok bedivrei Torah “to occupy ourselves with words of Torah.”[2]
According to Rabbi David Ellenson, z”l, the former president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Rabbi Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of the modern Reform movement, removed the words of chosenness from his prayer book because he felt it “unnecessarily denigrated others and promoted Jewish chauvinism.” Similarly, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, left out references to chosenness in a siddur he published in 1945, a fact of some importance to certain Orthodox rabbis who then excommunicated Kaplan and burned his book.
Marcia Falk, a feminist poet and theologian, not surprisingly rejects patriarchal language in her liturgy, but the desire to avoid distinguishing between groups of people also led her to dispense with chosenness altogether. So, in her The Book of Blessings, her proposed blessing before the Torah reading begins with: “Let us bless the Source of Life.” And it ends with: “May our hearts be filled, our spirits refreshed, our understanding deepened by the study of Torah.”[3] (pp. 266-67.)
The Reform movement in the United States has moved away from Geiger’s formulation, steadily returning to the traditional formulation. The Union Prayer Book of 1940 included the traditional Hebrew asher bakhar banu, but altered the English translation from “chosen us” to “called us.” The more recent Mishkan Tefillah retains both asher bakhar banu with a more honest translation.[4] And it does so without providing any options, which is curious because it provides four options for Aleinu[5] only one of which affirms Israel’s designation as a people set apart with a unique destiny.
Reform’s latest prayer book may be silent about the movement’s original theology on chosenness, but, as Ellenson acknowledges,
“Modern Jews have considered the notion that Jews are a chosen people nothing short of scandalous, implying that the idea entails antidemocratic claims of Jewish superiority.”[6]
Hard to Believe that God Literally Chose Us
One of those Jews who rejects chosenness is me. Growing up in a post-Holocaust world, I cannot accept the notion of Divine choice of one people over all others. The fundamental flaw for me is not the arrogance of the claim, troublesome as that is, but the more basic problem that the claim requires that there was a Divine chooser who made a choice. Given what I know about the development of the Torah text in which we first find that claim, similar claims by other national or ethnic groups in their origin stories, and the history of the Jewish people, I cannot believe in such a deity, any more than I can believe in an intelligent designer who fashioned our universe or who intervenes in history or who modifies the laws of nature to split a sea or to heal one person, but not another.
While this is not currently the majority view of American Jews, apparently, I am not alone either. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, there are today considerably fewer Jews who are certain that god or a universal spirit exists than was the case seventeen and even ten years ago. Only Buddhists scored lower on the question of God’s existence than did Jews. Conversely, 38% of Jews reportedly believe that the natural world is all there is, substantially exceeding the numbers for runners-up Hindus and Buddhists and doubling the percentage of all adults in the United States.
What is important is that we recognize that we have choices in how we engage Jewishly, including choices about the words we say in a service.
During my aliyah, I chose not to say asher bakhar banu, but to substitute asher kervanu la’avodato, a phrase meaning one who has brought or drawn us near to service. Here, I posit a more natural force of attraction. It is not ideal. Rather it’s a compromise, one initiated by values, but tempered by the reality that I could not figure out how to match la’asok bedivrei Torah (“Who commanded us to immerse in the words of Torah”) to the traditional melody.
I do not believe that have found the one true path. Nor do I think it critical that we all agree. What is important is that we recognize that we have choices in how we engage Jewishly–choices about words we say in a service, choices about how we adorn ourselves with kippot (head coverings), tallitot (prayer shawls) and tefillin (phylacteries), choices about prayer choreography. And surely, we have choices about the values we derive from the extensive and not exactly consistent intellectual history of Jewish theology and liturgy.
Does this mean that anything goes? Of course not! Instead, our communal choices ought to be informed by study of our multi-faceted tradition, consistent with its values and mindful of our place in and connection with other Jewish communities, near and far. If we engage in serious and thoughtful exploration, we may still opt for the familiar. But we might also, for many and varied reasons, find that we no longer need or wish to be bound by what we were taught in Hebrew or Sunday school, any more than our current choices about social, economic, cultural, political, scientific or other matters are circumscribed by what we were taught in elementary or middle school. Each of us has grown since we were children. We can move on, if we choose to do so.
I choose to be Jewish and to be here today, not because the laws of Torah are perfect and my ancestors were chosen to receive them. I choose to be Jewish because the way is good, life-affirming, rooted in both experience and reason, audacious in reach and hopeful at heart, rich in tradition yet ever changing, full of challenge and still a source of strength, a fantastic conversation across time and territory about fact, fiction and faith. And I choose to wrestle with it.
[1] Isaiah 42:1. See also 41:8-9, 43:10, 44:1-2
[2] W. Gunther Plaut, editor, The Torah: A Modern Commentary (UAHC 1981), p. 105.
[3] Marcia Falk, The Book of Blessings (CCAR Press, 1996), p. 266f.
[4] Lawrence Hoffman, editor, Seder K’riat HaTorah (Volume 4 of My People’s Prayer Book), p. 368.
[5] Lawrence Hoffman, editor, Seder K’riat HaTorah (Volume 4 of My People’s Prayer Book), pp. 566-568.
[6] Plaut, p. 104.
