Rethinking Chosenness: A Dialogue for Our Time
“Chosenness” has been both a source of pride and discomfort in Jewish life. What does it mean to be a “chosen people” in an age of equality, interconnection, and moral responsibility? This Evolve series invites a deeper look — not to settle the question, but to open it. We’ll explore how the idea of chosenness can evolve into a call toward purpose, justice, and shared humanity.
Discover New Evolve Essays on Chosenness:
The fundamental flaw is not the arrogance of the claim, troublesome as it is, but that the claim requires that there was a Divine chooser who made a choice.
The belief that Jews are Chosen risks promoting Jewish chauvinism and even racism.
Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s arguments against chosenness still ring true.
It is not enough for us to change a few prayers in our liturgy to live into Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s rejection of chosenness.
Join the Conversation
Is the claim that Jews are the Chosen People important to your identity? Do you find it objectionable? Why?
Past Perspectives on Chosenness From Evolve:
First published in The Reconstructionist, September 1984, pp. 8-27
First published in The Reconstructionist 50/7, June 1885, pp. 9-14
First published Mordecai Kaplan's 1948 book, The Future of the American Jew
3 Responses
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Israeli philosopher, known as the “conscience of Israel”, was what I’d call a spiritual iconoclast who warned his government that the Occupation of the Palestinians would be Israel’s downfall. I highly recommend his book Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State. In it he states: “The uniqueness of the Jewish people is not a fact, it is an endeavor. The holiness of Israel is not a reality but a task. The uniqueness of the Jewish people is a direction and a target. The people of Israel were not the chosen people but were “commanded” to be the chosen people. The Jewish people has no intrinsic uniqueness. Its uniqueness rather consists in the demand laid on it”.
In the extrinsic conversations of open society, the claim that Jews are the “Chosen People” is solipsistic in a cultural sense and offensive. In the ancient world, religion was a tribal matter, for Jews as well as other groups. The literacy of Judaism transported Jewish consciousness over vast evolutionary ground in terms of cultural, social, and political history, over thousands of years. But within the tribal essence of religion, all tribal religions were — in their self-perception — the chosen people of their original, geographically and culturally isolated ‘gods’. The tribal god or gods of a people, during pre-modern unconsciousness of the variety of cultures and diversity of the World were the creations and, in their cultural complexes of religious creation, the supernatural choosers of the peoples who created them. This is the essence of Jewish ‘Chosenness’ as well, except that the original “people of the book” arrogated to themselves a ‘Chosen’ status that illegitimately transcended the modern, interconsciousness of diverse peoples, across a World impossible to know by the primitives of thousands of years ago. Thus, as might be described in Feuerbachian terms, every ancient religion was ‘chosen’ by the god or gods postulated and promulgated internally by that religion, as a cultural institution of a particular people defined in time and location. To expand the notion of being a “Chosen People” beyond the internal, cultural consciousness of Jews and Jewishness was always a logically invalid notion, in the modern perspective of cultural anthropology. As such, it bears some similarity to the demand by fundamentalist Islam that all of the World respect its standard of blasphemy, subject to penalty exacted regardless of the location or cultural identity of those deemed ‘blasphemers.’
When I was younger the idea of being “the Chosen people” made me a little uncomfortable because it brought attention to me as a Jew. And attention is not something that I wanted as a Jewish person, it made me feel threatened. But as I grew and studied more and understand more of the mystical, biblical and historical meaning of being “chosen” I take deep pride in it. It never meant superiority. That is an imposed meaning, like the current definition of Zionism. It means that we were plucked from other peoples — with all our faults (of which there are many) to believe and live a life which celebrated the Oneness of Hashem. Hashem chose us for that and we chose this path. And being “chosen” for this has not been an easy or kind, smooth or peaceful decision. But we hold on to it with all we are. We insist on this truth as a breath: the choice is the choice of relationship. Of love. It doesn’t lessen any other people, they have their path. We have ours. And I do think we have suffered from it. If the word “chosen” is offensive, it’s offensive to those who have a problem with Jews. Maybe in the depth of the Spanish prisons, or the concentration camps or the Hamas tunnels this relationship saved some souls. Knowing this special relationship we have, this deep commitment to Love is ours in its uniqueness. And that takes nothing from anyone else, but it is something of value to us. That is what I think being Chosen means.