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this credo, and then, when he did so in a foreign
policy address, they mocked his insincerity.
While Americans proudly claimed chosenness in its various forms, most Jews coming to
America eagerly shed it. As Arnold Eisen recounts in his classic book, The Chosen People in
America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology,
rabbis outside of Orthodoxy repeatedly attempted to minimize, reinterpret, or explicitly
discard the notion of Israel’s divine election. If
one doubts a personal God on high as much of
the American rabbinate did, how can one claim
that anyone chose anyone? One reformulation
explained that Jews were “chosen” only in the
inverted sense that they chose to “see” a universalistic God, making themselves a “light unto
the nations.” The Reform movement, in particular, recast chosenness into liberal do-goodism.
Such distancing from chosenness seems
to have succeeded. When I searched surveys
commissioned in recent decades by Jewish organizations, I found none that asked the Jewish
respondents about chosenness, not even a study
titled “Chosen for What?” Today, American
Jews are much less likely than are American
Protestants to agree with the statement: “God
gave Israel to the Jewish people.” Similarly, far
more Jews consider “working for justice/equality” to be an “essential part of being Jewish”
than consider “observing Jewish law” to be.
Declaring one’s tribe to be God’s “treasure”
(as noted in Deuteronomy 7:6) is awkward
throughout the post-Haskalah, post-Emancipation, pluralist West; it is particularly problematic for American Jews, who are hesitant
to offend their neighbors by being “arrogant”
or “clannish.” There are ideological concerns
also. In a nation defined from virtually the start
as remarkably egalitarian, claiming a special tie
to God — even a secularized, sanitized version
of that tie — sounds wrong. (Here, the ultraOrthodox have no problem: Faith trumps modernity; peoplehood trumps democracy.) There
are also psychological barriers to claiming chosenness. American culture stresses more than
any other that each individual is a freely choosing agent. How can such an agent be truly free
if he or she is chosen by God — much less,
commanded by God — to demonstrate chosenness through halakhah?
Jews found in America the greatest, freest
welcome in millennia of Diaspora, but it entailed many awkward adjustments. They had to
hope, as Eisen put it, that “gentile Americans
would believe that Jews were just like them but
that Jewish children would not be deceived” —
that the sense of chosenness would be somehow conveyed discreetly. Ceding the crown of
divine election to their hosts has been one of
those awkward adjustments. Bridging the Near and the Far
R u th M ess i n g er
S
erving on New York’s City Council in 1986,
I was the floor manager for a civil rights
bill to protect gays and lesbians in employment, housing, and public accommodations.
Embracing chosenness means accepting a moral mandate
to speak for and with those whose dignity has been denied.
Ruth Messinger is president of
American Jewish World Service
(ajws.org), the world’s leading
Jewish organization working to
end poverty and realize human
rights in the developing world.
Jordan Namerow, director of
digital and strategic content for
AJWS, helped with the writing of
this essay. Portions of this essay
were drawn from speeches Ruth
Messinger delivered over the
past few years.
[8]
The hearing was not progressing well when a
young police officer named Charlie Cochran
stood up (by prearrangement) and announced
to the entire room that he was gay.
Those of us who supported this legislation — particularly straight people — weren’t
taking any significant risks. But Officer Charlie
Cochran’s public declaration in the 1980s was
heroic. And it helped to pass the bill. Cochran’s
choice to be vulnerable and visible, at a time
when it would have been far safer to remain
hidden, is at the core of my understanding of
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chosenness in the modern world.
For me, chosenness is not about superiority or triumphalism. It’s about carrying, internalizing, and claiming difference; it’s about
being willing to stand up for what matters. It
involves figuring out how to negotiate the dynamics of being different in the modern world,
and advocating for those who are perceived as
different, vulnerable, or on the margins, even
when — especially when — the act of doing so
renders us vulnerable, too.
My choice to stand up for the vulnerable reflects a dynamic, reflexive relationship between
being chosen and the act of choosing. Jews may
be God’s “chosen people,” but we also make
choices. We choose how and to what degree we
shape our lives with Jewish values and Jewish
tradition. In some contexts, we decide to amplify
our Jewish identities and, in other contexts, we
decide to mute them. Ultimately, we determine
the impact our Jewishness has on our own lives,
our communities, and the broader world.
Rabbi David Wolpe writes about “the bias
of the near.” He explains: “Things close to us
seem of more importance than things far away.”
People who live next door seem more real than
those across the sea. The Bible acknowledges
— perhaps, even attempts to correct — this bias
when it says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
The Bible also seeks to make the stranger as
close as one’s neighbor, and to make the far-off
future vividly present to us.
Wolpe instructs, “A moral life cannot
only be lived with a focus on those next door.
Someone starving across the world is as real
as someone living beneath the bridge near our
own homes. Bias toward the near in people
and in time is important and helpful: our family and our lives today are naturally our imminent priorities. To be fully human, however, we
must…[have] hope for the future and care for
all who suffer, wherever they may be.”
Much of my work at American Jewish
World Service is about bridging the near and
the far. We seek to close this gap for the sake of
humanity and for the sake of ourselves as Jews
in the world. But we can only do this well when
we listen to the stories and struggles of others
— when we pay attention to how they describe
their needs. This task involves a choice to be
humble and present, generous and engaged.
Embracing chosenness means accepting
a moral mandate to speak for and with those
whose dignity has been denied. Choosing to
do this through a Jewish lens means rooting
our lives in ethical obligations, speaking out in
the face of injustice, and fighting for a better
world. At times, like Officer Cochran, we are
the ones who must make ourselves seen. At
other times, we must act for the sake of others. We are presented with opportunities to
choose and embrace being chosen, to activate
our most deeply held values and manifest our
truest selves.
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The God I Walk With
A r y eh C ohen
W
hat does it mean to have a covenantal relationship? In the book of
Exodus (chapter 19) God says:
“Now, then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My
treasured possession among all the peoples.
Indeed, all the earth is Mine, but you shall be
to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
These are the words that you shall speak to the
children of Israel.”
One of the central points of contention in
these verses is the causal relationship between
the condition in the first part of the first verse
(“…if you will obey Me…”) and the reward in
the second part of the verse (“you shall be My
treasured possession”). Is Israel’s “election” an
imminent, essential, and organic part of what
it is to be Israel? Or is it an earned title that can
therefore also be lost?
Although Jewish theologians have considered these questions throughout history, I
find them irrelevant to my life as I try to walk
with God.
I am writing shortly after a Ferguson, Mo.
grand jury decided not to indict Police Officer
Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael
Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man,
last August. The shooting initiated a vigorous
exchange — in both private and public spaces
— about the veritable plague of shootings of
unarmed black men by police officers. The
public reckoning often took the form of mass
I speak of a powerful God who appeared at Sinai and who
despised tyrannical oppression. That God was a vulnerable
God who mourned destruction and hoped for justice.
demonstrations — citizens across the nation
taking to the streets in a show of concern. At
one such gathering, a group of seminary students marched while chanting: “Tell me what
theology looks like? This is what theology
looks like.”
Though I’m partial to the original slant of
this chant, which I first heard while participating
in Occupy L.A. (“This is what democracy looks
like”), I recognized in this gathering, marching,
and speaking in the street a kinship with the
way in which rabbinic thought proceeds.
The midrash (Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael
Shirah 4) teaches that God appeared to Israel in
different forms on different occasions, including:
at the sea, as a gibor oseh milkhamah, a “hero
warrior”; and at the revelation at Sinai, as a
zaken malay rakhamim, “an elder full of mercy.”
It is in this space, where God appears as
Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, a member
of the Sh’ma Advisory Board,
is a professor of rabbinic
literature at the Ziegler
School of Rabbinic Studies
at
American Jewish University. His
latest book is Justice in the
City: An Argument from the
Sources of Rabbinic Judaism.
He usually davens with Shtibl,
an independent minyan he cofounded in Los Angeles, and he
blogs at justice-in-the-city.com.
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[9]