Eikev: Chosenness and Choosing
Rabbi Lizz is with IfNotNow DC.
This week’s Torah portion deals in the question of Chosenness. Moses tells the people of the Israelite camp that if they obey all the commandments, then God will love them and bless them above all the other peoples of the Earth. In Ellen Frankel’s The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, she offers an objection from “Our Daughters”, an imagined feminine voice responding to the text: “Many of us no longer feel comfortable with the notion of Jewish chosenness … By what right do we hold ourselves above and apart from other peoples?”
This question has of course plagued men and women, daughters and sons, rabbis and laypeople for generations. The claim to Jewish chosenness and its perception by non-Jews has led to a lot of grief for our people. As Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof, “I know we are Your chosen people, but every once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?”
But beside the antisemitism that Jews have suffered for this perceived insult against non-Jews, there is also the nagging question of what being “chosen” actually means. I don’t know any Jewish person who would claim any sort of Jewish superiority, though some might exist. Many rabbis and commentators have read into the covenanted language used when the Torah imparts the idea of God’s Chosen People to understand that Jews are only “chosen” when they choose to accept Torah, and that the act that we are chosen for is Tikkun Olam, to repair the world in the ways the Torah commands. In this reading, anyone who follows the ethical commandments and the teachings of the prophets is a part of this holy endeavor to repair the world, and can be considered chosen for such work as well.
However, even as some leaders of the Jewish community have offered this view on chosenness as an act of choosing, when it comes to their own power, they are blind to the need to be as open and inclusive. For example, this Torah portion also references the story of Korach, who challenged the authority and supremacy of Moses in a previous parasha. I think Korach was advocating for a similar broad sense of chosenness in his encounter with Moses, but Moses painted him as a villain and clings to his own authority, both in Parashat Korach and in this parasha. Korach insisted that it wasn’t just Moses who was chosen by God, for the Divine presence dwelled in the Israelite camp among all the people. I think we can extrapolate one step further and understand now that not only Jewish people who can be chosen for the holy work described in the Torah, but anyone who chooses to do it. In last week’s episode of the podcast Judaism Unbound, fellow IfNotNow member Lex Rofes offers a comparable interpretation of Korach. Korach’s defiance of Moses wasn’t a defiance of Judaism or God, but rather a way of offering another route into Judaism and a relationship to the Divine. Just as we are told in the Mishnah that the Torah is passed down from Moses to Joshua to the men of the Great Assembly and so on to the rabbis of the time, Lex suggested that maybe Korach passed his own Torah down to the destroyed and lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and then to Elisha ben Abuyah, to Baruch Spinoza, to Emma Goldman and all those who were considered in their time to be heretics and sinners, but whose voices were still so thoroughly Jewish in their challenges to institutional Judaism that they refused to be silenced and washed away by history.
I think IfNotNow is the current inheritor of this Torah. We are a people who claim our chosenness to be the moral leaders Judaism needs and many of our institutions fail to be, to choose to pursue Tikkun Olam even when it means challenging our own leaders and institutions. We want to truly follow the commandments of the Torah to make peace, to care for others, to have one law for all people, Jews and non-Jews alike. And by offering a Judaism that allows for that, we are absorbing many of those who would otherwise be lost to Judaism, those who feel exiled by the politics and the leadership structures of institutional Judaism, but who are so thoroughly Jewish that they too will not be silenced or washed away from Jewish life. May all who seek the Divine presence know that they are indeed chosen for this as well, and may we work together in choosing freedom and dignity for all.
