Reply #32: Chosen People

[Meshuga]

The belief that Jews are the Chosen People has often provoked antagonism from non-Jews. In the 1930s, as Nazis were tightening the noose around the necks of German Jews, George Bernard Shaw remarked that if the Nazis would only realize how Jewish their notion of Aryan superiority was, they would drop it immediately. In 1973, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Yakov Malik, the Soviet ambassador of the UN, said: "The Zionists have come forward with the theory of the Chosen People, an absurd ideology. That is religious racism." Indeed the most antisemitic document in history, the forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is based on the idea of an international conspiracy to rule the world by the "Chosen People".

In the light of these attacks you can't blame Jews who wanted to do away with the belief in chosennes. And some have out of fear.

In judaism, the notion of the one God became known to the World by the Jews. And according to Jewish sources, that is the idea of chosennes: to make God known to the world.

Does Judaism believe that chosennes endows Jews with the same special rights in the way racists ideologies endow those born into the "right race"? Not at all.

The most famous verse in the Bible on the subject of chosennes says the exact opposite: "You alone have I singled out of all the families of the earth. That is why I call you to account for all your iniquities" (Amos 3:2). Chosennes is so unconnected to to any notion of race that some Jews believe that the Messiah himself will descend from Ruth, a convert to Judaism. You cannot convert to a race. Once a person converts he/she becomes part of the Chosen People.

Why were Jews chosen? Because they are descendents of Abraham. And why were Abraham and his descendants given the task of making God known to the world? The Torah (first five books of the Bible) never tells us. What God does say in Deuteronomy, is that "it is not because you are numerous that God chose you, indeed you are the smallest of people" (7 ). Because of the Jews' small numbers, any success they would have in making God known to the world would presumably reflect upon the power of the idea of God.