Are jews choosen people ? - By Rabbi Gershon Steinberg-Caudill
By Rabbi Gershon Winkler
Regarding the question about the Jews claiming to be the chosen people, and how that has led to antisemitism: my feeling is that we never claimed to the world to be the chosen people. We claimed it to ourselves, no less and no more than did the Celts claim that they were the chosen ones, or the Hopi Indians, or the Lakota Sioux or the Egyptians, or the Greeks. It is not our fault that Christianity TOOK our personal diary from us and published it all over the world. It is the early Church in its claim to be the only true religion that used our scriptures to prove this by quoting about how we were chosen by God, so that by replacing us, they became automatically the NEWLY chosen ones.
But we Jews never publicized to the world that God had chosen us over any other. On the contrary, throughout the Tenakh we were reminded again and again that we are not THE chosen people, but A chosen people, meaning a people chosen amongst many others.
Here are a few examples from the Tenakh, the private diary of the Jewish people:
"In that day shall Israel be third alongside Egypt and Assyria, as a blessing on earth; for God will bless them, saying: Blessed be my people Egypt, my handiwork Assyria, and my inheritance Israel" (Isaiah 19:24).
"Are you not just like the Children of the Ethiopians unto me, O Children of Israel? Did I not bring out Israel from the Land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caftor, and Aram from Kir?" (Amos 9:7).
From the Talmud:
"It is written, There never again arose among the Israelites a prophet as great as Moses (Deuteronomy 34:10) --among the Israelites there never again arose a prophet as great as Moses, but amongst other peoples, it is certainly probable!" (Midrash Bamidbar Rabbah 14:19).
Martin Buber put it this way: "As a historical people, Israel enjoys no precedence over any other. Like Israel, the other peoples were all wanderers and settlers; they came up from a land of want and servitude into their present homeland. The one God, the Redeemer and Leader of the peoples, strode before all of them upon their way -- even the hostile neighboring peoples -- protecting them by His might. He guided their steps, gave them power, let them inherit the soil of a people that had been ruined by its sins and abandoned by history." (From "Martin Buber On the Bible", edited by N. Glatzer [Schocken Books, 1982], p. 80).
I believe that we believe that God does not discriminate between one people and another. That God loves the Palestinians as much as [God loves] the Israelis. Sort of like a mother who writes six letters to her six children, and in each letter she writes "You are my favorite. I love you more than anything in the world!" This is why we never went out missionizing to people. We believed every-one had their own divine revelation and each their path is sacred as long as they dont use it to destroy others. A tzadik (righteous person), the Talmud teaches, is not someone who is a holy Jew, but someone of ANY faith or [ANY] people who is righteous by their actions. A tzadik is not determined by belief or religious affiliation but by how they live their life.
So, no we are not any more chosen than the aboriginals of Australia. We are equally chosen. And when we say "asher bachar banu meekol haameem" (who chose in us from all the nations) we mean that we thank God for choosing us, too, from among all the other nations, meaning from among all those other peoples who were chosen long before we were.
Of course the average traditional Jew will think about this differently. I believe that is because we have as a people been persecuted for so long that our religious teachers kept impressing upon us how precious we were to God in order to lift up our downtrodden spirits. A people oppressed for close to two thousand years needs to hear that they are important, chosen, the highest of the high. But theologically it is totally incorrect. We are different than most, yes. But we are not more important to God than most. God likes us because we are funny. We gave the world more comedians than anyone else.
We are not hated because we claim to be chosen. We are hated because of the venom spread against us by the New Testament story of the Jews calling for the crucifixion of Jesus, which has been proven again and again as historically and theologically fictitious, but it is already a poison well-entrenched in every-one influenced by the Church, whether Christian or not, which is practically the entire world today.
I think another factor of this chosen people problem is not anything we say or said to the world as much as what the world assumes we say about ourselves or think about ourselves, because the world sees us as uncompromising, tenaciously clinging to our peculiar and often politically-incorrect ways, even when those ways clash with the rest of the world. We have always been different, and always refused to conform to the religious and cultural ways of those who have conquered us, whether Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Christian, etc. which led them to assume that we thought ourselves special. Why dont the Jews give in? They couldnt understand it. Everyone else who was conquered adopted the conquerors ways. Everyone but the Jews. Which may naturally lead people to think that we think we are too special, chosen by God or the gods. Our crime was our stubborn refusal to compromise our beliefs and our ways, and so we chose death more often than any other conquered people, rather than conform or convert.
Our crime was not our claim to be chosen. Our crime was our claim to the right to believe as we wished.
And for that we have paid dearly.
Are jews choosen people ? - By Rabbi Gershon Steinberg-Caudill
By Rabbi Gershon Winkler
Regarding the question about the Jews claiming to be the chosen people, and how that has led to antisemitism: my feeling is that we never claimed to the world to be the chosen people. We claimed it to ourselves, no less and no more than did the Celts claim that they were the chosen ones, or the Hopi Indians, or the Lakota Sioux or the Egyptians, or the Greeks. It is not our fault that Christianity TOOK our personal diary from us and published it all over the world. It is the early Church in its claim to be the only true religion that used our scriptures to prove this by quoting about how we were chosen by God, so that by replacing us, they became automatically the NEWLY chosen ones.
But we Jews never publicized to the world that God had chosen us over any other. On the contrary, throughout the Tenakh we were reminded again and again that we are not THE chosen people, but A chosen people, meaning a people chosen amongst many others.
Here are a few examples from the Tenakh, the private diary of the Jewish people:
"In that day shall Israel be third alongside Egypt and Assyria, as a blessing on earth; for God will bless them, saying: 'Blessed be my people Egypt, my handiwork Assyria, and my inheritance Israel'" (Isaiah 19:24).
"Are you not just like the Children of the Ethiopians unto me, O Children of Israel? Did I not bring out Israel from the Land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caf'tor, and Aram from Kir?" (Amos 9:7).
From the Talmud:
"It is written, 'There never again arose among the Israelites a prophet as great as Moses' (Deuteronomy 34:10) --among the Israelites there never again arose a prophet as great as Moses, but amongst other peoples, it is certainly probable!" (Midrash Bamid'bar Rabbah 14:19).
Martin Buber put it this way: "As a historical people, Israel enjoys no precedence over any other. Like Israel, the other peoples were all wanderers and settlers; they came 'up' from a land of want and servitude into their present homeland. The one God, the Redeemer and Leader of the peoples, strode before all of them upon their way -- even the hostile neighboring peoples -- protecting them by His might. He guided their steps, gave them power, let them 'inherit' the soil of a people that had been ruined by its sins and abandoned by history." (From "Martin Buber On the Bible", edited by N. Glatzer [Schocken Books, 1982], p. 80).
I believe that we believe that God does not discriminate between one people and another. That God loves the Palestinians as much as [God loves] the Israelis. Sort of like a mother who writes six letters to her six children, and in each letter she writes "You are my favorite. I love you more than anything in the world!" This is why we never went out missionizing to people. We believed every-one had their own divine revelation and each their path is sacred as long as they don't use it to destroy others. A tzadik (righteous person), the Talmud teaches, is not someone who is a holy Jew, but someone of ANY faith or [ANY] people who is righteous by their actions. A tzadik is not determined by belief or religious affiliation but by how they live their life.
So, no we are not any more chosen than the aboriginals of Australia. We are equally chosen. And when we say "asher bachar ba'nu mee'kol ha'ameem" (who chose in us from all the nations) we mean that we thank God for choosing us, too, from among all the other nations, meaning from among all those other peoples who were chosen long before we were.
Of course the average traditional Jew will think about this differently. I believe that is because we have as a people been persecuted for so long that our religious teachers kept impressing upon us how precious we were to God in order to lift up our downtrodden spirits. A people oppressed for close to two thousand years needs to hear that they are important, chosen, the highest of the high. But theologically it is totally incorrect. We are different than most, yes. But we are not more important to God than most. God likes us because we are funny. We gave the world more comedians than anyone else.
We are not hated because we claim to be chosen. We are hated because of the venom spread against us by the New Testament story of the Jews calling for the crucifixion of Jesus, which has been proven again and again as historically and theologically fictitious, but it is already a poison well-entrenched in every-one influenced by the Church, whether Christian or not, which is practically the entire world today.
I think another factor of this chosen people problem is not anything we say or said to the world as much as what the world assumes we say about ourselves or think about ourselves, because the world sees us as uncompromising, tenaciously clinging to our peculiar and often politically-incorrect ways, even when those ways clash with the rest of the world. We have always been different, and always refused to conform to the religious and cultural ways of those who have conquered us, whether Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Christian, etc. which led them to assume that we thought ourselves special. Why don't the Jews give in? They couldn't understand it. Everyone else who was conquered adopted the conqueror's ways. Everyone but the Jews. Which may naturally lead people to think that we think we are too special, chosen by God or the gods. Our crime was our stubborn refusal to compromise our beliefs and our ways, and so we chose death more often than any other conquered people, rather than conform or convert.
Our crime was not our claim to be chosen. Our crime was our claim to the right to believe as we wished.
And for that we have paid dearly.
