Lech Lecha ~ Choosing Chosenness

The more extreme, and exclusive, interpretations of the doctrine of election among Jewish thinkers, were partly the result of reaction to oppression by the non-Jewish world. The more the Jew was forced to close in on himself, to withdraw into the imposed confines of the ghetto, the more he tended to emphasize Israel's difference from the cruel gentile without. Only thus did his suffering become intelligible and bearable. This type of interpretation reaches its height in the Kabbalistic idea that while the souls of Israel stem from God, the souls of gentiles are merely of base material." ~ Lou Silberman, Encyclopaedia Judaica, sv. Chosen People

Judaism has a structural peculiarity so perplexing and profound that though Christianity and Islam took much else from it, they did not adopt this: it is a particularist monotheism. It believes in one God but not in one exclusive path to salvation. The God of the Israelites is the God of all mankind, but the demands made of the Israelites are not asked of all mankind....[as the Rabbis say]: 'The pious of the nations have a share in the world to come.' (MT Hilchot Teshuvah 3:5)

God the creator of humanity, having made a covenant with all humanity, then turns to one people and commands it to be different, teaching humanity to make space for difference. God may at times be found in the human other, the one not like us. Biblical monotheism is not the idea that there is one God and therefore one gateway to God's presence. On the contrary, it is the idea that the unity of God is to be found in the diversity of creation." ~ Sir Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Dignity of Difference (Chapter 3, 2002)

We have not chosen God; He has chosen us. There is no concept of a chosen God but there is the idea of a chosen people. The idea of a chosen people does not suggest the preference for a people based upon a discrimination among a number of peoples. We do not say that we are superior people. The "chosen people" means a people approached and chosen by God. The significance of this term is genuine in relation to God rather than in relation to other peoples. It signifies not a quality inherent in the people but a relationship between the people and God. ~ A.J. Heschel,'To be a Jew: What is it?' in: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, pp. 11

The idea of race or national superiority exercises divisive influences generating suspicion and hatred...we cannot assume that Israel must at all times possess that spirit to a higher degree than other people. ... Thank God I had the courage to go through with the excision of such a cancerous growth from the Jewish consciousness ... ~ Mordechai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, p. 43

Rabbi Leo Baeck (1873-1956, Germany)

"Jews possess a special genius for ethical monotheism which keeps the idea alive even today. Were the Jews and Judaism to disappear, ethical monotheism would lose its irreplaceable advocate and might itself disappear."

The presence of Jews among the not-yet-extinct peoples of the world can no more be credited to any kind of special trait or behavior than the Tasmanians or the Taino ought to be blamed for their own eradication. In the end human survival is a matter of luck — or destiny, if you prefer — of decisions taken in distant capitals in vanished eras that bore unforeseeable fruit 200 years on, of chaotically intersecting systems of weather, metaphysics and pandemic, of the failures and weaknesses and limitations of our would-be destroyers...

This is, of course, the foundational ambiguity of Judaism and Jewish identity: the idea of chosenness, of exceptionalism, of the treasure that is a curse, the blessing that is a burden, of the setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.

This is the ambiguity that cites the dispensation of God and history, of covenant and Holocaust, to lay claim to a special relationship between Jews and the Land of Israel, then protests when the world — cynically or sincerely — holds Israel to a different, higher standard as beneficiaries of that dispensation.

This is the ambiguity that proudly asserts the will and the obligation of Israel to be a light unto the nations, then points to the utterly evil, utterly bankrupt, utterly degraded, utterly stupid misdeeds of ship-sinking, sailor-massacring North Korea — North Korea! — in an attempt to give context to its own relatively less-evil, bankrupt, degraded and stupid behavior. ~ Michael Chabon, Chosen but not Special, NYT June 5 2010

It is not unreasonable to suggest that this, indeed, was the key to Jewish survival: The belief that the individual Jew must maintain his Jewishness because he is the beloved of God. This belief found expression not simply in creed but also in Jewish practice. The dedication of generations of Jews to Jewish law was not out of a blind sense of duty, but out of a firm belief that these laws were the expression of the Creator’s special love for the Jewish people, and their betrayal would be a betrayal of that love. It is this belief, perhaps above all else, which sustained Jewish communities through the hardships of exile, persecution, and pogrom. And it may still.

Meir Soloveichik, God’s Beloved: A Defense of Chosenness, in Azure Magazine, no. 19 winter 2005

See also https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/texts/cjrelations/resources/articles/rosenthal.htm

and

http://azure.org.il/article.php?id=201&page=all