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1. CHOSENNESS: SOME CONCEPTIONS, MISCONCEPTIONS, AND COMPARISONS
The concept of the "chosen people" has been widely misunderstood, by Jews and Gentiles alike. It has, in addition, been one of the focal points of Jewish-Christian dispute, going back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, with Christians claiming to have supplanted the Jews as Verus Israel ("the true Israel"), while the Jews continued to regard themselves, and themselves alone, as maintaining Abraham's special covenantal relationship with God.(1)
The concept of chosenness is clearly closely connected or correlative to this concept of covenant (berit). What I shall attempt to demonstrate below is that chosenness means neither privilege nor any innate Jewish superiority, whether explicit or implicit. Rather, what the biblical and post-biblical sources emphasize is an internally-directed Jewish responsibility to live in a certain way, based on the Torah, and the promises of divine blessing are conditioned upon Israel's fulfilling those covenantal responsibilities.(2)
Because of the centrality of the concept of the Chosen People to much of Jewish religious experience, and because of its having been the focus of so much animus in Jewish-Christian relations over the centuries, I believe that the concept merits serious reconsideration and reevaluation in our day. Besides the obvious historical factors, our generation, which has witnessed both the murder of one-third of the Jewish people in the Holocaust and the renewal of Jewish nationhood in the state of Israel--the poles of Jewish national powerlessness and power--needs to reassess what meaning chosenness can have in our lives as Jews and in our relations with non-Jews in general and Christians in particular.
I single out the Christians here for two reasons without implying in any way that other religious traditions, especially Islam, are less worthy of serious consideration and recognition by Jews.(3) Nevertheless; Islam does not specifically posit a concept of chosenness, and the concept of the Chosen People has therefore not been the focal point of Jewish-Islamic dispute, as it has with Christianity. Moreover, whereas in recent decades we have been witness to an increasingly open and frank relationship between Jews and Christians, at least in some parts of the world, the same cannot, regrettably, be said of Jews and Muslims. The unavoidable involvement of religion in the Jewish-Arab dispute, which is primarily national...