Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion,
Parashat Eikev, 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”, the 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 from 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, co-host Lex Rofes discusses the idea of Korach in a similar way. Korach’s
defiance of Moses wasn’t a defiance of Judaism or God, but rather it was
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 down his own Torah to the destroyed and lost
tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and then to Elisha ben Abuyah (The
Other), to Baruch Spinoza (the First Secular Jew), and so on. People 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 in history.
I’m excited to see who is the next inheritor of
this Torah. I agree with the general sentiment of Judaism Unbound that the
nature of institutional Judaism is changing in our time, and while this is
mildly worrying to me as a professional rabbi, it’s also hugely exciting. I
think Judaism is moving more toward decentralization, where lay people will
feel empowered to create personalized rituals and communities will lean more on
each other than on their leadership. Those doing the work to make Judaism more
inclusive and personalized are the chosen people who want to choose Tikkun Olam
even when it means challenging their own leaders and institutions. And by
offering a Judaism that allows for that and has a big wide-open tent for
variations on Jewish expression, decentralized Jewish movements will absorb many
of those who would otherwise be lost to Judaism, the Korachs and the Elisha ben
Abuyahs and the Spinozas, those who feel exiled by the leadership structures of
institutional Judaism, but who are so thoroughly Jewish in their kishkes that
they can’t be silenced or washed away from Jewish life.
These changes will not come tomorrow, of
course, and as of now there is still great reason to be dues-paying members of
the synagogue and look to your rabbi for support or learning. But it’s
interesting to consider how Ner Shalom might be able to be ahead of this curve.
How can we be more fully inclusive now? How can I empower you to take on
meaningful home rituals and direct you in self-education? How can you support
each other and teach one another the unique Torah each of you has to give? How
can we show each other, the wider community, and God that we do indeed still
choose Judaism and that we see the chosenness and Divine spirit in others? May
we grapple meaningfully with these questions in the coming weeks, and let all
who seek the Divine presence know that they too can be chosen for this
community and for the important work of repairing the world.
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