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Modern Man and the Concept of the Chosen People
Renzo Fabris
Introduction
The ordinary man of our time, who derives the few religious ideas remaining to him more from his own secularized culture than from Scripture, finds the concept of chosen people very difficult, almost inconceivable. Who can be chosen among all the millions on this planet? And by whom — a God who is dead? The biblical idea of the chosen people seems only to have survived in the idea of an elite, and this concept of remnant is used by sociologists and politicians to denote any manifestation of personality, whether good or bad, within modern society.
More careful analysis of the question reveals that the concept of an elite evokes an ambiguous response of mixed attraction and rejection. Rejection, because the much-praised democratic sentiments of our time seem to compel us to condemn any group or class which exerts command, authority or power by virtue of being an aristocracy, intrinsically superior in the intellectual or the moral field. A typical example of this attitude is given in the essay by the sociologist, C. Wright Mills: "L'elite del Potere". Conversely, the attraction of an elite is explained by the fact that present-day social development seems to be leading humanity towards a system in which authority will be in the hands of those few in possession of superior technical knowledge, of knowledge accessible only to a few persons who thus become models for the rest. The essay by Jurgen Riisch: "Social Disability", reveals this tendency most impressively.
If the re-action to the discussion on the chosen people in the guise of an elite is ambiguous, the re-action in our time to the idea of the special choice by God of the Jewish people is substantially negative. It is considered infantile or primitive — an idea to be despised rather than discussed. The Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, writing immediately after the war, numbers the Jewish idea of the chosen people among the surviving features of primitive, barbaric religious thought and goes on to say that it is "so foolish that it was adopted by Hitler..." The Welsh psychologist, Ernest Jones, came to the same conclusion in 1945 when he wrote: "Everything points to the fact that the basic lesson for the non-assimilation of the Jews is to be found in the peculiarly exclusive and arrogant nature of their religious belifs, including that of having a special relationship with the divinity, more intimate 'than that of any other people (except perhaps for the Japanese)." 2
It is significant that, even after the Holocaust, some of the enlightened minds of our time cannot free themselves from the opinion that the Jewish consciousness of being chosen stems from the conviction of having certain intrinsic moral or intellectual prerogatives, and is therefore a sort of superiority complex which ends in producing an exdusive or overbearing attitude. The idea has such an appeal that even Jewish intellectuals have accepted it. Roger Ikor wrote an essay in which he proposed to fight against the idea of the Jews as the chosen people because it was "wrong and harmful" — wrong like that of the analogous idea that nobility derives from hereditary blue blood, and harmful because it attracts persecution just as a lightning conductor attracts the thunderbolt. 3 The point has been reached where aversion to the idea of the chosen people has acquired a religious aura. "The very idea of chosen people" as Simone Weil, the well-known writer of Jewish origin has tried to explain, "is incompatible with the knowledge of the true God. It is social idolatry, the worst form of idolatry." 4
With Simone Weil the idea of the chosen people seems to have been rejected. An idea, religious at the outset, has passed through a process of secularization to come back again to the religious level, but with its original meaning reversed.
The Biblical Concept
What is the original biblical meaning of the choosing of the people of Israel? The idea arose out of the extraordinary experience through which the Israelites passed about 1,500 years before the birth of Christ. From being a group of tribes fleeing from the oppression of Egypt to win their freedom, they became a nation, and in this liberation they saw the hand of God. He it was who formed them into a people and chose them as his own. Thus a consciousness was formed which derives, in the final analysis, (Gerhard van Rad: Theology of the Old Testament) from the "condensation and extrapolation of the religious meaning attributed to certain events — events which as such are unknown to us today." These fugitives from Egypt would discover subsequently that their chief at that time was a descendant of the tribal chieftain Jacob who had journeyed towards the Nile in earlier times from a distant country allotted to him by God, and that a still earlier ancestor Abraham had been chosen by God to be the father of their people.5
The Bible attests that the choosing of the people of Israel is an event which can on no account be attributed to their merits but only to the will of God; for Israel did not deserve it, either by being more numerous than other nations (Dent. 7:7,8) nor by its strength and energy (Deut. 9:4-6). And again, it was the will of God alone that brought the people of Israel back from the Babylonian exile to their own country (Isaiah 14:1).
Jewish tradition, from the Mishnah and the Talmud and the philosophical texts of the Middle Ages down to the writers of modern times, has kept the idea of the chosen people and has even made it the subject of reflection, speculation and prayer while the Jewish people was being persecuted throughout the course of the centuries. This tradition has always emphasized that being chosen does not give Israel the right to any special treatment, does not give rise to privileges before God, but means special duties such as the observance of the Law and the teaching of monotheism to other peoples.
Sometimes certain rabbis have tried to indicate the reasons for which Israel was chosen by God, or have preferred to . remind those they taught that being so chosen imposes faithfulness to God as a condition. It appears to us that the Mechilta follows the line of Jewish tradition in the midrash according to whith the Torah, before being offered to Israel, was offered to the children of Esau, the Ammonites, the Moabites and the children of Ishmael, who all refused it for one reason or another. Only the children of Israel accepted it: "All that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will obey." This acceptance, according to the beautiful interpretation of Sergio Quinzio and Piero Stefani, is parallelled by the acceptance by Mary of the angel's message: "As you have spoken, so be it." (Luke 1:38) 6
If it is clear at this point that the original biblical meaning and that of Jewish tradition are distant indeed from the anthropocentric meaning assumed by modern man who has forgotten Scripture, it is interesting to note that an Israeli scholar has recently put forward an idea which is quite a challenge to those of Croce and Jones: that the concept of chosenness has had a major influence on the history of civilization in the West. "Precisely this limitation, this being closed off, this exclusiveness", writes J. Talmon in a fascinating essay, "constitutes the secret of the value (not the superiority) of the Jewish component in the world." From this special character — originating, therefore, in the idea of the chosen people of Israel — derive in fact the ideas of communitas or the congretation of the faithful, the idea of the universitas fidelium of the Church and finally the concept of nationhood. In fact, " ... it was the concept of the chosen people which gave rise to national consciousness."7
Jewish and Christian Theologies
The heritage of theological reflection on the idea of the chosen people in the Bible is the result of the efforts of an enormous number of Jewish and Christian scholars. When we try to establish some of the most important concepts belonging to this heritage, the first one that we are bound to recognize is that of the divine choice being naturally connected with divine revelation which defines rather him who chooses than him who is chosen. The action of him who chooses can be understood and interpreted in three ways. The simplest interpretation is that of the freedom and omnipotence of God since, as Quinzio and Stefani explain, "none other than the arbitrary nature of the divine will expresses God's freedom from the constraint of all- laws." The second interpretation is that of divine pity and compassion, since "Israel was chosen because of its many sufferings, because of the greatness of its wretchedness." Finally, there is the paradoxical necessity for God to be helped by his chosen people in the fight against evil in the world. 8
Just as creation involves God in a relationship which moves forward in time, thus becoming history, so too, the second important observation to be made about the concept of the choice of Israel is that it, too, partakes of this same relationship with its Creator in the unfolding of history. The choice of Israel, as Pastor Giorgio Tourn teaches, presupposes history, is in itself history and sets in motion a chain of events which are narrated as history.9
The third point to consider is that God's choice does not bring a race into being. It is well known that persons of ethnic origins other than Hebrew, such as Melchizedek, Jethro, Rahab, Ruth and Job are part of the history of Israel.
Lastly, the fact of being chosen is inclusive rather than exclusive. The prophets, more than any others, as Tourn has emphasized, realized that Israel was like the focal point of a much larger circle in which all the nations live and act. This is the origin of that Jewish universalism which is based on the consciousness of the universality of God. "Israelite universalism", as Paul Eugene Dion explains, "is essentially correlated with the consciousness of being the chosen people of God.10
The Chosen People in Christian Consciousness
What is the Christian attitude to the question of the Jews as the chosen people? What is the Church's teaching on this subject? The Christian is by definition a follower of that Master, Rabbi Yeshua of Nazareth, who lived until his death observing the duties derived from belonging to the chosen people of Israel, and even died for his fidelity to them. This outstanding son of Israel is the Chosen One par excellence.
Through the mediation of Jesus, the Christian believes, he becomes a member of the chosen people; he belongs to the "chosen race, the royal priesthood, the dedicated nation, the people claimed by God for his own, to proclaim the triumphs of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. You are now the people of God . . ." (I Pet. 2:9,10) He belongs to those who must bear witness so that "the pagans ... see for themselves that you live good lives and will give glory to God on the day when he comes to hold assize" (I Pet. 2:12).
For a long time Christians believed that since "it first happened that God took notice of the Gentiles (i.e. in earlier times) to choose from among them a people to bear his name (Acts 15:14), it followed that the status of "chosen" no longer belonged to the Jews after the coming of Jesus. Many statues placed in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages bear witness to this opinion, showing the Church as a crowned matron, royally robed and bearing a sceptre, while the Synagogue is represented as a woman blindfolded, with the crown slipping from her head, the Tablets of the Law slipping from her hands and her sceptre broken. At the basis of this concept there lay the pseudo-theology concerning the substitution of Israel by the Church in the history of salvation, the accusation of deicide and the teaching of contempt for the Jews.
These convictions have been severely shaken by denunciation from many sides and also also by recent events. The second Vatican Council formally recognized that God's special choice of the Church has its beginnings, according to the divine mystery of salvation, with the Patriarchs, Moses and the Prophets; that the Jews, in the words of the Apostle Paul, remain beloved by God, whose gifts and whose vocation stand firm; that even if the Church is the new people of God, the Jews must never be represented as rejected or accursed as though this proceeded logically from Holy Scripture (Nostra Aetate, No. 4). The Council twioe repeated that the gifts and the vocation of God stand, in accordance with Romans 11:28,29, (cf. Nostra Aetate No. 4 and Lumen Gentium, Ch. 2:16) a passage where Paul alludes to God's choice of Israel.11
In 1973 the declaration of the Commission of French Bishops for Relations with the Jews stated with absolute clarity that "in contrast to what an earlier but far from irreproachable exegesis affirmed, it cannot be deduced from the New Testament that the Jewish people is no longer the chosen people of God.
If therefore these considerations are based on the Bible, is it then possible to speak correctly of two choices made by God, first that of the Jews and then that of the Church? The re-action of conservative theologians to the declaration of the French Bishops was harsh. Denise Joudant not only stated that the special vocation of the Jewish people no longer exists and that the gifts connected with it have passed to the Church, but also that the Jews nowadays have no special role and that to consider them in any way as a "nation apart" means overemphasis of their special status and thus anti-semitism.12 Thus we see that there are still Christians like Mme. Joudant who in the same way as Jews like Ikor, think that the idea of the chosen people lives at the basis of anti-semitism as the cause of an effect. Other theologians prefer to say that the Jews can be considered the chosen people of God only in analogy with the Church, that they are "a people of God sui generic" or a "consecrated people".13
The new theology, however, teaches without hesitation, in the words of J.-P. Lichtenberg, O.P., that the Jewish people "remains the people of God according to his irreversible divine choice and that the Church appears as the extension, through faith in Christ, of this same people of God, called to embrace the whole of humanity." Indeed it seems that the notion of the people of God can be applied simultaneously to the Jewish people, to the Church and to all humanity with its potentiality for salvation: "to the Jews because of God's choice, to the Church because of her confession of faith in Christ, and to all humanity called to salvation by divine adoption."14
Chosen for Responsibility
If, as Scripture teaches, God's choice fell upon the Jews, not by virtue of their intrinsic character but out of his free and omnipotent will, implying special duties for the chosen, then this choice mainly benefits those among whom these chosen people operate and not the chosen themselves. The fact of being chosen implies a mission to those who are not chosen. Indeed, if it is also true that the consciousness of being chosen is the psychological expression of the Jewish people's sense of identity, then this sense has found its historical realization in behavior that reveals precisely this mission of the Jewish people.
What is the Jewish people's mission, deriving from divine choice? The Bible and post-biblical tradition speak of witness and prophecy entrusted by the one God to the Jews and which are to be given and prodlaimed before all the peoples of the earth. The people are confirmed as witnesses to the Lord on their arrival in the Promised Land just before the death of Joshua (Jos. 24:21,22) and the same testimony is demanded later before the tribunal called by God, when all the nations are to be gathered together to decide who is truly God. (cf. Is. 43:10)
In biblical language we may say that the mission of the Jews is "the hallowing of the name of God". The Jewish people in fact bear witness to a God who communicates not only his name to humanity, but who gives himself in the most intimate union possible. The spiritual experience of the revelation of the name, as is explained in an issue of the periodical, Veritę, is set down in the profession of faith repeated by every Jew: "Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Praised be the name of his kingdom of glory forever!" This testimony to the uniqueness and holiness of the name and the petition for the coming of the kingdom is fulfilled for every Jew by listening to the word and following the way, the teachings of God. In fact, consciousness of the name of God is shown in practise by a course of action in obedience to God and the tending towards union with him — this constitutes the mitzvah, whose etymological meaning is commandment and union. 15
For the modern man who is unfamiliar with Scripture, one can express this better by saying that the mission of witnessing to the "hallowing of the name" consists in practice in the struggle against idols. In the Bible idolatry is seen, not only in the worship of images and of foreign gods, but, as the prophets recognized, in the sophistries invented by man about himself, in all the ideologies aimed at treating as sacred what is profane, in all the theories created by man to excuse injustice and violence. This is the way in which idols are the enemies of God and it is comprehensible that the opposition in the Bible is seen not as between athiests and believers but between idolaters and men of faith. For the Jew, man has the duty of becoming the image of God, but the idol is the image of man and of the things which are on the earth.16
Idols, what is more, are not easy to recognize. Not only are power, money and success idols in their various forms, but also a religious faith which perhaps believes that it has freed itself from idols. The height of idolatry consists, indeed, as Pastor Paolo Ricca has expressed it, "not in having an idol but in being one." 17
Paolo de Benedetti has a very penetrating interpretation of the action of King Hezekiah in breaking the bronze serpent made by Moses (2 Kings 18:3,4) as an episode in which the Bible celebrates the courage of the iconoclast who destroys something which has possessed authentic value but is now used in an idolatrous way. Here an act is celebrated which exalts the destruction of the relic that has become the object of superstition. 18
It is remarkable that this biblical logic condemns as idolatry the very idea that God chose the Jews because of some intrinsic quality in themselves as a people, a quality which might have destined them to exert authority and power over other peoples.
Returning to biblical terminology, the French Bishops stated, in the declaration made in 1973, that the present vocation of Israel is "the hallowing of the name". This, they explained, is "one of the essential dimensions of prayer in the Synagogue through which the Jewish people, invested with its priestly mission (Ex. 19:6), offers all human action to God and gives him glory. This vocation makes the life and prayer of the Jews a blessing for all the nations of the earth." In reality the mission of the hallowing of the name is the cord which binds together Jew and Christian in the one community of the children of God. Tommaso Federici in the lecture he gave at an important meeting between Catholics and Jews in 1977, reminds his hearers that "Christ himself, moving in the wake of the Old Testament, puts the precept of 'hallowing the name' at the beginning of the Lord's prayer, the Our Father, which he taught his disciples (Matt. 6:9; Lk. 11:2; see also the parallel in Synagogue liturgy of the Kaddish). This is mentioned explicitly by the apostles (e.g. Heb. 13:15 and Rom. 9:17) in the difficult context of the mystery of Israel who quote Ex. 9:16 (d. Eph. 3), showing how Christ makes known in a new way the fulness of the divine name, 'the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ', the ineffable and awe-inspiring object of loving adoration. (see, for example, John ch. 17 and the beginning of the Pauline epistles)." 19 We may therefore conclude that Jews and Christians, having the same mission to "hallow the name" while they wait for the coming of the kingdom, are members of the same religious family. Whether this is understood as one people or as a community comprising two forms of membership, two forms of the people of God, as Father Bernard D. Dupuy, O.P. sees it, or else two equal peoples of God, one of whom receives an additional blessing in the words of Chief Rabbi Alexandre Saffran,2° Jews and Christians are called together to fight against the idols of the world by virtue of their status as the chosen people of God.
Christians and the State of Israel
Confronted with the state of Israel reborn in our time, the Christian may well ask himself whether its reconstruction is the natural effect of the divine choice claimed by the Jews. This is the last but not the least important question raised by the issue of the chosen people of Israel.
According to Father Marcel Dubois, O.P. who has recently recognized among other things the ecumenical significance of the question of the irreversible status of the chosen people, three levels must be distinguished by Christians when speaking of Israel." The deepest of these levels is the theological one and here the profound link is defined between the Church and the Jewish people, and an effort is made to understand the mystery of the salvation of Jew and Christian which is furthermore, in accordance with Paul's teaching in the epistle to the Romans, 9-11, the mystery of the mission of the chosen to those who are not chosen.
The level immediately above that of theological research is a combination of scriptural and historical elements. Here one can try to pick out the structural relationship between the population of Israel and the land of its ancestors. The Bible shows clearly the link between the choosing of Israel, the gift of revelation and the promise made by God to his people of the land of lands, ha-aretz, the land of Israel. Martin Buber has spoken of a divine choice referring to the people and of another referring to the land: "God joins land and people as two of his possessions, as part of the plan of creation and as a completion of this plan." 22
At this level it seems to us that we can follow the reasoning of the perspicacious Catholic theologian, Kurt Hruby, who states that since the Apostle Paul assures us that the Jewish people is still in possession of the covenant and of the promises (cf. Rom. 9:4) and since the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (cf. Rom. 11:29), "no theological construction permits us to say that the link between the people of Israel and its land has been lost. On the contrary, part of the confidence of Israel in God's faithfulness to his promises lives on in the legitimate expectation of their fulfilment: the return of what, for the Torah, is the only normal situation, the restoration of the people to its own land." 23
The last, most superficial level is the political one and is concerned with the way in which the people of Israel fulfils historically the relationship to the land of its ancestors. And it is at this level that we speak of the state of Israel and that Christian and Jew as equals express personal opinions, determined by their own ideological and cultural considerations.
Obviously these three levels of thought are distinct from one another, but they are certainly not separate. They are linked both subtly and deeply because Israel itself is a complex reality — religious, cultural, social and historical.
1. Benedetto Croce in the preface to the book: I Pavidi, Cesare Merzagora, Istituto Editoriale di Milano, 1946. For an answer from the Jewish side, see Dante Lattes: Benedetto Croce e l'Inutile Martirio d'Israele and Ferruccio Pardo: L'Ebraismo secondo Benedetto Croce e secondo la Filosofia Crociana, Israel, Florence, 1948.
2. Ernest Jones: Saggi di Psicanalisi Applicata I° Estetica, Sociologia, Politica, Guaraldi, Bologna 1971, p. 211.
3. Roger Ikor: Peut on titre Juif Aujourd'hui?, Gras-set, Paris 1968, pp. 78f, 103, 111.
4. Simone Weil: Pensges sans ordre concernant l'Amour de Dieu, Gallimard 1962, p. 51.
5. Enzo Bianchi: "Israele Popolo Eletto" in Servitium no. 4, 1974, p. 4555.
6. Anthologie de la Pensęe Juive with an introduction by Edmond Fleg: "J'ai Lu", Paris 1966, p. 262; Sergio Quinzio and Piero Stefani: Monoteismo e Ebraismo, Rome 1975, p. 114.
7. J.L. Talmon: "La Componente Ebraica nella Storia Mondiale" in l'Europa 15/32, March 1974, pp. 127, 130.
8. Sergio Quinzio and Piero Stefani, op. cit., pp. 110, 113, 117.
9. Sergio Tourn: "Israele: l'Elezione come Problema" in Gioventit Evangelica, June-July 1968, p. 2.
10. Paul-Eugene Dion, 0.P.: Dieu Universel et People Elu. L'Universalisme Religieux en Israel depuis les Originess jusqu'a la Veille des Luttes Maccabeennes, Cerf, Paris 1975, pp. 12, 14.
11. Lucien Cerfaux: La Teologia della Chiesa secondo San Paolo, AVE, Rome 1971, p. 48, note 43.
12. Denise Joudant: Jalons pour une Thgologie Chrętienne d'Israel, Cedre, Paris 1975, pp. 95, 100, 113.
13. Gregory Baum: Les Juifs et l'Evangile, Cerf, Paris 1965, p. 317; Jean-Paul Lichtenberg: "Situation et Destine d'Israel a la Lumiere des Romains IX-XI et d'Ephesiens II" in Foi et Vie, Nov.-Dec. 1965, p. 509; Abbe Kurt Hruby: "Le Peuple de Dieu et l'Etat d'Israel" in Rencontre no. 25-26 1972, p. 71.
14. J.-P. Lichtenberg, O.P.: "Le Peuple de Dieu dans la Tradition Juive et Chretienne" in SIDIC no. 1, 1971, p. 34.
15. Veritę, no. 39-40, 1973, dedicated to "Judaisme Sanctification du Nom".
16. Enzo Bianchi, "La Fede e gli Idoli" in Bozze 78, no. 6, 1978, pp. 15f, 20.
17. Paolo Ricca: "La Chiesa e gli Idoli" in Bozze 78, no. 7-8, 1978, p. 52.
18. Paolo de Benedetti: "La Morte di Mose e altri Esempi", Bompiani, Milano 1971, pp. 143-145.
19. Tommaso Federici: "Etude sur la Mission et la Temoignage de l'Eglise" in SIDIC no. 3, 1979, p. 21.
20. Bernard D. Dupuy, O.P.: "Le Peuple de Dieu dans la Theologie et l'Exegese Chretienne Contemporaire" in Rencontre no. 25-26, 1972, pp. 57ff.; Alexandre Safran: "Le Peuple de Dieu dans la Tradition Juive, Ancienne et Moderne" in the same number of Rencontre.
21. Marcel J. Dubois, O.P.: "Situation Presente de la Theologie du mystere d'Israel. Questions a Examiner et Principes a Garder. Bilan et Prospective" in Lettre aux Amis no. 55-56, 1979, p. 17.
22. Martin Buber: Israele un Popolo e un Paese, Garzanti, Milano 1964, pp. 8, 71.
23 Kurt Hruby: art cit., p. 72.
