Chosenness is about carrying, internalizing, and claiming difference; being willing to stand up for what matters… Embracing chosenness means accepting a moral mandate to speak for and with those whose dignity has been denied.
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Are Jews ‘Chosen’?
A Letter Exchange between Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi: “It is essential that all Jews understand their role as a chosen people, chosen to create and sustain Israel in all its struggles and in all its strivings” and Aryeh Bernstein: “The association of chosenness with superiority reflects the faulty assumption that what I know is all there is to be known, that I can testify to our chosenness because I remember Sinai…” … More »
Chosenness
If Jews are the chosen people, what have we been chosen for? What does choseness demand of us? If we alone were chosen to be brought into the covenant with God, what happens to everyone else? What do you know about other faiths’ ideas of “chosenness”? A key concept in Judaism is that all of humanity is made … More »
A Bolt from the Blue
Biblical theology is at once profoundly universalistic and unabashedly particularistic… To jettison the language of chosenness, or election, is to jettison the Bible itself. … More »
The Hardest Part
The foremost challenge of hope-an ideal, a goal to be striven for-is the long arc of waiting. In our personal lives, this may be comparatively manageable, a matter of days, weeks, or months as we wrestle with some challenge in our professional, avocational, or inner lives. But in our collective life as a people, the … More »