The Paradox of Election

Parashat Va’Etchanan, Deuteronomy 3:23–7:11 

Dave Nichol, Ruach Israel, Needham, MA

Our parasha begins with Moses continuing his speeches of exhortation to the Israelites on the plains of Moab, as the Israelites prepare to enter the land of promise. He asks a question that to this day resonates:

Has any god ventured to go and take for himself one nation from the midst of another by prodigious acts, by signs and portents, by war, by a mighty and an outstretched arm and awesome power, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? (Deut 4:34 JPS)

A modern reader may have difficulty accepting the prodigious acts and portents that accompanied the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. But perhaps more challenging, given our culture’s commitment to the equality of all people, is the idea that God would choose one people in particular. 

But Moses doubles down, claiming: “And having loved your ancestors, God chose their heirs after them” (4:37). This one people gets chosen, not because of any merit, but because of who they are related to! It’s bald nepotism! God really liked one guy (Abraham), and 3000 years later everyone with even a tenuous connection to him gets to be part of this special club.

It is a startling paradox of our faith that an eternal, limitless, all-encompassing God chose a family of humans, and, for lack of a better way to describe it, initiated a friendship with them.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l helps us make sense of this in his book The Dignity of Difference. According to the dominant narrative in Western thought, the moral arc of history moves from tribal particularism (bad!) to undifferentiated universalism (good!). But in Genesis, according to R. Sacks, it’s the opposite: universalism, identified as totalitarian, globalist Babel, doesn’t work at all. And what is God’s solution? Choosing a particular family, that of Abraham. Why? Sacks explains,

The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity—by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbor, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut. (p. 58)

In other words, the most elevated expressions of love are not toward “humanity,” but toward actual, individual people. In fact, the only trustworthy love of humanity is that which is rooted in real interpersonal relationships . . . and that even applies to God.

Okay, fine, you might say. It makes sense that God would have a relationship with Abraham. But how can this special love extend to all of Abraham’s descendants three millennia later?

Further, why doesn’t God just love the good people more than the bad people? In a sense this is the claim of certain streams of Christian thought, that God’s elect are those who believe the right things, regardless of their background. Wouldn’t it make more sense if God had a special relationship with the good people?

But that’s not the story of the Torah. As Michael Wyschogrod puts it, Israel’s election is “a carnal election that is transmitted through the body” (Body of Faith, 176). Perhaps it is because the Torah elevates the unconditional love of family over the love of those we like (“even the pagans do that”). Perhaps it’s because the physical world matters, and spirit doesn’t exist separate from body. Or perhaps it is because humans are deeply social animals, and the modern conception of humans as free-floating individuals with identities independent of society and culture is more philosophical fiction than reality.

I think all these are true: familial love is undervalued today; spirit and body are inseparable; and corporate, social identity is fundamental to human life, identity, and flourishing. But whatever the reason, it is clear that the Torah privileges peoplehood, and not just a spiritual peoplehood, but an embodied, physical peoplehood of parents, children, and families.

And then there’s the issue of being chosen. We might occasionally find ourselves echoing Tevye’s complaint in Fiddler on the Roof: ”Maybe you could choose someone else for a change!” But the truth is that as much as we value freedom and choice, the most meaningful relationships in life are not chosen: you can’t shop for different parents or siblings. Or, in the case of a spouse, we make a choice once and get to live with the beauty (and challenges) of being stuck with someone. To paraphrase Antonio García Martínez, an author and tech entrepreneur who wrote eloquently on his decision to convert to Judaism, optionality is overrated.

So, we have this idea that physicality matters and that peoplehood matters. We have this idea from the Torah and from the very fact of the incarnation of Messiah—and not as a solitary, disconnected human, but one who is part of a people, with everything that entails. It would be easy to ask how this idea constrains us, but let’s look instead at how it opens up possibilities.

First of all, this gives us permission to be loyal to our people even through disappointment, disagreement, and conflict. The world is full of people who are willing to love Jews in the abstract, or love Jews that they agree with. The State of Israel may express the highest values of liberalism and justice—or it may not. It matters, but it doesn’t matter enough to undermine our love for acheinu benei Yisrael, our brothers and sisters, the Jewish people. It doesn’t always feel good, just as some familial bonds bring as much heartache as joy, but this bond’s power comes in part from its immutability.

Second, while many of us may intuit that it is important for our Jewish children to marry Jewish, the Torah’s valuing of familial identity provides a theological basis for “marrying in.” In contemporary parlance to say that the ethnicity or religion of a person matters for marriage is practically transgressive. (Jewishness is both ethnicity and religion—and neither—but we will set that aside for now). But understanding the importance of peoplehood and families (also see Deut 6:20–25) allows us to take seriously the notion (which was obvious in earlier times) that marriage is not only about romance, or even just about two individuals in isolation from their past or future families.

Finally, coming to terms with the particularity of God’s love for Israel gives us clarity in our responsibilities to others. Imagine a parent who is so loving and generous to others that their children get squeezed out and feel neglected. It’s not that the parent doesn’t love their children, even love them the most. More likely they just have a hard time saying “no” to the needs of others. That ability to draw boundaries is a prerequisite for meaningful, consistent, loyal relationships. 

Yeshua was quite capable of saying no (e.g. Matt 15:21–27). It was not for lack of compassion or love, but he understood that, as Priya Parker writes, sometimes you need to exclude in order to include. She writes (quoting Barack Obama’s aunt!), “If everyone is family, no one is family.” It is blood that makes a tribe, a border that makes a nation (The Art of Gathering, How We Meet and Why it Matters, p. 38).

Leaning into Ahavat Yisrael, the love of Israel, will always have its share of challenges, as will any relationship that we are stuck with. The wonderful thing is, we are also loved in this same way. Daily when laying tefillin we remind ourselves of God’s words to us through the prophet Hosea, “I will betroth you to Me forever . . . with righteousness, justice, covenant loyalty and compassion. I will betroth you to Me with faithfulness” (2:21–22 TLV). 

The security of being loved immutably will free us to love our people . . . freely. May we follow the examples of Yeshua and Moses, and may all of our actions and words be “rooted and grounded in love” (Eph. 3:17).