There is a political undercurrent that only becomes explicit towards the end of the book’s 400 pages. The average shul-goer here may not spend much time fretting over the meaning of being a chosen people, growing up, as Lebens observed, “in a culture where we didn’t really understand the Hebrew in our liturgy”.
But in Hebrew-speaking Israel, references in our prayers may have an altogether more immediate force. His concern is to “defang” Judaism of chauvinistic interpretations of chosenness. “In Israel it can very easily take on a toxicity and that’s why I am troubled by it.”
The book is actually dedicated to the oldest of his three children who was put off religion “mainly because of the toxic views he was exposed to in the religious school system in Israel, not just from students but from teachers saying horrific things… the worst sort of dehumanising rhetoric against non-Jews, frankly a tacit but pervasive Jewish supremacism…
“I am under no illusions that a book like this is going to be read by a mass audience but I felt someone needed to do the heavy intellectual lifting to excavate the concept of chosenness, which is frankly too central to Jewish theology to be expunged entirely. Someone has to show it needn’t, it shouldn’t undergird Jewish supremacism.”
He had actually penned “a very political preface” but cut it out for space because his original text was already overlong. He examines attitudes towards non-Jews in our sources, drawing on rabbinic values such as mishum eivah, the avoidance of animosity, and darkei shalom, the ways of peace, that were invoked to promote civil relations. He also tackles some of the biblical laws that are hardest for today’s readers to swallow, such as the command to wipe out the memory of Amalek – mindful of a contemporary climate when an influential rabbi in Israel can liken Palestinians in Gaza to the archenemy of ancient Israel, with the implication that “the army needs to kill the men, the women and the children. Therefore it was important for me in this book to say the weight of that tradition suggests that the mitzvah isn’t what you think it is.”
In writing, he was also aware of antisemitic warriors on the internet, from both right and left, who pluck quotes out of the Talmud to claim that Judaism is racist. “I felt it was important to respond to that as well.”
[Missing Credit]
He covers a lot of ground, from whether at the end of days other nations will merge with the Jewish people, as some of the prophets seem to envision, to whether God’s choice of Israel reflected some kind of merit or rather was an apparently arbitrary act of providence. In Maimonides’s view, it was the genius of Abraham that enabled him to discern the presence of God in the universe – but he did so by filling in the gaps in the biblical account, for in Genesis, Abraham does not have a backstory that makes it obvious why God’s word might have come to him.
His tour of rabbinic thought includes some kabbalistic metaphysics including the belief that Jews possess an additional, elevated soul – an idea with potentially chauvinistic consequences that later mystics tried to disarm.
His own outlook has been shaped by the legacy of Rabbi Sacks, in particular the concept of “the dignity of difference” whereby Jews stand for diversity in a world against the oppressive demands of uniformity. He offers a sympathetic interpretation of one of the passages – “God has spoken to mankind in many languages” – that landed Rabbi Sacks in hot water with his Orthodox peers when it first appeared (and which was later reworded).
One option to defuse some of the anxieties surrounding the idea of chosenness would be to follow Saadya Gaon, who long ago argued that biblical references such as Israel being a “treasured” people were simply figures of speech that should not be taken too literally.
But for Rabbi Lebens – who will be speaking about the book at this winter’s Limmud Festival in Birmingham – that is too reductionist an approach that “does violence” to the biblical tradition.
“I am inspired by the notion of a mission,” he says. “We do have a mission and if you take that out of the religion, I think you go too far. You sanitise Judaism and I don’t want to do that.”
God’s Chosen People – Judaism’s Most Divisive Doctrine is available from Oxford University Press. A paperback edition is to follow
