God’s Beloved: A Defense of Chosenness

One of Judaism’s central premises is that God has a unique love for the Jewish people, in the merit of its ancestor Abraham, whom God loved millennia ago. This notion may make many readers uncomfortable, as they may feel that a righteous God would love all human beings, and therefore all peoples, equally and in the same way. Nevertheless, the notion of God’s special love for Israel must be stated and understood, for without it one cannot comprehend much that is unique about Judaism’s moral vision.

There is no question that to speak of the Jews as a “chosen nation” is to speak of their being charged with a universal mission: Communicating the monotheistic idea and a set of moral ideals to humanity. In designating Israel as a “nation of kingly priests” and a “light unto nations,”¹ God, according to the medieval exegete Obadiah Seforno, commanded the Jews to “teach to the entire human race, so that they may call in the name of God, to serve him together.”²

It is, however, often overlooked that the doctrine of Israel’s chosenness also contains a strongly particularistic idea: That God chose the Jewish people for this mission out of his love for their forefather Abraham. The book of Deuteronomy is unambiguous on this point:

To you it was shown, so that you might know that the Eternal, he is God; there is none else beside him.… And because he loved your fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them, and brought you out in his sight with his mighty power out of Egypt; to drive out nations from before you, greater and mightier than you are, to bring you in, to give you their land for an inheritance, as it is this day.³

The Torah later states that God’s love for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was then bestowed upon their children:

The Eternal did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all peoples. But because the Eternal loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, has the Eternal brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.⁴

God loves the Jewish people because they are, according to Seforno, “the children of his beloved.”⁵ If the Jews are chosen to serve for all eternity as a light unto the nations, it is because God, in the words of the theologian Michael Wyschogrod, “sees the face of his beloved Abraham in each and every one of his children as a man sees the face of his beloved in the children of his union with his beloved.”⁶ This unique, preferential love that is bestowed upon Israel, even when it sins, is often depicted in the prophets as being familial in nature: When God describes in the book of Jeremiah how he sustains Israel in its exile, he says, “I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, in which they shall not stumble; for I am a father to Israel.”⁷ The Jewish people also beholds God as a merciful mother: “As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you,”⁸ he assures Israel. So, too, in the book of Isaiah, does God respond to Israel’s fear that “God has left me and forgotten me” after the destruction of the First Temple by asking, “Can a woman forget her suckling child, refrain from mercy on the child of her womb?”⁹

Read the full essay from Azure.