Anti-semantic.

16 August 2001—On a Valentine’s Day episode of “The Simpsons,” Lisa feels sorry for Ralph, who didn’t get any valentines, so she hastily dashes one off and gives it to him. It has a picture of a train with the caption, “I choo-choo-choose you!” Ralph is smitten.

God gave a similar sort of valentine to the Jews thousands of years ago, and it’s kind of been a sticking point ever since. On the telephone the other night, I was talking with a friend of mine about chosenness; we both feel, as many Jews do, that it’s a highly problematic concept, even as conceptions of what it means have shifted over time for some Jews. For example, the original perspective was more that there was a specialness conferred upon Jews, an elite by design, a special gift from God.

Contrast that with a contemporary attitude, one espoused particularly by the Jewish Renewal movement, which tries somewhat to refute the earlier definition. It says, instead, that chosenness is not an award but a responsibility, that Jews are charged with the challenge of tikkun olam, repairing the world.

During the conversation, though, as we were talking about the original definition, I said something like, “But they did think of themselves as the Chosen People.”

My friend corrected me: “We.”

I was taken aback. “Yes, right,” I said, embarrassed by my gaffe. “We.”

I thought about it afterward and throughout the next day, and I realized that my slip of the tongue was not really a slip: I can’t identify with any concept of chosenness. I don’t want to be included in any kind of elite, even one that isn’t averse to accepting strangers into its ranks, in the form of converts, though what makes one worthy of conversion is problematic, too. (I’m saving the topic of intolerance within Judaism for another time.)

Even the contemporary attitude is unacceptable for me. I’m deeply passionate about tikkun olam; the more I learn, the smarter I get, the more progressive I become, the more involved I become. So that’s not the problem — it’s the idea that somehow Jews are better suited to the responsibility than anyone else. It still confers an elitism that I can’t abide. I accept the responsibility, but I’m no better suited to it than anyone else I know.

My further problem, however, is the twisting the definition of chosenness has been put through to get us to this point where we conceive it differently because it fits us better. Jewish scholars constantly argue fine points of Halakha (Jewish law) and Midrash (teachings); it’s an honored tradition, one encouraged by the very name Israel, which means “one who wrestles with God.” At the same time, I think it can be stretched to the limits of credibility. An example:

The Torah portion from a couple of weeks ago dealt with Chapter 3 of Deuteronomy, which, to be brief, covers a couple of conquest massacres on the final leg of the journey to the Promised Land (God’s way of rewarding the Chosen People). The chapter ends with a plea by Moses, who, along with all but two of the Israelites who left Egypt, had been condemned to wander the desert for forty years, forbidden to enter the Promised Land. Moses asks God one last time to relent and let him into the Promised Land, and God, one last time, refuses, telling Moses instead to go up to the mountain and look at the land so that he would know where he was not allowed to go.

At a Jewish Renewal Shabbat service I attended, the person who volunteered to describe the portion gave a remarkably different interpretation. What she said, essentially, drawing on texts other than the Torah, was that apparently Moses, over those forty years, had asked God to relent some 553 times. This final time, God gave in a little bit, and at least let Moses see the land. This the volunteer presented as a compromise, and as a lesson: if you really want something, persist in the face of refusal, for in the end you will gain a little bit of ground, perhaps not what you wanted in the first place but something valuable nonetheless.

I was comforted by this lesson; I hadn’t read the portion for myself, but the lesson had immediate meaning for me. Banzai had just passed away three days earlier, and it was significant to me that in the end, he finally got food he had been denied for a very long time. He must have pleaded with us at least 553 times, and we finally relented, bestowing him with actual tuna.

When I got home and read the portion, though, I felt like I had been misled. That wasn’t anything like what the Torah said. I’ve looked at two different translations, and they are pretty consistent with each other. The instruction to look at the Promised Land was hardly God’s way of giving ground; it read more to me like rubbing salt in the wound. Once I read it, I felt cheated by the reinterpreted description. If there was any lesson in the portion, it was that God’s inflexible wishes had to be followed to the letter, or else.

There are tons of similarly problematic sections in the Torah, all with their apologists, reinterpreters, and equivocators. Take, just for example, the establishment of homosexuality as a capital crime. The text is clear on this point (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13), and yet, Michael Lerner, a rabbi who wrote an influential text on Jewish Renewal, attempts to work his way around the issue by suggesting, among other things, that the prohibition against a man “hav[ing] intercourse with a man as if with a woman” is moot anyway because men have intercourse with men in a way that is typically different than how men have intercourse with women (though there’s a whole section on it in your local adult video store and elsewhere on the Web, if that strikes your fancy).

He’s trying to talk his way around the problem without denouncing this part of the Torah outright, and it’s a semantic disaster. If I had my way, we would simply strike those passages from the Torah altogether, because they’re wrong, end of story. In my view of the world, anyway.

Follow the example of Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, a branch of Judaism established in the mid 1900s. He was so bothered by the concept of chosenness that he struck passages from Torah blessings that espoused it. No equivocation, just long-overdue action.

That’s a kind of Judaism I can choo-choo-choose.

your thoughts?