The Choosing People

The Chosen People? Of course. Chosen to suffer. My most earnest experiences of faith in the Hebrew God always coincide with my greatest moments of existential despair. A familiar thought to most Jews, I’m sure. And in true Jewish spirit, many of us even dare to state this in the public square. For the Jewish people, faith is intertwined with anguish, humor with cynicism, the divine with the banal. We are a People of contradictions. We marry, and at the height of our joining in holy matrimony, we smash a glass so that we may remember the destroyed Bet Hamiqdash in Jerusalem and the fragility of life. We must remember that we are but dust and ashes, and yet the world was created for us. We wrestle with ourselves, we wrestle with God. Our name, Israel, is a declaration, a prophecy: we will never make it easy on ourselves. 

I am proud of this tradition. We wrestle, I wrestle. I beseech God: Why us? Why must we bear this sublime and ancient burden of Chosenness? I take pride in the question. Six out of seven days of the week, I am an unbothered atheist. But on the seventh day, I take a break from my considered rationality and consider the reality. My namesake, the prophet Yehezkel, prophesied over a thousand years ago that we should experience exile and persecution at the hands of the rest of the nations. Where is the lie? 

Do not mistake me: the gift of Judaism is one for which there are few equals. I am uplifted by the resilience of my ancestors. I derive strength from their humor and inspiration, from their unflinching determination to question all. In this essay alone, I join the time-honored tradition of petitioning the Supreme Judge for a kinder verdict. 

The petition remains unanswered: another time-honored tradition. Like so many other questions in Judaism, I am left to ponder and come to my own conclusions. 

How can we persist in a world that takes such joy in our suffering? 

Why does our persecution have a supernatural longevity? 

What is the source of our resilience? 

The resilience that uplifts my wings is bound to an ancient scroll of kosher parchment, detailing stories of pure obstinacy and pigheadedness. That scroll is our origin story. It tells us who we are, and what binds us together. For millennia we have been reviled for our segregation (imposed or otherwise) and ‘tribalism’. But what is tribalism if not an envious misnomer for community? Here lies the secret of our ancestors. 

The supernatural character of antisemitism is best exhibited in the pure irrelevance of our actions as a People in relation to our persecution. Too much Jewish pride and we are deemed ‘clannish’. Assimilate and we become ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. Antisemitism is the amorphous putty that seals the gaps between the cracks of Gentile society. We will always be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Why not make that place our home? Why must we accept the binary existence presented to us by the gentile world, rather than choosing for ourselves? We are posed the Shakespearian question, “To be, or not to be?”, according to external stipulations. We struggle to answer this question, as relevant today as it was in Napolean France. In doing so, we neglect a far more relevant query: “who are we, and what do we want?”

Modern psychology defines resilience as “the psychological quality that allows some people to be knocked down by the adversities of life and come back at least as strong as before.” Resilience results in post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth is irrigated by the waters of community, meaning-making, spirituality, self-knowledge, and agency. 

Agency. An antonym to victimization. We are commanded to “remember that [we] were slaves in Egypt” (Dvarim 16:3) every Pesach, and we finish the Seder with the proclamation, “Next year in Jerusalem!”. It is the inceptive Hero’s Journey from slavery to freedom. Jerusalem is the symbol of our freedom, the promise of self-actualization in the form of autonomy. Agency. A synonym for Jerusalem. 

How can we muddle through the endless deserts of antisemitism and find our way to the Promised Land? 

The modern political movement of Zionism provides one possible answer to this ancient quandary in the form of the Jewish state of Israel, creating the first time that Jews could exercise our inalienable right to self-determination since our exile. But still, those of us remaining in the Diaspora live in Gentile societies with all of the accompanying challenges and suspicions. What is our Jerusalem? 

Jerusalem represents the center of the Jewish soul. It is a part of who we are, as integral to our bodies as our right hand (Psalms 137:5). While it is a physical locality, we also carry it within us… and we would do well to remember this. Agency is not something that is granted, but realized. 

God made a Covenant with the Jewish people, and we have Chosen to be signatories to that Covenant. 

We must recognize that ‘Chosen’ is bidirectional. As prophesied, we have been and continue to be victimized by other nations. But we have made many choices along the way. We have chosen to continue as Jews despite those who would have us stifle ourselves. We have chosen to unite in the face of antisemitism and create communities. God chose us, and we continue to choose Him. We are not passengers in our journey to the Promised Land, but conductors. This is our Jerusalem. 

I have a dear friend, a self-proclaimed atheist, who keeps kosher. He claims that kosher is a small choice he makes every single day that reminds him of who he is. In doing so, he transfers the locus of control of his identity from external identifiers to his own actions. 

We are but ashes; we are a whole world. We are the Chosen People, and we are the Choosing People. 

I often feel that the world is all too willing to fulfill Yehezkel’s prophecy of exile and persecution upon the Jewish people. The pervasiveness of antisemitic forces begins to feel biblical.  When I experience these crises of faith, in which my atheism is broken by despairing belief, I take solace in the fact that I am part of the Choosing People. I am the descendant of an unbroken line of Jews who signed that Covenant every day without fail, choosing our peoplehood over and over again. 

Their tenacity is the antidote to my despair, and I join them, hands stained with ink as I scrawl my signature alongside theirs.