Jeremy Rosen
The Chosen People
Jeremy Rosen | The Chosen People | 07.20.21
- Gosh, it’s hot in New York, isn’t it?
It’s hot and muggy and what’s it like where you are? Is there a nice breeze?
I’m actually, yeah, I am in New York. It’s very hot. I’m actually with my kids in the Hamptons, so.
Oh, that’s nice. Do you have to babysit or they take care of themselves?
They babysitting me. No, I’m only kidding. I’m only kidding. No, I do, I love to babysit my little granddaughter, so.
Yeah.
Justine is eight months pregnant. She’s about to have a baby and she’s just hung her show. We’ve just hung her show at Goodman Gallery in East Hampton.
Ah, that’s interesting.
Yes, I’ll send you images, so it’s beautiful. And now we having fun. We’re having a wonderful time. Thank you.
Oh, that’s good.
Yeah. As we said, you can’t always choose the music that you get, but you can choose how to dance to it, right?
Nice expression, that, yeah.
That’s great.
Grandkids are great. The other thing that strikes me as interesting is that my kids, those who were the wildest kids have become the strictest parents.
Yeah, it’s funny. Neither of my… No, my kids were actually quite good. Well, I don’t know. I don’t think I was a disciplinarian. They were not destructive, so, and not very wild. I was so naughty myself, so nothing’s changed. So let’s have a look here, and I think I’m going to hand over to you. We’re a couple of minutes in, and, yeah, I’m looking forward to today’s lecture, on “The Chosen People.” Thank you so much.
Thank you, Wendy. So, everybody, the chosen people. It’s such a controversial subject and a subject that, unfortunately, resonates nowadays with antisemitism. And whenever I think of the subject, I think of that famous line from “The Fiddler on the Roof” in which the poor, oppressed Russian Tevye turns to God and says, “For God’s sake, can’t you choose somebody else for a change?” And so the question really is what does it mean to say a chosen people? And does a chosen people have anything to do with being a better person or a better people? The Torah, the Bible, where this comes from originally, is full of a series of phrases, and the Hebrew word is bahir, to choose, to pick.
When you pick a team or you pick one flower as opposed to another. The first references to this term bahir, to choose, in the Bible comes with choosing a wife or choosing men to fight in an army. The choice is made. One hopes they’re good at what they do, but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it’s the right choice. And the choice in itself has nothing in it to indicate superiority. But later on in the Bible, when after Mount Sinai and the revelation to the Jewish people that they have a particular mission in life and they have a particular constitution, you have the expression that if God says, and this is a big if, if you are prepared to do what I ask of you and you’re prepared to behave in a particular way, then you will be a nation of priests. You will be a people who will have a role and a function to set an example.
An example, as I say, is a moral and unethical one as outlined in the Torah. So there is a statement that God has selected us for a particular mission, a particular function in life, to try to set a good example. But everything is conditional. Nothing is what I would call intrinsic. Nobody is intrinsically a better person or a good person. It all depends on behaviour and what they actually do. There’s two interesting examples of how this works in the narrative of the Bible. When the children of Israel come out of Egypt and they are immediately faced by this attack by the Amalekites, and it’s a strange attack because it’s not as though the Israelites were invading their territory. They were heading to Canaan where Judea is today.
The Amalekites were like the Philistines on the coast or rather like in the area of Gaza. And there was no reason for them to feel threatened, but they attacked and not only did they attack, they attacked from behind the weak and the stragglers and the poor. And the command came from Moses to Joshua to choose men who would go and fight against Amalek. And in the battle against Amalek, Moses was sitting on a hill overlooking the battle. And according to the Torah, when his arms were raised, the Israelites were defeating the Amalekites. When his arms were down, the Amalekites were defeating the Israelites.
And as the battle raged, his hands got tired. And so the story goes that Aaron and a man called Hur, was a brother-in-law, helped keep the arms up in the air and for as long as they were up, the Israelites won. That’s all the Torah tells us. Then there’s another story that comes many years later when the children of Israel once again are betraying Moses betraying everything he stands for. There’s a plague of snakes. And Moses takes an image of a snake and puts it on a stick and holds a stick up in the air and says, “Anybody who looks up at this will be cured. And anybody who doesn’t, won’t.”
The rabbis later on turn around and say, “This doesn’t make any sense. What difference does it make if your hands are up in the air or down? That can’t make any logic at all.” And they say the answer was this, by pointing up, Moses is saying, you are fighting for a cause. The cause has to be a just cause. If you’re just fighting for the sake of a punch up, whoever’s got the biggest fist or whoever gets a punch in first wins. But if you’re fighting for a cause for justice for the right thing, you have an additional impetus. You have a different spirit in the battle you enter into.
So it’s not just might is right, it’s the cause that has to be right too. And the message of this very clearly is that the Israelites for all that they have been given a certain role and a task and held out the promise that if things went well, they’d have a close relationship with God, it is not automatic. And so many times in the Bible, God so to speak, turns around and says to Moses, “I’m fed up with these people. I want to kill ‘em. I want to destroy them,” after the golden calf at various stages. And Moses then turns around and says to God, “Oh come on, God, you can’t possibly do this. What will people say that you took them out of Egypt to destroy them in the wilderness?”“
Now of course, we’re not taking this literally as God has to change his mind or God is subject to sort of arguments, Whichever way you understand whatever God is. But it’s the message that counts and the message that counts is there’s nothing special in you. And later on, much later on in Deuteronomy, Moses says, "There’s nothing special about you. You are not chosen by God because you are better than anybody or because you are bigger than anybody. You’re nothing. You’re a small little bunch of people. Your selection, if you like, is your burden. It’s your task in order to achieve certain standards and goals.” In the same way that in the Book of Deuteronomy, this expression of chosen applies to a place.
The place where God wants to hold his sanctuary. It doesn’t actually mention Jerusalem, but the implication is that there will be a place, but this place may move from one place to another, from Shiloh to Bethel until finally it gets Jerusalem. So it’s if you like an expression of hope, an expression of potential, but not an expression of perfection or superiority. The truth is that the Bible itself goes out of its way to emphasise the fact that all human beings are equal. And yet, you can see for example, examples of the Canaanites where the Israelites are told to go into the country and to destroy them.
Once again, this is an example of the Bible expressing certain ideals or talk about the Canaanites and indeed the Egyptians was not against them personally, it was against their ideology and the dangers of their ideology because paganism at that stage stood for no moral code. A person does what you feel like doing. Their traditions were traditions of child sacrifice, of temple prostitution, of a whole way of life that was the opposite of the more disciplined life that the Israelites were supposed to be living according to.
And yet for all that, for all the statements you can find in the Torah “get rid of the Canaanites,” the fact is they coexisted with the Canaanites. For generations afterwards, they were interacting with them. Sometimes they were fighting against 'em, sometimes they were not. But they did not exterminate the Canaanites. This was more an expression like when, for example, the Bible talks about you do this, you’ll be put to death. It doesn’t really feel like it doesn’t want to throw death around the place 'cause it was almost impossible to carry out the death penalty given all the restrictions that the Bible put on witnesses and evidence and warning and things of that kind. But it’s an expression of overall ultimate goal.
Within the civil law of the Torah, every citizen, every person who comes into the country and abides by the laws of the country has to be given equal civil rights. So the ger, the stranger, not the ger meaning the convert, but the ger meaning anybody coming to live within a country abiding by the laws of that country was given equal civil rights on all issues. Charitable issues, civil issues, justice. So the Bible already lays down the fact that you can welcome people from different backgrounds. It doesn’t matter so long as they abide by your basic fundamental principles.
And in fact, the prophets of the Bible are speaking to non-Jews as much as they are speaking to Jews. Their message is a universal message where everybody’s coming together, all the nations coming to their dream of Mount Zion. But basically it means humanity. They’re concerned with humanity. And the Bible stresses this idea that we’re all the children of one God. We are in that sense, all of us as human beings chosen to live a better life if that’s what we are prepared to take upon ourselves.
So the other feature of what people mean by the idea of chosen is to differentiate Jews from non-Jews in terms of a value judgement . “Ah, you Jews, you only take care of yourselves.” Whereas look at the Bible, look at the Book of Ruth and look at all the other laws that talk about taking care of everybody no matter who they were because they are human beings. A universal idea. A famous prophet Micah says in his famous line, “You know what God wants of you? Just to do justice, to be kind, to walk humbly with your God.” Doesn’t say to be specifically one religion or another. It’s humanity that matters.
And in that we are just one part, but we’re one part with an example to set, to use, if you like the Christian idea, the idea of mission, the idea of example of trying to show a preferable way of living. By the time you get to the Talmud, this message is transferred into another important principle. By the time you get to the Talmud, there are people who are saying, “Ours is the only religion, the only religion that counts. All other religions are not worth what we are worth.” We have never ever said that. We have a principle laid down in the Talmud of the sons of Noah.
That is to say, anybody who abides by the seven basic laws of Noah has a place, as they put it, in the world to come, is a righteous person. What are the seven Noahide laws? Basically number one is that you don’t worship idols. Number two is that you set up courts of law. Number three is that you don’t murder, that you don’t steal, that you are not cruel to animals. These are basic universal laws that if everybody adheres to them, then you are considered to be, if you like, a card carrying member of the Israelite community.
So you have the idea of the sons of Noah, the seven Noahide Laws, everybody’s involved. Then you have the idea of the pious of the nations, the righteous of the nations. You know, there’s a nice idea expressed in the Talmud that there are 36 saintly people in the Jewish world. We don’t know who they are, but thanks to them being so saintly, we are, if you like, kept going by God because they make up for everybody else. Now there is a version of that, some say 30, some say 35. But there’s another version of the Talmud, in Gittin, which says there are 40 non-Jewish pious people who are keeping the world alive.
Now, if you just think of that in the terms of proportion, those 40 must be extra super, super, super because they have to carry millions and millions and millions. But I say this sort of jokingly, but essentially, throughout the Jewish tradition, you have the idea it is goodness of the human being that counts, and that is the priority on every single level. Then the question, of course, is do we have any distinction between Jews and between non-Jews in the value system? And here you have an interesting argument between two rabbis in the Talmud. One of them is the famous Rabbi Akiva.
Most of you will have heard of this wonderful man. He was, if you like, a political activist. But he was a wonderful man and he was a man who actually was martyred by the Romans and he was tortured to death. And they asked Rabbi Akiva, “What is the most important law in the whole of the Torah?” And he, echoing Hillel said, “Love your neighbours yourself. That’s written in the Torah and that is the most important principle in the whole of the Torah.” He had a colleague called Ben Azzai, and Ben Azzai said, “No, I don’t agree with you because it is possible to interpret love your neighbour as your neighbour.
But what about somebody who’s not your neighbour, who has a different point of view? So I say,” said Ben Azzai, “That the most important principle is in the second chapter of Genesis, where it says, 'This is the history of mankind’ in which clearly God is concerned with mankind. It is mankind that is the fundamental principle of all in Jewish life.” So you can see this debate about particularism and universalism. I’ve always been impressed and love this wonderful poem, the Song of Life that was written by a great rabbi who was a poet, who was the first chief rabbi of Palestine under the mandate, a man called Abraham Isaac Kook. He had a son who became identified with a settler movement. But Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was a genius and a saint and a most wonderful person.
And in this poem he said, “ We all of us sing songs, some of us sing a song of our own soul and that satisfies us. Some of us sing a song of humanity. Some of us sing a song of our own people. But the greatest song is the song of those who can sing all of these songs together.” And that is the fundamental message of the opinion that the rabbis express based on the Torah, on the idea of humanity. So where do we get this notion, this crazy notion of the chosen people as somehow we are better than anybody else? If we go back in history, it’s interesting the time of the Greeks, 2003, 400 years ago, a lot of the Greek philosophers admired Judaism for its morality, for its discipline.
And in fact both under the Greeks and under the Romans, they liked Jewish soldiers mercenaries because they did stop for Shabbat, they did have discipline and they could be relied upon. So you have a whole list of people, Greek philosophers, I’ll mention their names, but you know, you probably won’t have heard of them ‘cause I hadn’t heard of them for most of my philosophical life. Diadochi in the third century, Theophrastus, Hecateus, Megasthenes, Posidonius, Apollonius, all of them writing nice things about Jews.
But at the same time there was competition from Greek and Roman merchants and there were Greek merchants who didn’t like the Jews. They thought they were too fierce in, if you like, in business, they were doing too well. There was always rivalry and it continued for a long, long time afterwards. And because of this you also get those people like Apion, famous one under Rome who became what we would call anti-Semitic. “Can’t stand the Jews. Don’t like the Jews.”
The biggest complaint the Greeks had against the Jews was circumcision. Because as you know, Greeks like the Olympic Games, everybody naked and they thought there was something wrong with the Jews who didn’t respect their naked bodies and try to change it a little bit. But what the Romans didn’t like being the sort of people they were was Jews wanted to take one day off in the week. They didn’t believe in work as taking one day off in the week. They didn’t like the fact that Jews seemed not to want to mix with them at their orgies.
And so the Jews were seen as being exclusive of wanting to mix only with their own. And that became the major complaint of the Romans. Except of course that we know throughout every society there are elites and not elites that like mixing with their own. It goes through all classes. You are familiar with those around you and that tends to be the natural response. It’s nothing wrong with that so long as you don’t in any way affect negatively other people. Nothing wrong with preserving your own culture.
So it was interesting that at the time of the Greeks and the Romans, everybody thought that they were special, that they had a special mission in life. The Greeks did, the Romans did, the Persians did, the Parthians did. Every one of them thought that while they were on top, they were top dogs and they were there by right, rather like the divine right of kings. Why should a king be any superior to anybody else? But they had this idea of divine rights. The real problem began with the rise of Christianity, because Christianity believed that it had taken over from Judaism and superseded it. There was the Old Testament, the old deal between God and the Israelites. And in this old deal, God said, “No, you are the people I want to set an example.”
Christianity comes along and says, “Quite rightly, look, you Jews have done a terrible job. You’ve betrayed your God time and time again. You’re useless. We are now taking over from you and we have become the new Israel, the New Testament.” And so, for example, both in Revelation, the Book of Revelation, and the Book of Peter, you have this expression. You, you Christians, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession. Once you were not a people, you were the Jews.
Now you are the people of God, a new people. Once you didn’t have mercy, once you didn’t have Jesus to protect you, but now you’ve received mercy from Jesus, so now you are the chosen people. And that idea of the chosen people in Christianity was behind the Crusades. There was a famous book written by a man called Guibert de Nogent. They just stop at Francos, the mission of the Franks to start the Crusade, in which he said, “We are the chosen people. We’ve been chosen by God to avenge every failure in humanity that ever existed.”
And interestingly enough, to this very day, Mormonism thinks it’s chosen, Seventh Day Adventists think they’re chosen, Rastafarians think they’re chosen, Farrakhan’s Nation of of Islam think they’re chosen, and not far away, the Nazis thought they were chosen. So the question is, what does this statement mean today? And I believe that it is no more than saying that we Jews should be setting an example according to our constitution and our law. If we don’t, we are no different to anybody else. We can be defeated, we can be destroyed, we can be attacked, we can be thrown out, we can lose our money.
All these things are going to happen to us. Nothing automatically is going to protect us. Now, I know there are people who say within Judaism that we are better because we keep the Torah, but there is actually no basis in reality for saying this. And besides, every group that says this, you can find people in it who betray the very Torah they claim to be standing for. So what then is the nature of this? Is it possibly because people say this because we have succeeded in surviving and people wonder what this means. But you can take this in one of two ways.
You can take this as many people have over the years, taken this to mean the reason why the Jews have survived is because they’re in league with the devil. There’s something horrible about them. Otherwise, how do you explain why they could have survived? How can you explain that this small group of a small few million of people can hold out against everybody else, can survive when every single major nation in the world has either been against it or try to destroy it? It doesn’t make any sense. It must be diabolical.
Or the other thing we can turn around and say, look, there are other explanations of this. The explanations of this are simply that when a people is pushed from one place to another, it has to learn how to adapt. It learns how to make the best out of a bad situation. We are a tradition that has a strong sense of a written tradition of the Torah. We are encouraged to study and these are the tools that help us cope when we have to deal with new situations. There are tools within the Torah that have enabled us to survive, but they don’t automatically make us better.
So this survival or the fact that so many of us have done well, but look at those who people will point to and say they’ve done well. These are people who might at some stage come genetically from a Jewish background, but you can hardly say that they are examples of the Jewish religious tradition, which of course raises another issue about how we define a Jew but that’s a discussion for another time. The one issue I think that disturbs every one of us at the moment is the idea of racism and the idea that somehow white means that we are bad, that we are automatically racist. And of course within Judaism we have never ever had any law, any law that indicates any kind of racism.
The distinction is simply between those who adhere to our tradition and those who choose not to adhere to our tradition. Doesn’t mean those who don’t adhere to our tradition are bad in any way. But in terms of if you like citizenship and the rewards of citizenship, you have to be a citizen and to be a citizen, you have to agree to certain ideas. So the wherever you go in the Jewish world, even the most ultra orthodox, you will find black and Asian converts who are accepted within the community. So we can’t be accused on any level of being racist. What we might be able to be accused of is taking care of our own.
But in almost every situation where Jews establish organisations to take care of their own, they also take care of others. Whether it is the Hebrew HIAS, the Hebrew immigration, or whether it is whatever kind of organisation you have against discrimination, the Jews have always been in the forefront of fighting it. The fact that there may have been individual Jews who have been racist. Yes, there are individual Jews who are thieves and gangsters and do horrible things, but that doesn’t characterise the whole of the nation.
So there is no ground whatsoever, when you look at the Jewish sources of saying that chosen people means we are intrinsically better. The most that it’s possible to say is that we feel we have been burdened with the tradition. We have an obligation and it’s a heavy obligation to adhere to the constitution that we’ve been given. It is so heavy that the vast majority of Jews don’t adhere to it. And so if they don’t adhere to it, automatically they can’t be included in list of chosen, if that’s what you understand it. Chosen only applies if you behave according to a particular tradition. This gives you a relationship with God, a special relationship with God. But not everybody believes in God.
And even without that, there is still an obligation to be good citizens, honest, fair, pursuing truth as the Prophet Micah says. Truth and justice, that is the obligation. That is what we all have and that is the only feature that in a sense characterises the obligation of the Jewish people. Being chosen means being burdened and that’s why poor old Tevye said, “I’m fed up with a burden, I can’t handle it anymore.” And that sadly is why so many Jews abandoned Judaism. And it’s why so many of our young people have turned away entirely. They don’t want to be burdened by being different. They don’t want to be burdened by having to do something that marks them out as different from others.
Whereas we who are committed feel the privilege of being committed as well as the burden. So I regard this expression as a privilege and a burden, something to aspire to and to work hard but in no way does it make me better than anybody else. In no way is it a way of distinguishing Jews from non-Jews ethically or morally. It is a specific cause that we have to maintain a particular culture and that is what, if you like, makes us different.
So there’s my presentation, I’d be happy to answer any kind of questions you might have concerning it. Q&A and Comments
Q: “Are Ben & Jerry amongst the chosen?” A: Chosen for what? For making ice cream? I think they’re very good at that. But if you are asking me whether anybody, whether an actor or a businessman simply is chosen on the basis of their ideas or whether they have necessarily any particular extra knowledge of certain situations, I don’t think so.
And Arlene has asked if individuals can be intrinsically good or bad. And this is a fundamental difference between Catholicism and Judaism. You’ve heard of the idea of original sin. The idea of original sin is that thanks to Adam and Eve disobeying God, all human beings are intrinsically bad, original sin. The original sin has made us all bad. And the only way you can escape from the burden of being bad is if we have grace. And grace can only come from accepting Jesus as our redeemer. If we accept Jesus as our redeemer, the burden of original sin can be lifted. And if not, it remains in place. Judaism has never taken that point of view, although you can find similar points of view to original sin in the Talmud.
But overall, what Judaism believes is that human beings were born neutral. In Genesis, it says there is a tendency in human beings to do bad things, but it says this tendency comes with youth. from youth, it’s not inbuilt. And so we believe that within humans there’s a tendency to do good and a tendency to be bad. We call it the good inclination and the bad inclination. And we struggle with these throughout our lives, but this is struggling with ourselves to behave well. The relationship we have with God is there all the time, whether we’re a sinner or not. We might not cultivate it as much as we should. We’ve got a long way to go but it’s there constantly. It doesn’t need special grace. Grace is there all the time directly between us and God.
So we do not believe that human beings are born intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. We do not believe that our religion is the only way to heaven. So as I’ve said before, you can be a good non-Jew and get to heaven. You can be a good Christian and a Muslim and a Buddhist and everything else and get to heaven. We just feel that our route to heaven is helped by, if you like, more intensively engaging with a religious expression. Have you heard of the limerick how God to choose the Jews? Others still the… Yes, how others still… That those who are Jewish, God should choose and those who swear the Jews are Jewish, God should choose. Yes, it’s cute limerick.
Q: People tend to lack God’s perspective of the Jews as obligated and burdened as I think you say in your presentation. Did God know that? A: Now the trouble is one never knows what God knows. And I think God has to be taken out of this idea of a superman, of a superhuman being. God is a non-physical, non-material, if you like, at best you can say energy or if you can say dimension. Whatever it is, God is, in this sense, not like a human being. So we have all these questions we have about God. If God can do anything, can he create a stone which he can’t lift? And you can’t win with that. Either he can create a stone which he can’t lift or he can’t create it, he can’t. This all comes from this nonsense of trying to think of God as a human being. Or if you often use this idea, God knows what’s going to happen. Does that mean we have no choice? Well, it depends what you mean by know. There’s a difference between knowing and foreseeing, knowing and predicting, being in space and beyond space. Most of the problems people have with God are because they think God is a human being, and the truth of the matter is that Abraham’s responsible for this because Abraham turns to God before the men of Saddam and he says, “Will the God of all heaven not do justice?” As if God has to perform like a judge in a high court. But it’s a way of saying justice is the most important thing for us. And justice is what, if you like, our God approves of.
People tend to lack God’s perspective of Jews as obligates burden to… I just said that. I’m sorry. This is from Stephen. “There’s a Midrash which says Torahs were offered to all the nations, the other nations were spared as being too onerous. And only Israelis accepted it, even in more merit, unconditionally, will do and we’ll see in this sense, the Jews could be said not to be chosen but the choosing people.” Well that’s a nice idea that Midrash, you know, Midrash does not take things seriously. That for that same Midrash which says God offered the Torah to other nations, which is a lovely idea, it also says God turned Mount Sinai upside down on the Jews and said either you accept this or I’m going to smash you.
So you’ve got Midrash that contradict all the time and it’s the message that counts. And the message from this which counts is that Torah’s not just for us, it’s for anybody who wants it. There are people who don’t want it. The people who want to be gang leaders and corrupt and immoral. For them, they don’t want it. So these are, if you like, metaphors.
Q: “Am I right in thinking what pressure was brought to Rabbi Sacks who implied God was there for everyone? He had to change his book to say only the Jews of the chosen people.” A: That’s not quite right, but it’s almost right. What Rabbi Sacks had to remove from his book and I tried my best to persuade him not to and it didn’t work, was to say, there are other truths and of course there are other truths. And of course he believed that. And I believe that and any reasonable person could believe it. Even within Judaism, there are other truths. It is true that a Kohen has to function as a Kohen. It is true that I as a non Kohen must not function as a Kohen. So he’s got a truth and I’ve got a truth. It depends what you mean by truth.
But yes, unfortunately, in our tradition, we have our fundamentalists, we have our God squad, we have our Tokhath mothers and our heretic hunters. And this all comes from insecurity. It comes from the insecurity from 2000 years of having a chip on your shoulder because you become defensive. And it’s not 2000 years, imagine as I mentioned this before, I hate to have to mention it again. You’ve looked at the world through the perspective that barely a generation ago, the whole of the world turned its back on the Jews while the Nazis were murdering us. And hardly anybody, there was some, but hardly anybody percentage-wise, was there to help us.
So that being the case, we are so defensive, we have such a chip on our shoulder that I’m not surprised. But I think, you know, if you hit somebody in the stomach, they tighten up and we’ve been hit in the stomach so much. And look at us now, anti-Semitism has such a massive rise everywhere around the world. And whether there’s a reason for it or not because people don’t like Israel or Israel does the wrong thing, that’s not the point. This is Jew hatred because it is saying that Jews cannot be the same as everybody else. They’re not allowed to have a home of their own. And so this is happening around us and this is affecting our youngsters. And so I’m not surprised that we are defensive and in certain ways that’s the only way to cope.
Yanna Alfred, “The 40 righteous non-Jews are even more general, and it specified number 40 throughout cultural language and the release to the present days of meaning of many.” That’s quite true.
“The message of Talmud’s 40 in the context you meant is not merely there are righteous among non-Jews, but there are are countless righteous.” That’s a legitimate point, a very valid explanation and for mentioning it. Thank you. Very good.
Ah John, welcome back from Heckler’s corner. “I can find nothing of this degree until you quoted Micah, but to do justice, love, kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” And then you said, “Thus, it doesn’t specify which God as long as you walk humbly with him. This smacks of universalism, the idea that all men will ultimately enjoy the afterlife however they understand that.” Well look, first of all, let’s not talk about the after world 'cause I don’t know what it means and I don’t know it’s really in essence a way of saying try your best on this earth. There are other dimensions beyond that you must try to reach.
But we are concerned, Judaism is concerned with this world now. Throughout Judaism, the Midrash says this world is like an orchard before the palace. If you don’t prepare yourself in the orchard, you don’t get into a palace. We don’t know what the next world is going to be. I’m not saying that the universalism means that everything is the same. After all, that would mean I’m implying that witchcraft is the same. That the witchcraft’s understanding of God or a pagan’s understanding of God is the same with mine.
No it’s not. I don’t say that. What I say is that every human being has the capacity to reach God or to reach a degree of spiritual enlightenment, whatever they want to call it. God’s covenant with the Jews was that they should behave in a particular way to set a good example of how a religious person should behave, which is what Christianity thinks to this day, that they should do that. So if we are to be criticised for being a chosen people, let’s criticise Christianity for being a chosen people and leave us out of this altogether and stop throwing it at us in our face. If you are honest, you’ll throw it in Christian’s face too.
“Matching the prophets who spoke of God, their wonderful plans for Israel.” Yes, but his wonderful plans for Israel were for a good, ethical nation in which people behave ethically. And this is the reason why the first commonwealth of the Jews was destroyed. The second was destroyed because they did not behave ethically and why the second temple was destroyed because they did not behave ethically. So from this you can see it’s behaving ethically, which is the condition of the Jews surviving in one form or another.
Dina’s iPad, “They’re referring to withdraw from B&J on West Bank.” Yes, I know that’s what they’re referring to, their withdrawal and they’re entitled to choose this and therefore so are those Jewish-owned companies who are entitled to boycott Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. That’s a free world. In a free world, you do as you please and you face the consequences.
Q: “I understand that Jesus is a circumcised Jew. What made him unpopular amongst Jews at that time?” A: Barry Epstein. Well, I don’t know that he was unpopular amongst the Jews at that time. There are two basically movers in the case of Jesus. One of them are the Sadducees, the priests who claim he insulted the temple but there’s no evidence that he did insult the temple. And he may be objected to money changers, but money changers at that time were mainly helping people buy sacrifices to go into the temple. If there was a problem, the problem will not have been with the Jews. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I’m the king of the Jews.” The Jews would simply reply by saying, “Okay, prove it.” There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I’m the son of God,” 'cause the Jews believe we’re all the sons of God.
So the only problem might have been with the Romans. And the Romans only objected to somebody who was a threat politically. So if they killed him, they must have thought he was some kind of destabilising threat. But of course Jesus was circumcised and Jesus lived and claimed to live as part of the Pharisee community. And therefore if Jesus were to come back on earth today, he would recognise and be more in common with Judaism than he’d have with Christianity. Sorry if I upset some of you by saying that, but that’s the fact. He would’ve kept Shabbat and Shavuot and all the things that we still adhere to. It was Paul who said, “Jettison all the laws,” not Jesus. And again, even when Jesus apparently offended the Pharisees, he said in the New Testament, “I come to change neither a jot nor a tittle.” So if he didn’t want to change, how come everybody else did?
Thank you very much, Carla.
Q: Peter Sevitt, “A light unto the nations. Would you consider this familiar of being a chosen people?” A: Yes, light is an example. Showing the light is there, but if you don’t have a light, if you blow your own light up, then there’s darkness. “I often said of being a spotlight allows others to carry the murky business in the shadows.”
Neil and Jan. That’s a nice idea but the truth of the matter is we all do.
Victoria. Hi, Victoria, nice to see you again. I haven’t seen you for ages. “You didn’t mention the mystical Kabbalistic strain of Judaism where there’s definitely the idea of special Jewish soul. Some Christians understandably don’t like it.” Yes, that’s quite true and some Jews don’t like it. I don’t like the idea that there is such a thing as a specific Jewish soul. I like the idea we can all develop a spiritual soul. But you are quite right. That is part of the mystical Kabbalistic strain, particularly you find it in Chabad-Lubavitch, that all of us have two souls. We have an animal soul which keeps us going in a physical sense and we have a spiritual soul. And some people think only Jews have a spiritual soul. My opinion is that these ideas developed at a time of great persecution of the Jews and it was a way of the Jews reinforcing themselves, giving themselves hope and giving themselves a reason to go on surviving. So it was if you like, a kind of a life belt for them but I don’t personally take that very seriously.
Thank you, Romaine.
Q: “Judaism is racist. What about sons of Noah fated to be hewers of wood and drawers of water i.e slaves?” A: No, what that is talking about is some of the sons of Noah were considered to be superior to other. Now this superiority of the sons of one class or another was not a racist point of view 'cause if it would’ve been a racist point of view, it would’ve applied to the tribes of Africa that were mentioned. But in fact, it was applied to the tribes of Canaan. Canaan or the Semites. The Semites weren’t black in that sense. Other people translated it afterwards into being against black, particularly the South African Dutch Reform church.
But in fact, if you look through sources, you see the wife of Moses was was, if you like black. There was no problem about that. And so this was merely a way of explaining at the time why the sons of Noah, some tribes did better than others. Some if you like, were more successful and some were less successful. But again, if you take the idea of slaves, slavery was an idea that belonged back then. And even though there is reference to slavery in the Bible, there are two kinds of slaves. There’s the slave who was a Hebrew slave, who was just a civil Jew who was indentured to work. There was the non-Jewish who was captured from outside and that non-Jewish slave became a half Jew and the moment he was freed, became a full Jew.
So there was no racism even in that idea of slavery, which thank God went out a long, long time ago. And let’s not forget the fact that every single race in this world has been slaving until relatively recently. Whether it’s black, white, oriental, Muslim, Christian, whatever it is, they were all slaves. Everybody did it. It doesn’t make it right then, doesn’t make it right now.
Q: “The concept of Jews being written is written in the Amidah, one of our fundamental recitations. Was this politically motive to instil the idea that Jewish people sit on the influence of priests?” A: No, I don’t think it had anything to do with that. I think it had to do with the idea of, we are so grateful to have this way of life. I thank God for this way of life and I do every day. I say when I wake up first thing in the morning, I say, “Thank you God for being alive and for giving me a way of life that I value and I appreciate and I hope will make me a better person.” And unfortunately I fail more often than I’d like to.
Thank you, Abigail. “I remain to the line of logic thought God was presented with intrinsically energy.” I have no problem with how people understand the notion of God. It is so subjective. That’s why Steven Pinker says, we talk about the idea of God and if you ask three people what they understand by God, each one will come up with a different explanation. So I don’t mind what people choose to understand God by. I just want people to be good human beings.
“Accepting God is incorporeal is prayer for our own benefit based on God being spiritual.” Yes, I think that’s right. It’s interesting. There was some debate amongst mediaeval philosophers as whether God was corporeal. And there are many people who accuse mysticism and Kabbalah and the idea of 10 spheres of making God corporeal. And so you know when Maimonides said a thousand years ago, “God has no physical form,” one of his commentators, and it’s in the text of the commentary today said, better and greater men than him thought that God did have some sort of corporeal representation. So again, it depends what you mean. This is a subject we can argue about for ages.
Carol Katner. “I choose not to believe in God. There’s a thorough to your little book of Jewish thoughts. I do believe in being a good, kind, understanding person.” I think that’s wonderful. I’m absolutely delighted. And long may you thrive and go. I don’t see any more questions. Are there any more questions here?
[Wendy] That’s all of them. Thanks, Jeremy.
Well then, let’s call it a day. Thank you very much and I’ll see you in two weeks time.
[Wendy] Thanks Lauren, thanks Jeremy. It was fascinating. Does that help? Do you think? Did it help?
[Wendy] Absolutely, yes.
Okay. Thank you.
Very good, thanks a million. Speak soon.
Bye.
Bye bye. Thank you, Lauren. Thanks everyone for joining us, bye bye.