A Chosen State?

Is Israel the chosen state? Syllogistically speaking, it must be. If we Jews are the chosen people and the Land of Israel is the chosen land, then the people who dwell in that land, and the Jewish state established on it, must also be chosen. But chosen how, one must still ask, and for what? Can a country founded largely on secular and universalist principles lay claim to a uniqueness grounded in spiritual, particularist ideals? Is Israel, a country widely accused of the darkest transgressions — racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide — chosen only to be doomed?

As a divinely bestowed status, chosenness is introduced in the Book of Exodus 19:5, “Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples.” The Children of Israel receive this declaration just prior to receiving the Ten Commandments. The notion reappears in Deuteronomy 7:6–8 and 14:2. But in all these cases, the term chosen people would be a mistranslation of the Hebrew am sigula, “a treasured people.” And even that is conditional; Israel must accept and keep the law. While God chooses Israel — so the Talmud teaches us — Israel chooses God.

With the exception of a brief reference in Amos, chosenness all but disappears from most of the biblical narrative. The Jews are depicted as just another Mediterranean people, no better, and sometimes worse, than any other. Their sole distinction is their special relationship with God and their continued obligation to His law. Not until the post–Second Temple exilic period does chosenness resurface as a defining Jewish characteristic. It does so by turning on its head the classic Christian view of Jewish suffering as proof of the loss of God’s love. On the contrary, the rabbis argue, the Jews’ suffering is a sign of their chosenness. “Just as the olive only produces oil after being crushed,” the tractate Sanhedrin (101a) tells us, “so, too, Israel fulfills its purpose through suffering.”

Suffering as the source of chosenness has a higher, eschatological, purpose. The Jews have been chosen to be a “light unto nations” (Exodus 19:6) and to spread monotheism, such that “all peoples on Earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Commentators from Rashi and Maimonides to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch agreed: Chosenness does not bestow a superior or privileged status on the Jews, but rather a profound moral and spiritual responsibility. Chosenness is the Jews’ duty to humanity.

Israel’s chosenness had great meaning for medieval and pre-modern Jews. It peppered their liturgy from the Aleinu to the Kaddish prayer to the benediction for reading the Torah. But for Zionism, emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, chosenness was not necessarily a blessing, but a challenge.

For many of its secular pioneers, Zionism was a revolt against chosenness. It was an attempt to become a nation like every other. Rooted in the suffering caused by statelessness, chosenness was an affliction that only Zionism could cure. For all their differences, Herzl and Jabotinsky similarly dreamed of creating a modern, largely secular, liberal Jewish state, a normal state like the many others that dotted the map, the France or Austria of the Middle East.

Yet Zionism’s normalizing mission, its attempt to extricate Jewish peoplehood from chosenness, was only partially successful. Many Jews refused to abandon their religious beliefs and, together with Christian Zionists, viewed the rebirth of Jewish statehood in the biblical homeland as a millenarian event. That state would be, in the words of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.” Celebrating its creation was an article of faith.

Despite these dissenters and their religiosity, secular Zionism managed to establish a state that in many ways did resemble France. The music, the museums, the universities and research centers, the food — all were appurtenances of normalcy. Yet the Jewish impulse to chosenness, even among those who eschewed it, proved irrepressible. No sooner had the state come into being, as it grappled with seemingly insurmountable economic and security challenges, than it dispatched agricultural delegations to Africa and South Asia. The Foreign Ministry opened a special department, Mashav, for aiding developing countries. The IDF deployed rescue missions to disaster-struck areas abroad. While these humanitarian initiatives also brought diplomatic advantages to a small and embattled state, they served as evidence of Israel’s moral preeminence — implicitly, its chosenness.

Not surprisingly, then, Israelis are ambivalent about their chosenness. We want our soldiers to be judged by the same standards applied to others while at the same time insisting that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. We strive for normal ties with foreign nations, but with the United States, where tens of millions still believe in Israel’s chosenness, we claim a special relationship. Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, the majority of Israelis agree, but that same majority takes pride in the assistance we render to other nations in need. We are Israel First and tikkun olam all at once.

Much of the world, by contrast, shows no such ambivalence about choosing Israel. The singling out of Israel by the United Nations and other international bodies, the media’s malign obsession with the Jewish state, and the transformation of elite universities into hotbeds of anti-Zionism — all suggest that Israel is, in some obverse way, special. Israel’s detractors today see it much as the medieval church regarded Jews, as chosen not for admiration but for contempt. Those who denounce it as a “white settler state” and call for its destruction differ little from those who, centuries ago, considered Jews to be the spawn of Satan and condemned us to expulsion or death. Today’s anti-Zionists, much like the Jew-haters of the past, adduce our wholesale demonization as proof of our inherent wickedness. After all, those countless keffiyeh-clad college students chanting “from the river to the sea” can’t be all wrong.

In response, Israelis could assert, as our ancestors did, that the world’s hatred of us is a sign of our chosenness — that accusations of genocide, like the earlier ones of deicide, indicate that we remain, even as a secular state still yearning for normalcy, chosen. But, again, chosen for what?

Prior to the massacre of October 7, the answer might have seemed simpler. Israel supplied the world with an example of a country that can reconcile East and West, tradition and modernity, a democracy with a nation-at-arms. Israel showed how a small country could welcome and absorb massive waves of immigrants, reverse desertification, and desalinate seawater. Israel gave humanity Waze, Mobileye, the components of every cellphone, computer, and system that form the mainstays of 21st-century life. Israel demonstrated that a country short of natural resources, short on allies, and surrounded by lavishly armed foes, could produce one of the planet’s healthiest and happiest societies, with universal medical care, a solid infrastructure, and a polity that, despite never knowing a minute of peace, has never experienced a moment of nondemocratic governance. Chosen indeed.

After October 7, though, the questions of whether Israel is chosen and, if so, for what purpose, became far more complex. The state failed to fulfill its most basic duty of defending itself and its citizens, a failure hardly consonant with chosenness. On the other hand, we were once again thrust into the role of a people who both suffered and were accused of deserving that suffering. But on what basis, besides being martyred and scorned, can Israel still lay claim to being chosen?

Arguably, the post–October 7 war reaffirmed Israel’s chosenness as never before. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis voluntarily returned to army service for hundreds of days at a stretch. They confronted an enemy that stood for everything abhorrent to Western civilization; that hid behind civilians and shot from inside schools, mosques, and hospitals; and that massacred, mutilated, raped, and kidnapped hundreds of innocent people. Israel also showed how a nation so grievously threatened can still reduce civilian casualties to the lowest number proportional to combatants in any contemporary war — a point demonstrated by the meticulous research of John Spencer, chairman of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute.

Millions of Israelis — an estimated 80 percent of the entire country — meanwhile volunteered to help the wounded, house the displaced, and tend to the fields of short-handed farmers. Throughout, the Israeli birth rate, already the highest among industrialized societies, continued to climb.

The jihadist forces facing Israel in this war are identical to those increasingly threatening all democracies today. Israel has demonstrated how those nations can be defended and has reminded them why they are worth fighting for. We’ve shown how a society, though traumatized by loss and haunted by the hostages’ ordeals, can still rally for the common good. We are a testimony to the ways in which a beleaguered but determined people can indeed survive. Perhaps that is what we’ve been chosen to do.

I write these words as Israeli forces are in the process of inflicting untold damage on Iran, eliminating its military leadership, neutralizing its ballistic arsenals, and, most fatefully, preventing it from acquiring nuclear weapons. While it is premature, only hours after it began, to predict the long-term impact of Operation Rising Lion, it seems likely that the regional war so many feared has not erupted, nor has Israel suffered a crippling counterattack. More propitiously, Israel’s preemptive strike, much like that of 1967, promises to create an entirely new Middle East. Peace between Israel and Lebanon is possible, with Syria, Saudi Arabia, and, conceivably, with Iran under a different leadership. Once again, Israel has shown the world — and especially an increasingly timorous West — how a nation can stand up and defend itself from evil. Israel, once more, has earned the distinction of chosenness.

More than 3,000 years after God and the Children of Israel chose one another, and after many agonizing months of war, the concept of am sigula remains powerfully relevant. Whether on the battlefield or in the Israeli streets where opposing protests sometimes clash, it is a status we must always strive for and a title we must relentlessly earn. Israel, built by the chosen people on the chosen land, must prove it is chosen not by suffering and enduring hate, but by showing strength, seeking justice, and embracing peace. Not only to the world but to ourselves, Israelis must affirm that chosenness is, in fact, our normal.