Finally, I fully accept Sarna’s rebuke for having missed his mention of Judaism in his book. But Sarna’s reference to Judaism is almost an afterthought. Even in his cursory mention of this pre-eminent intellectual journal, Sarna had an opportunity to include a sentence on its significance and impact: The pages of Judaism were the very representation of the ferment around theology, society, and history of the time. Judaism (together with other journals) established the intellectual and theological linkages that were crucial to the maturing of American Jewish thought. This is the “glaring omission” to which I referred. Again, it’s about interpretation of data, or lack thereof.

Ultimately, Sarna is right: It is impossible to include everything. The world is informed by the Yiddish expression Alles in einem is nishto bei keinem—you can’t have everything in any one thing. This is especially true in a survey volume, and Sarna’s choices in his superb book are for the most part right on the mark. But it is the task of the reviewer to set a context for reading the work. He and I clearly differ on interpretation and the boundaries between data and interpretation.

I thank as well Richard L. Rubenstein for his erudite letter, which recalls for the contemporary reader the issue of the Holocaust and the “death of God,” words unfamiliar to most under the age of fifty. Indeed, it was Rubenstein who first (and later with Rabbi Irving Greenberg) taught us to articulate the theological—and not merely historical—vocabulary of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Rubenstein’s letter is a service to a new generation.

Also valuable is Rubenstein’s underscoring a point I made in my essay, that conventional wisdom that holds that the Holocaust was on the American Jewish communal agenda in the 1950s and early 1960s is wrong. Most Jews expected that the Eichmann trial would generate widespread Holocaust “consciousness” in America. It did so in Israel, but not in the United States. It was the trauma of threatened annihilation that preceded the Six Day War that served to place the destruction of European Jewry firmly on the agenda of American Jews.



Divine Love

TO THE EDITORS:

In attributing to Judaism a vision of the God-Israel relationship marred by chauvinism—and ultimately by racial bias—Meir Soloveichik conflates the two biblical ideologies of chosenness (“God’s Beloved: A Defense of Chosenness,” AZURE 19, Winter 2005).

According to Soloveichik, Deuteronomy depicts a God-Israel relationship based on the parent-child model, a bond of privilege in which the Jewish people need not justify their favored status. If the Jews are like “sons to the Eternal” (Deuteronomy 14:1), sentimentally desired on account of their forefathers (Deuteronomy 7:7, 10:15), then they are “chosen” no matter what they do. Israel is thus categorically unique, and other nations, however worthy, cannot hope to compete with the elected status of God’s sons. They simply aren’t part of his family.

Instead of discomfort with the implicit racism in this depiction of election, however, Soloveichik embraces it, and makes it the cornerstone of his Judaism. In his reflections on “divine love”—itself a Christian term, and one at odds with the Jewish predilection for “covenant” and “election”—he ignores the primary biblical model of Israel’s election, which has nothing to do with blood ties or nepotism and everything to do with a covenant with Abraham and his meritorious descendants.

In the book of Genesis, election is not about love at all, but about virtue, character, and just desserts. God chooses Abraham and his descendants because he knows that they will keep the ways of righteousness and justice, not because he loves them or sees them as part of his family. Thus Abraham is called God’s servant but never his son, because, like a servant, he was chosen for his talents, and not for his lineage. Consequently, Soloveichik’s claim that God loves the Jews more than other peoples, far from being “one of Judaism’s central premises,” runs counter to large parts of the Hebrew Bible.

Likewise, Israel as the “servant of God” becomes the primary symbol of election in the book of Isaiah. This is as it must be, for only a people chosen by the content of its character can be emulated by others as a “light unto nations” (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6). Only an inclusive vision of chosenness in which other nations of moral magnitude can be similarly elected allows for the possibility that “nations shall walk by your light; kings by your shining radiance” (Isaiah 60:3).

Soloveichik’s prejudicial tilt towards Deuteronomic privilege is obvious in his references to “the Bible’s depiction of God’s love of Abraham,” and God “falling in love with Abraham.” Yet not one verse in Genesis says that God loved Abraham—this despite the fact that love is a fundamental motive in Genesis: Abraham loves Isaac, Isaac loves Rebecca and Esau, Rebecca loves Jacob, and Jacob loves Rachel, to name a few.

More troublesome still is the ethical intuition that drives Soloveichik’s argument. He seems to believe that God loves a Jewish child more than the child of a Muslim, Christian, or Hindu. Why push a racist version of election, when Judaism provides plentiful resources for a doctrine of enlightened chosenness?

Finally, there is Soloveichik’s crude anthropomorphism: With reductive statements like, “Judaism, in contrast [to Christianity], argues against such a sharp distinction between divine and human love,” Soloveichik dismisses eight hundred years of Maimonidean rationalism. In his view, Maimonides’ philosophic rescue of Judaism is misguided, for the Jewish God is remarkably like man, and he loves his Jews as if they were his one and only son. Ironically, in this, his version of the Jewish God is about as Christianized as one can get.

Akiva Tor
Beit Shemesh


TO THE EDITORS:

Contrary to Meir Soloveichik, many Christians believe that God understands people as individuals, but expresses his love for them universally—that is to say, the universality can be applied to his love, not to his view of persons. Just as we can love more than one person in his particularity, so can an infinite God love every individual in this way. Thus his love is not “directed at all humanity”; rather, it is directed at each person, and is discovered after the fact to include everyone.

It seems to me that the best analogy we have for how God loves each of us individually yet extends that love to mankind is a parent’s love for his children. One can have multiple children, and love each of them equally. (It may be true that parents sometimes have favorites, but this is generally not considered a good thing.) Thus Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd who, if there is one sheep among his flock missing, will leave all the others in the pen and go in search of that one. This doesn’t seem like “loving a totality,” but like loving many individuals.

Moreover, Soloveichik writes that “one acts justly only if he takes nothing personal or familial into account in bestowing justice on another.” This seems eminently untrue. The very imperfection of man-made laws is that they are blind. They may be the best we can do without perfect information, but that does not make them just. After all, we can never really know people’s motivations, yet we think that perfect justice would require it. In fact, perfect justice would demand that we take into account the personal and familial story of the one being judged.

Finally, concerning Soloveichik’s point about the differing views on family in our two religions, while I agree that the distinction he describes does exist between Jews and Christians, I would add that in Paul’s lists of requirements for leadership in the Church, it is explicit that being able to manage one’s own family is a prerequisite for being allowed to help manage the family of God.

William Britt
New Haven, Connecticut


TO THE EDITORS:

In his response to Meir Soloveichik’s essay “God’s Beloved: A Defense of Chosenness,” Shubert Spero takes issue with Soloveichik’s view of Judaism’s understanding of divine love (Correspondence, AZURE 20, Spring 2005). He maintains that we are dealing with an unknown, and he objects to the “conflation of human and divine love.”

On the contrary, however, Soloveichik is standing on firm ground. The greatest love story in the written Tora—and possibly in world literature—is found in the Song of Songs. Spero knows that the poetic depiction of the relationship between the shepherd and his beloved is interpreted allegorically as representing the love between the Divine and the Jewish people. Moreover, R. Akiva states that if the Bible is holy, the Song of Songs is the “holy of holies.” Meir Soloveichik is thus standing in good company, and his theology is far from incoherent.

Fred Ehrman
New York