God’s Beloved: A Defense of Chosenness

By Meir Soloveichik

Jews and Christians disagree about what love is.

Now, the question may arise: If Mefiboshet has done nothing to earn David’s love, and if indeed that love is granted without regard for anything that Mefiboshet has said or done, in what sense is David’s love really addressed to him in particular? Is this not in fact the opposite of the sort of preferential love we discussed earlier? At first glance, it may indeed seem more reminiscent of Nygren’s “unmotivated” love, which loves without regard for the specific qualities of the individual.

In truth, however, the two loves are polar opposites. For while in the Christian view, God’s love is universally bestowed, possesses no desire or longing, and stems purely from God’s essence that is itself love, David’s regard for Mefiboshet, like God’s love for the children of Abraham, is filled with longing. His love for Jonathan is so profound that he looks for him even in the latter’s children. It is a possessive love, one which may not flow from Mefiboshet’s own deeds but nonetheless reflects a crucial part of who Mefiboshet, and no one else, truly is: The son of Jonathan. Perhaps Mefiboshet has done nothing to deserve David’s love. Yet he is and remains a child of a father, and that leaves an indelible mark on his own unique essence. It is this uniqueness that wins David’s love, just as it is the uniqueness of the Jew as a child of Abraham that becomes the basis of God’s own love.

These differing attitudes can be found throughout centuries of Jewish and Christian theological reflection. In approaching Jewish and Christian understandings of love, it is useful to study the striking contrast between the writings of two nineteenth-century contemporaries: Soren Kierkegaard, the foremost Protestant thinker of his time; and Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin, known as the Netziv, who was the dean of the most important talmudic academy of his age, the Yeshiva of Volozhin. Both drew on their respective traditions in writing their reflections on the biblical obligation to “love your neighbor.”⁴⁴

Drawing on Jesus’ parable, Kierkegaard contrasts neighbor-love, which he defines as loving someone solely because that person is a human being, with what he calls “preferential love,” the love of one’s family, friend, or spouse. Neighbor-love, he argues, is distinguishable from preferential love in that it is predicated not on personal affection or selfish need, but solely on religious duty. “If it were not a duty to love,” Kierkegaard writes, “then there would be no concept of neighbor at all. But only when one loves his neighbor, only then is the selfishness or preferential love rooted out and the equality of the eternal preserved.”⁴⁵ Neighbor-love, he continues, is certainly superior to preferential love, in that one’s love is impartial; it is not linked to the object of that love. Instead, one’s focus is only on the obligation to love the neighbor:

Let men debate as much as they wish about which object of love is the most perfect—there can never be any doubt that love to one’s neighbor is the most perfect love. All other love, therefore, is imperfect in that there are two questions and thereby a certain duplicity: There is first a question about the object and then about the love, or there is a question about both the object and the love. But concerning love to one’s neighbor there is only one question, that about love. And there is only one answer of the Eternal: This is genuine love, for love to one’s neighbor is not related as a type to other types of love. Erotic love is determined by the object; friendship is determined by the object; only love to one’s neighbor is determined by love.⁴⁶

A different approach can be found in the Netziv’s commentary on Leviticus. He begins by citing Maimonides, who in his Laws of Mourning interprets the obligation to “Love your neighbor as yourself” as commanding us to love others “as we ourselves hope to be loved by them.”⁴⁷Berlin stresses the wisdom of Maimonides’ interpretation by noting that the obligation to love our neighbor “as ourselves” cannot mean that we must love our neighbor’s life as much as we love our own; for no one is expected to sacrifice his own life to save that of a neighbor. The Netziv then takes this a step further: Because we must love as we hope to be loved, then the obligation of neighbor-love obligates us to love preferentially. For one naturally expects to be loved by one’s son or brother more than by another; the verse in Leviticus obligates one to return that love in a similar manner. As he writes:

As yourself: It is impossible to interpret this simply, as it is known that one’s life comes before that of his neighbor. Rather, Maimonides explained [the verse] in the Laws of Mourning to mean, as you would desire to be loved by your friend. And it is obvious that a person would not foolishly think that one’s neighbor would love him as much as himself, rather to the extent that is worthy based on the degree of relation and propriety. Based on that standard you are obligated to love human beings.⁴⁸

Preferential love, according to this view, is not wholly distinct from neighbor-love, but is rather an essential part of it. Nor does the command to “love your neighbor” demand that we see all human beings equally; on the contrary. If God has a family that he loves above all, then the only way to love correctly is to love as God loves. Kierkegaard, however, insisted that the superior form of love is of an impartial form, and to love impartially is to disregard anything unique about the object of love. Interestingly, Kierkegaard, in noting the uniqueness of every member of humanity, describes these differences as “earthly” and “temporal.” Neighbor-love, he asserts, demands that we look beyond these differences to the spiritual equality that lies within:

Christianity… allows all distinctions to stand, but it teaches the equality of the eternal. It teaches that everyone shall lift himself above earthly distinction…. Distinction is temporality’s confusing element which marks every man, but neighbor is eternity’s mark on every man. Take many sheets of paper and write something different on each one, then they do not resemble each other. But then take again every single sheet; do not let yourself be confused by the differentiating inscriptions; hold each one up to the light and you see the same watermark on them all. Thus is neighbor the common mark, but you see it only by help of the light of the eternal when it shines through distinction.⁴⁹

Judaism, on the other hand, insists that distinction is not merely “earthly” or “temporal,” but is itself the foundation of God’s love for us, and therefore an essential part of our love for others. Judaism believes that to love someone as an individual in his or her totality is to focus squarely on that distinctiveness. At times one’s love for another is founded upon an essential, though unearned, part of their identities, such as a shared kinship, just as God’s love for Israel is based on its shared kinship with Abraham. But this does not alter the fundamentally hierarchical, preferential aspect of this love. It is this kind of love which, in the Jewish view, forms the model for all human relations.

Yet if God expresses a familial love toward Abraham’s family, and this preferential love represents an ideal form of love, then a further implication of the Jewish approach to love is that the institution of the family is especially sacred. In this regard one of the most important differences between Judaism and classical Christianity emerges. Stanley Hauerwas, the renowned American Christian theologian, once noted the following:

Nothing distinguishes Christians and Jews more dramatically than our understanding of the family. Put simply, Christians are not bound by the law to have children. We must acknowledge that we are children by appropriately honoring our parents, but to honor our parents does not mean that we must make them grandparents. The stark fact of the matter is that Jesus was neither married nor had children.… What Jesus started did not continue because he had children but because his witness attracted strangers. Christians are not obligated to have children so that the tradition might continue; rather we believe that God through the cross and resurrection of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit has made us a people who live through witness. In other words, the church grows through the conversion of strangers, who often turn out to be our biological children.⁵⁰

The point is not, Hauerwas assures his readers, that “Christians are antifamily or antichild”; but that individual Christians are not necessarily called to marriage. In other words, Hauerwas concludes, “family identity is not at the core of our identity as Christians.”⁵¹ Indeed, the catechism of the Catholic Churchconfirms that while the family is the moral bedrock of society, nevertheless the choice to avoid marriage and family is a legitimate one. The cathechism notes, without criticism, that “some forgo marriage in order to care for their parents or brothers and sisters, to give themselves more completely to a profession, or to serve other honorable ends. They can contribute greatly to the good of the human family.”⁵²

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