God’s Beloved: A Defense of Chosenness

By Meir Soloveichik

Jews and Christians disagree about what love is.

For Jews, by contrast, the election of a family, and the godliness of preferential love, makes childbearing and child-raising a form of religious devotion. This, for several reasons. First, if true love of a human being necessitates “a genuine encounter with man in his individuality,” then the raising of children schools one in the art of truly loving. A fascinating law in the Talmud mandates that in order to serve on the Sanhedrin—in order to be considered qualified to judge one’s fellow man, a candidate must have children; for parenthood teaches one to love someone not merely as a member of a class but as a truly unique individual.⁵³ Second, as Hauerwas points out, if it is Abraham’s seed that is elected, then Judaism’s redemptive mission to the world depends upon the continuity of Jews. In Wyschogrod’s words, by refusing to have children, “the Jew refuses to replenish the seed of Abraham and thus contributes to thwarting God’s redemptive plan.”⁵⁴

Yet there is a third, perhaps more important reason why familial love is integral to Judaism. If the Jewish people are indeed banim lamakom,members of God’s family, then the raising of children is essential to one’s own relationship with God. In bestowing, or receiving, parental love, all Jews come to comprehend the covenantal love that God has for them as members of the Jewish nation. For the Jew, to raise children is to replicate God’s passionate, parental love for every member of the assembly of Israel.

The distinction between the classical Jewish and Christian teachings on the family finds expression in myriad ways, but perhaps the most striking is in their respective attitudes towards the relationship of the clergy to the institution of family. Upon ordination, for example, the priest is ordered to renounce family life as an earthly distraction from the love of God, and “to observe chastity and to be bound forever in the ministrations of the altar, to serve who is to reign.”⁵⁵This renunciation is drawn from the writings of Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians:

He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to the Eternal, how he may please God. But he that is with a wife is solicitous for the things of the world, how he may please his wife: And he is divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin think on the things of the lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit. But she that is married thinks on the things of this world, how she may please her husband. And this I speak for your profit, not to cast a snare upon you, but for that which is decent and which may give you power to attend upon the Eternal without impediment.⁵⁶

This is not to say that Christianity is opposed to family life; on the contrary, Christian society has always provided one of the most important defenses of the traditional family as a bulwark of human society. At the same time, however, it is significant that on the highest level, the service of God is seen by classical Christianity as conflicting withthe creation and maintenance of a family. The priest and nun are chaste, for they must forsake the distractions of family life in order to serve God.

For Judaism the opposite is the case. Even those who have consecrated their lives to the service of God are obligated to marry and to bring children into the world. The archetypical priest, Aaron, is depicted as a family man, and indeed passes on the priesthood through his progeny. As opposed to the Christian approach, in Judaism the priest is to love preferentially and partake of the same forms of family as the rest of God’s beloved. Perhaps the most important example appears in a striking passage in the book of Leviticus, which obligates the priests who serve in the Temple to attend to the burial of their close family members, even as their sanctity prevents them from attending any other funerals.⁵⁷ Maimonides takes this a step further. In his view, not only are the priests required to set aside the concerns of purity for the sake of their loved ones, but in so doing they set the example from which all the laws of mourning are derived. In other words, it is from this extreme case that all Jews can understand what it means truly to mourn our loved ones:

How weighty is the commandment to mourn! On its account, concern about the impurity from his deceased relatives is put aside, so that he might tend to them and mourn for them, as it is written, “except for his kin that is near unto him, for his mother... for her he shall defile herself.” This is a positive commandment, and if the priest does not wish to defile himself, he is made to do so against his will.⁵⁸

The holiness of the priests does not prevent them from loving preferentially; on the contrary. The priests are archetypes of preferential love and family life. By loving and serving all Israel, but loving their immediate kin in a unique way, the priests learn, and in turn teach Israel, that to love means that our love must be individuated. The example of the truest love, the love that defines the ideal way in which man should treat his fellow, is not in the universal, undifferentiated, unmotivated agape, but in the overwhelming longing and preferential concern that is the core of family life. It is the family that teaches us the meaning of love. And it is the institution of the Jewish family in which the divine love of Abraham’s children, the chosen nation, is fully manifest.

During the most difficult moments of their history, through centuries of exile, the Jewish people were sustained by an enduring faith. Yet the question of how they were sustained—what it was, exactly, that gave them the strength to preserve their identity in the face of unfathomable challenges—remains something of a mystery. Some have suggested that the secret lay in their system of laws, which provided a stable political and social framework for the preservation of their communities. There is truth in this, yet one suspects this answer is insufficient: Other peoples have failed to survive dispersion despite a set of practices deeply rooted in tradition. Others have suggested that what sustained the Jews was a belief in the Jewish historical mission—the idea that the Jews were placed on earth to communicate God’s message to humanity. But again, one wonders whether an abstract mission is enough to give life to a persecuted and exiled people beyond a single generation, or whether it is more likely that most Jews would readily abandon such a mission in exchange for personal security and opportunity.

Rather, in studying the legendsand liturgical poetry composed over these terrible centuries, one discovers a theme that appears time and again in theological expressions of Jewish grief. It is the belief in a God who bestowed upon the Jewish people a special love, and who continues to love them still; a God who appears to his people as the shechina begaluta:A divine Father who accompanies his children in their exile, comforting and consoling them. The Jews who endured the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the pogroms expressed belief in a God who so loved the Jews that he made their joys his joys and their suffering his suffering. One midrash reads as follows:

The relationship between God and the Jewish people is like the relationship between twins. When the head of one aches, the other feels it, too. Therefore, we see that the Holy One said to Moses, ‘I am with him in distress’ (Psalms 91:15) and again, ‘In all their afflictions, he [God], too, was afflicted. (Isaiah 63:9) Are you not aware that I am wracked with pain when Israel is wracked with pain? Take note of the place from where I am speaking to you—from the midst of a thorn bush. I am, as it were, a partner in their pain.’”⁵⁹

It is worth noting that in composing passages such as these, Jews rejected one of the central philosophical tenets of Maimonides. In his Guide to the Perplexed,Maimonides argued that any anthropomorphic description of the divine is merely language inserted for the weak-minded, and offers nothing of theological significance to the philosophically sophisticated. Biblical descriptions of God’s emotions—of his love, his anger, his sadness—are merely “attributes of action.” To speak of God as loving the Jews is not to ascribe the feeling of love to God; rather, the Bible merely means that God acts benevolently toward the Jewish people. It is therefore blasphemous, Maimonides declared, to compose prayers and religious reflections that speak of God in an anthropomorphic manner. While God may at times speak anthropomorphically in revelation, we ourselves are not allowed to speak anthropomorphically of God, whom we cannot, and therefore should not, attempt to comprehend.⁶⁰

Maimonides’ approach was rejected by those persecuted Jews who spoke not only of a God who bestowed loving actions upon them, but who loved them, and who was deeply pained by their suffering. God, in the Bible, tells the Jews that he loves them and that he is “with them in distress.”⁶¹This could not be theologically insignificant. Some of the composers of these midrashimacknowledged that their sentiments were doctrinally unsettling, but insisted that the Bible allows for such descriptions of the divine:⁶²

When the Holy One saw them [exiled from Jerusalem], immediately [we read]: “And on that day did the Eternal, the God of Hosts, call to weeping and to lamentation, and to baldness, and girding with sackcloth.” Had the verse not been written, one could not have stated it. And they went weeping from this gate to that, like a man who deceased lies before him, and the Holy One wept, lamenting, Woe for a king who prospers in his youth and not in his old age.⁶³

It is not unreasonable to suggest that this, indeed, was the key to Jewish survival: The belief that the individual Jew must maintain his Jewishness because he is the beloved of God. This belief found expression not simply in creed but also in Jewish practice. The dedication of generations of Jews to Jewish law was not out of a blind sense of duty, but out of a firm belief that these laws were the expression of the Creator’s special love for the Jewish people, and their betrayal would be a betrayal of that love. It is this belief, perhaps above all else, which sustained Jewish communities through the hardships of exile, persecution, and pogrom. And it may still.

Meir Soloveichik is an Associate Fellow at the Shalem Center, and a Contributing Editor of Azure. He is the Assistant Rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan, and is currently working on his doctorate at Princeton University.

Notes

1. Exodus 19:6.

2. Seforno on Exodus 19:6.

3. Deuteronomy 4:35-38.

4. Deuteronomy 7:7-8.

5. Seforno on Deuteronomy 7:8.

6. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith (New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1996), p. 64.

7. Jeremiah 31:8.

8. Isaiah 66:13.

9. Isaiah 49:15.

10. Mishna Avot 3:18.

11. John 3:16.

12. Matthew 28:19.

13. Romans 1:7, 10:12.

14. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), p. 201.

15. Nygren, Agape and Eros,pp. 75-76.

16. Matthew 5:43-45, 48.

17. “While we were still sinners,” Paul writes, “Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” Romans 5:8-10.

18. Nygren, Agape and Eros, p. 77.

19. Nygren, Agape and Eros, p. 75.

20. Wyschogrod, Body of Faith.

21. Genesis 18:17-19.

22. Rashi on Genesis 18:19.

23. Wyschogrod, Body of Faith, p. 64.

24. Wyschogrod, Body of Faith, p. 61.

25. Genesis 18:23-25.

26. I John 4:7-8.

27. www.peterkreeft.com/topics/love.htm.

28. Luke 13:24.

29. Matthew 7:13-14.

30. Matthew 22:14.

31. Cardinal Avery Dulles, “The Population of Hell,” First Things 133 (May 2003), pp. 36-41.

32. Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Repentance 3:4; Sanhedrin 108a.

33. Jerusalem Megilla 3:2.

34. Cited in Dulles, “Population of Hell,” pp. 36-41.

35. See Sanhedrin 107b, 111b.

36. I Corinthians 13:13.

37. Genesis 1:27.

38. Nygren, Agape and Eros, p. 92.

39. Luke 6:32-33.

40. I Samuel 20:41-42.

41. II Samuel 9:1-3, 5-7.

42. II Samuel 8:15.

43. I Samuel 18:12.

44. Leviticus 19:18.

45. Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (New York: Harper, 1962),p. 58.

46. Kierkegaard, Works of Love,p. 77.

47. Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Mourning 14:1.

48. Ha’amek Davar,Leviticus 19:18, s.v. ve’ahavta.

49. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p. 97.

50. Stanley Hauerwas, “Christian Ethics in Jewish Terms: A Response to David Novak,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms,ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Peter Ochs, David Novak, Michael Singer, David Sandmel (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000), p. 138.

51. Hauerwas, “Christian Ethics,” p. 139.

52. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2231.

53. Sanhedrin 36b; see Rashi, s.v. zaken.

54. Wyschogrod, Body of Faith,p. 254.

55. See Catholic Encyclopedia, “Celibacy of the Clergy,” at www.newadvent.org/cathen/03481a.htm.

56. I Corinthians 7:32-35.

57. Leviticus 21:1-2.

58. Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Mourning 2:6.

59. Shemot Rabba 2:5.

60. Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer (New York: Dover, 1956), 1:26, pp. 34-35.

61. Psalms 91:15.

62. For an elaboration on this point, see Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, “The Duties of the Heart and Response to Suffering,” in Leaves of Faith: The World of Jewish Living (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2004), pp. 140-142.

63. Lamentations Rabbati, Petihta 24.

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