Introduction: "A Covenant to the People, a Light to the Nations" Universalism,

Exceptionalism, and the Problem of Chosenness in Jewish Thought

Author(s): Dana Hollander and Joel Kaminsky
Source: Jewish Studies Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1, "A Covenant to the People, a Light to the
Nations": Universalism, Exceptionalism, and the Problem of Chosenness in Jewish Thought
(2009), pp. 1-5
Published by: Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG
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 Introduction
"A Covenant to the People, a Light to the Nations"
Universalism, Exceptionalism, and the Problem of
Chosenness in Jewish Thought*
Dana Hollander and Joel Kaminsky

The papers in this collection originated as contributions to two confer-

ences. The first conference, "Ά Covenant to the People, a Light to the
Nations': Universalism, Exceptionalism, and the Problem of Chosenness
in Jewish Thought," was held at McMaster University in May 2005 (co-
organized by Dana Hollander and Annette Yoshiko Reed). It was a
forum for reflection about the concept of Israel as a "light to the na-
tions" (Isa. 42:6; 49:6) in ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish thought,
together with its relevance for Christianity and contemporary philoso-
phy and theory. This highly stimulating conference in turn sparked Mat-
thew Collins of the Society of Biblical Literature to create a slot for two
featured panels on Jewish Chosenness in the Hebrew Bible, New Testa-
ment, and early rabbinic texts at the annual meeting of the Society for
Biblical Literature in November 2005 (co-organized by Joel Kaminsky
and Annette Yoshiko Reed). As the papers in this collection show, the
biblical, rabbinic, Christian, and philosophical attempts to reconcile the
election of Israel with the universality of Israel's God serve as a fruitful
starting point for exploring the range of ways in which Jews (and Chris-
tians) past and present have negotiated the nature and boundaries of
their collective identities (ethnic, religious, cultural, political) in relation
to other nations and peoples.
Jewish reflections on this topic have been receiving greater attention
of late due to certain recent changes brought on by the postmodern
critique of Enlightenment universalism. Until quite recently, it was as-
sumed since the advent of modernity that "particularist" Jewish reli-

* The editors would like to thank Tema Smith and Zipporah Weisberg for their
editorial assistance in the production of this issue.

Jewish Studies Quarterly, Volume 16 (2009) pp. 1-5

© Mohr Siebeck - ISSN 0944-5706

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 2 Dana Hollander and Joel Kaminsky JSQ 16

gious claims were only of value if they could be directly linked to various
"universalist" ideals. (Truth be told, such a view occurred even earlier
inasmuch as already in Hellenistic times Jewish particularism was some-
times caricatured as a type of misanthropy.) An important consequence
of this has been a productive confusion of what is meant by "particular"
and "universal" in discussing Judaism and Christianity. Where "univers-
alist" might once have meant an openness to proselytes or an active
pursuit of missionizing, and "particularism had tended to denote a
lack of eagerness for proselytism - and the charge of "particularism"
often served an anti- Jewish rhetoric in discussions of biblical theology1
- recent decades have yielded a more nuanced understanding of what
these categories mean and how "particularist" and "universalist" ten-
dencies interact with each other. Thus, with the advent of our postmo-
dern condition, many thinkers have questioned whether various Enlight-
enment (or earlier) universalist claims are simply particularistic claims
that are held by a majority of people in the West.2 Further, in an age that
values "difference" over a totalizing politics of identity, the idea that a
religion or an ethnicity might be hospitable to its other(s) in ways other
than missionizing has become more attractive. Suddenly, Judaism's long
struggle to balance the delicate tension between its particular experience
and various universalist impulses that it has nourished over the centuries
is now of deep interest to thinkers from many traditions. Keeping this
theme in mind, we will present a synopsis of each essay and attempt to
draw out some of the threads that tie them together.
Joel Kaminsky studies the Hebrew Bible's various approaches to the
assimilation of foreigners into the Israelite community in order to clarify
Israel's stance toward missionizing the Gentiles. Kaminsky notes that
Christian understandings have led biblical scholars to seek out and

1 Jon Levenson, Ephraim Urbach, and Joseph Blenkinsopp, among others, have
pointed to this conceptual history: See Jon D. Levenson, "The Universal Horizon of
Biblical Particularism," in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Mark Brett (Leiden: Brill, 1996),
143-69, esp. 144-45; Ephraim Urbach, "Self-Isolation or Self- Affirmation in Judaism
in the first three Centuries: Theory and Practice," in Jewish and Christian Self-Defini-
tion, ed. E.P. Sanders et al., vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 269-98,
esp. 269; and Joseph Blenkinsopp, "YHWH and Other Deities: Conflict and Accom-
modation in the Religion of Israel," Interpretation 40:4 (October 1986): 354-66,
esp. 360.
2 Blenkinsopp, ibid., 360, points out that the categories of "universalism" and
"particularism" are "a relic of the Enlightenment with its postulate that true religion
must be in conformity with the universally valid law of reason and a universally acces-
sible moral law derived from them .... It was in this prejudicial form that the terms
came into use in the new discipline of Biblical Theology, which was itself a product of
the Enlightenment."

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 (2009) Introduction 3

praise instances of conversion and mission but that the Hebrew Bible
"rarely, if ever, endorses an active Israelite mission to the Gentiles."
Thus, the fact that the Hebrew Bible's theology may have universal im-
plications need not mean it has a missionary impulse. This, in turn,
raises some issues not only for how the church and the rabbis each
read the Hebrew Bible, but also for contemporary Jewish-Christian dia-
logue.
E. P. Sanders' groundbreaking work over a quarter of a century ago
challenged New Testament scholarship, which widely held that the Juda-
ism of Jesus' era as well as that found in rabbinic texts involved a focus
on works righteousness as opposed to the more grace-based view suppo-
sedly affirmed by Jesus and Paul. Sanders argued at length that almost
all manifestations of Judaism in this period affirmed a "covenantal no-
mism." In this essay, Sanders seeks to rebut criticisms of his lifelong
work by providing additional evidence to support his views of second
temple and late antique Judaisms. Most particularly, he eloquently ar-
gues that much scholarship in this area is flawed because it fails to
acknowledge that specific texts presume underlying assumptions, many
of which are never openly discussed. A careful examination of Jewish
texts from this period demonstrates that all affirm the idea of Jewish
chosennness and the allied notion that one can live in proper relation-
ship to God by fulfilling the commandments given at Mount Sinai. That
the Judaisms of this period tend to stress God's gracious act of choosing
the people of Israel indicates that even the act of fulfilling various com-
mandments is undergirded by God's prevenient grace towards his people
Israel. Thus Pauline Christianity and the variety of other Judaisms pre-
sent during this period were in fact much closer to each other than the
standard scholarly portrait acknowledges. As indicated in a number of
other essays in this collection, an affirmation of God's favor toward his
people Israel, rather than leading to a rigid and dead religion, serves as
the basis for a vibrant religion in which human actions are a response to
God's ongoing mercy toward Israel and the larger world.
Jeffrey Siker explores the rather radical vision of Paul put forward by
a group of contemporary New Testament scholars working in the wake
of Sanders' critique of the ways in which New Testament scholarship
had mischaracterized the Judaism of Jesus' and Paul's era. John Gager
in particular pursues the idea of a "reinvented Paul," and he along with
scholars such as Lloyd Gaston argue that Paul conceived of a dual
covenant theology in which Jews gained salvation through Torah, Gen-
tiles through belief in Christ. Siker finds that this model is driven more
by the contemporary rapprochement between Christians and Jews in the

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4 Dana Hollander and Joel Kaminsky JSQ 16

West than by a careful reading of Paul. Thus, while Sanders critiques

those who want to draw too sharp a distinction between the nascent
Christian community and other Jews living at that time, Siker attacks
the tendency to portray relations between these competing groups in
irenic tones that are inaccurate and overstated. Both essays lead us to-
ward the possibility of true interreligious dialogue, which must be based
on understanding each religion's distinctive claims as well as on a careful
assessment of what ideas in particular they may share.
Marc Hirshman focuses upon an extended midrashic passage and
some of its analogues in order to demonstrate that the ancient rabbinic
corpus contains an unresolved tension concerning the implications of
Israel's elect status for the Gentile nations of the world. Two notions
of Israel's election stand side by side in this single midrash that Hirsh-
man explores: Rabbi Akiba's exclusivist notion that God's relationship
to Israel is so close that the other nations are by definition excluded
from any similar intimate divine contact, and Rabbi Ishmael's notion
that Israel's close relationship to God is an opening or even an invita-
tion to the whole world to come worship and adore Israel's God. In an
approach analogous to Siker's reflections on the New Testament, Hirsh-
man tries to recover a more complete portrait of how the rabbis viewed
the other nations of the world, notwithstanding any discomfort that
contemporary readers might feel with some aspects - that is, with the
lack of openness to the other associated with Rabbi Akiva's school.
Looking at the book of 4 Ezra, an apocalyptic text composed in the
wake of the destruction of Jerusalem at the end of the first century C. E.,
John J. Collins finds that this book is particularly useful in discerning
both the strengths and the limitations of Israel's election theology. While
the book, like much other wisdom literature, recognizes that Israel's
destiny is tied up with that of the rest of humanity, unlike standard
wisdom texts such as Proverbs, 4 Ezra loudly affirms Israel's special
election. The tension arising between these two notions is never clearly
resolved and one finds a number of negative characterizations of the
Gentile nations standing right alongside occasional pleas for God to
have mercy on fragile sinning human beings. But lest we restrict our-
selves to a view of the election idea in 4 Ezra as simply offensive in its
anti-humanism, Collins suggests that, in this context, we must view the
ethnocentrism of election, through a postmodern optic, as an "essential
means of maintaining minority identity," a potential opening to an
"ethic of difference."
Andrew Jacobs shows that the central physical expression of Jewish
chosenness, the act of circumcision, functions in a rather unusual fash-

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 (2009) Introduction 5

ion in the thinking of certain Christian exegetes who reflect on the

meaning of Christ's own circumcision. The need for Christians to both
appropriate the authority of the Hebrew Bible and at the same time to
read it in a way that subverts much of its content is mirrored by the
claim that Christ is circumcised but is the last person who needs to do
such a ritual. Thus, the story of Christ's circumcision reflects ambiva-
lence toward Jews in the articulation of a Christian self. While "standard
narratives" of Christian origins relied on a "forceful differentiation"
between the Christian and its other, the figure of Christ's circumcision
may be read as an articulation of an "otherness" within the Christian
self - a "more subtle recognition of the ways in which 'they' are always
and inevitably part of 'us.'"
Randi Rashkover' s piece is a fresh look at two classical representatives
of Christian and Jewish thought, St. Augustine and Moses Mendels-
sohn, geared toward finding in their works challenges to classical views
of how Jewish particularity might relate to a Christian universality, and
thus resources for Jewish-Christian partnership that have been thus far
underappreciated. While Mendelssohn's treatment of state and religion
in Jerusalem, Or on Religious Power and Judaism is often taken to be a
critique of Christianity as involving a notion of ecclesiastical power that
results in religious coercion, Rashkover suggests, drawing on Mendels-
sohn's understanding of the praxis of Bildung, that it be read as an
"invitation to Christianity" to join with Judaism to resist the denigration
of religious life that is entailed by the secular Enlightenment. Similarly,
Rashkover discerns in Augustine's On Christian Doctrine, which has ty-
pically been read as perpetuating the classic "adversus iudaeos" posi-
tion, a nuanced view of the Jewish interpretation of Scripture that can
be made productive for improved Jewish-Christian relations.
Dana Hollander's essay looks at the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig,
who stands out among modern Jewish thinkers for having retrieved and
made productive the concept of chosenness. Hollander shows how Ro-
senzweig's understanding of election as a mode of human existence is
articulated with his theory of Jewish chosenness - and also looks into
how this combined understanding of chosenness informs Emmanuel Le-
vinas's conception of ethics as a singular call to responsibility. These
accounts of election transform the relationship of the particular - which
is no longer the special case of the general - and the universal - which is
no longer the result of a synthesis or subsumption over particulars. They
may thus be taken to offer a kind of theoretical underpinning for the
concrete accounts of Jewish and Christian traditions regarding election
that make up the bulk of this special issue.

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