In Praise of Being Chosen
On the Interdependence of Election and Revelation
Lightning now conducts Great Books discussion groups (via Zoom, in person, and hybrid) for seekers all over the globe. You can sign up for my Pirkei Avot group here. We also have groups on Hyperborea and on Golden ages, and will be launching more this summer on the Bhagavad Gita and The Fontainebleau. If you are interested in becoming a Lightning Professor, get in touch. Imagine hundreds of these led by young scholars, post-docs, PhD students, spiritual leaders, and passionate amateurs, coaches, and community builders skilled in facilitation. Imagine if every great book had a QR code inviting you to join a learning group to discuss it? We’re on a mission to enable life-long learning at scale. We believe your life would improve if you spent more time with great texts and ideas, in great conversations, and aided by great guides. Religious people intuit the importance of study and intellectual development as a habit and fundamental obligation. But without this framework, the secular world lacks the infrastructure and culture to supports the love of learning as a way of life. We have yoga studios and crossfit gyms. We have video game arcades. But what is the social equivalent of the Library?
Elite universities are finishing schools where you mingle with future world leaders while getting high and virtue signaling. The remaining universities are vocational schools and credentialing factories at their best. At their worst they promote fake skills for B.S. jobs that AI and tech advancement will make obsolete before you can say “uncle.” My point is that imbuing a love of learning in students is not the core objective of universities. I remain perplexed about how to awaken love for learning, but know that this love exists and needs a better vessel.
Content is great, and some of my happiest moments have been spent quietly in a library basement with a stack of books, but there is an undeniable magic that happens via group discussion. To borrow a dichotomy from Jewish tradition, books are “Written Torah,” while discussion is “Oral Torah.” The former provides the anchor for good discussion, but the latter is where we apply the book knowledge and make it our own.
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Now, a Shavuot thought.
It's not hard to prove the existence of God. But the God you end up proving is very abstract. God is a prime mover. God is a unity. God is perfection. God is thought thinking itself. God is the cause of causes and causa sui (self-caused). The God of philosophy does not inspire prayer, song, dance. The God of philosophy does not command or invite. The God of philosophy does not ruffle leaves in the garden, calling out to us "Where are you?"
Even the more religious formulations of God are abstract: God is love. God is the Creator. Thus Pascal quipped, "The God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." Until the modern era, the existence of God (or gods) was a given. What was up for debate was the nature of God's relationship to the world and to humanity. Is God disinterested or deeply involved? Is God a protagonist in history or has God outsourced providence to the historical process? Does God have local jurisdiction?
Debates about divine immanence vs. divine transcendence, rather than existence vs. non-existence, were once the province of religious debate. Mystics have long claimed God to be deeply involved in the world. Rationalists typically see God as more distant, more abstract. But if you make God too distant, God ceases to be personal. If you make God too proximate, God becomes a mere synonym for nature. Thus, a la horseshoe theory, pantheism (God is everything) and atheism (there is no God anywhere) merge.
Biblical language celebrates not those who posit the existence of God, but those who are "God-fearing," or "God reverent" (yirei Hashem). The hard part is not grokking an abstract line of reasoning, but a) cultivating a relationship with God and b) experiencing God as a being that seeks relationship with us.
This is the crux of what we celebrate on Shavuot. Revelation is not only about the specific content of Revelation, but about the idea that God seeks relationship with us and that this relationship has specificity. God has a personality. God promises. God hopes. God desires. God cares.
A rational God might have created reason and left the world to improve itself via reason alone. But a caring God seeks connection, relationship. The Jewish people are a chosen people. Why? Well in part to teach the point that God chooses. God elects. God had to choose somebody. Might as well be us.
The doctrine of Jewish election is not fashionable in a world dominated by Enlightened universalist morality (itself a weakened form of the particularist tradition that is Protestant Christianity), but it is a crucial idea. You cannot separate the doctrine of Revelation from the doctrine of Election. Positing that there is no Revelation = Positing there is no Election and vice versa. We were chosen to be representatives of the notion that the God of Philosophy is not enough.
Even if the content of Revelation were entirely deducible from first principles, and even if all Torah law were demonstrated to be fully rational and reasonable we would be missing the meta-point that we need Revelation as an experience or we are incomplete. The first commandment, "I am the Lord your God" cannot be fulfilled by drafting philosophical proofs. The chiddush (innovation) of the first commandment is that God says "I" and addresses Godself to a "you," (as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig underscore).
For some, the beauty of the Torah serves as the "top of funnel" driving openness to the beauty of the Jewish people. For others, the beauty of the Jewish people serves as TOFU for conversion to Torah. The former is the teaching of Exodus, the latter the teaching of Ruth. Ruth converts to Judaism, and provides the blueprint for conversion, not on the basis of Torah study, but on the basis of her relationship to Naomi. "Wherever you go, I will go, your people will be my people."
The Jewish people are not for everyone and not intended for everyone. Orpah chooses not to join the Jewish people, as is her prerogative. But the fact that we're not for everyone is a thorn in the side of those who condemn Election and seek to enforce social conformity. We celebrate life, the liberation of hostages. Our enemies cheer for death in the name of equity and proportionality. Like the woman who tells Solomon to split the baby, they would rather have more death provided that the death-toll is more equal. Equality of outcome and Divine Election are opposite ideas. They are not opposite merely in effect, but from first principles. There is no right to Torah. Torah is not a human right, or even a Jewish right. Torah is a responsibility and a gift. Nobody says to a gift giver, did you give that gift to everyone else? If the gift were given in equal distribution to all it would not be a gift. It would be a public policy. The gift establishes a relationship. It says, "I want you to accept me."
A Midrash has it that God offers the Torah to every nation. But only the Jewish people accepts it. We are singled out not just by the Torah, but by our decision to accept the Torah, and with it, the logic of the gift. Looking at Jewish history I can understand why one would reject the Torah and follow Orpah. It's not simply that Torah law is demanding and challenging, but that setting oneself apart often provokes jealousy and scapegoating. If you stood at Sinai and could see all the pogroms for thousands of years into the future, knowing this would be the price of your Election, would you choose it? Most would not.
Another Midrash has it that every Jewish soul stood at Sinai and accepted the existential burden of being chosen. Even the Marxist Jews and Bundist Jews; even the Jews who want to erase their Judaism, undo their circumcisions, change their names, don whatever literal and figurative keffiyas will help them feel safe. Our souls run deeper than our politics, deeper than our psychological hang-ups, and deeper than the copium we have all had to develop to survive the slog of being strangers in a strange land. The pintele yid is the pintele of particularism that is bigger than any one Jew. It is the residue of the God of Revelation who will not assimilate into the God of Philosophy.
Chag Sameach,
Zohar Atkins