Two Sides to Being “Chosen”
In these two essays, Waxman and Kreimer address different contemporary implications of the idea that Jews are a “chosen” people. Waxman wrestles with the question of whether it is “possible to believe that all people are created equal and to believe that Judaism is superior to other religions.” She concludes: " As postmoderns, we may have the capacity to hold multiple and conflicting values. When it comes to chosenness, I would argue that that we should not indulge in this capacity; by moving beyond chosenness, we make a deliberate statement about our highest values."
Kreimer was raised in a Reconstructionist community that rejected chosenness. As an adult, she places the dilemma of chosenness in the context of her interfaith work which has forced her to reexamine the parts of Jewish tradition that make her uncomfortable.
“In the interfaith encounter, I have to resist the temptation to claim only the parts of Judaism I love," Kreimer writes. "If I skip over the Jewish ideas I find objectionable or, more often, if I explain that they belong to someone else—“the mistaken Jews”—I am acting in a way that is both arrogant and untrue to my own pluralistic commitments.”
